by Laura Furman
Keeping their backs to the doctor’s house, they tell themselves that any place as old as Hillcrest has stories. All old houses do. It’s part of their character. The older neighbors stand smiling as the younger parents gather their children, pull them close and whisper, Listen. Then Madeleine’s lips nestle into the brass mouthpiece of her horn, and James lowers his bow to the strings.
Halina Duraj
Fatherland
MY MOTHER’S PARENTS KEPT four cows. Each had a heavy chain around its neck. When my mother got home from school at two, she brought the ends of the chains together in one thick strand, looped them around her arm, and led the cows to pasture. She held on to the chains until dinnertime. She couldn’t let go, not even for a second, because the cows might wander off into the rows of cabbage. To pass the time, she made up poems. She was so good at Polish that the boys in the row behind her called her Pani Poetka—Little Miss Poet. So good her teacher told her she could be a teacher if she went to high school.
But to go to high school she would need a new pair of shoes. Her mother would not buy them. Instead, her mother sent her to be a nanny for a rich couple in a nearby town. You don’t need new shoes to run after children, her mother said. But of course she did not only run after children. She cooked, she cleaned, she helped them with their lessons, repaired their clothes—all in tattered, too-tight boots. By the time she saved enough money for a new pair, she was too old for high school. She became a seamstress instead, in a factory that made heavy black overcoats for the Communists in China.
After ten years of sewing coats, she wrote to the beekeeping nuns of Szczecin. She’d bought their honey at a market once; it was sweeter than the honey she remembered from home. She thought she’d be an excellent nun, even if she were afraid of bees, except for the fact that she wanted children. She was thirty, old for getting married. She was getting ready to accept that children weren’t meant for her, even though it twisted her to think she’d never know the peculiar sensation of life inside. The nuns told her to wait until spring, when the snow would melt and the trains would be safer for journeying through the mountain passes.
On the cool April day she planned to give notice at the factory, she stepped off a curb on her way to work and got hit by a speeding bakery truck.
So much depends on a new pair of shoes, my mother liked to say.
When my father was two years old, his father drove his horse and cart home from a New Year’s Eve sylvestra at a neighboring farm. Drunk, my grandfather passed out behind the reins and slipped sideways into the snow. The horses went on without him, pulling the empty cart all the way home to my grandmother’s barnyard. They stamped their hooves lightly and snorted steam until my grandmother came out to milk the cows in the morning. She saw the horses and sent my uncles down the road to find their father. It was not the first time.
Only this time the New Year brought an unexpected snowfall, and in the hours between my grandfather’s fall and my grandmother noticing the horses, two inches of snow fell steadily and softly onto the road and my drunk grandfather, who froze solid and died.
When my father was sixteen, SS men drove up to his farm in southern Poland, outside a tiny town named Golonog, and tore the brothers out of their beds. It was four in the morning. They demanded employment papers. Only my father did not have them; his job had been to help his widowed mother on the farm. The SS men loaded him onto the transport. The dog barked in the barnyard, so the SS men shot it dead. The dog’s name was Kukusz.
The SS took my father to four labor camps, the last and worst of which was Auschwitz. Night after night, for company or just for us kids, he reenacted the story in the middle of our kitchen: In a twilight march back to camp after a day of digging ditches, my father breaks from the line and bolts into the forest. He is twenty, but in our kitchen, in the forest, he is sixteen, frozen in time at the age he was torn from bed. He throws himself on the forest floor, on the yellow linoleum. He rolls under the branches of a fir tree, under the legs of the table. Soldiers shout, guns fire; my father trembles. Flashlights glance off boughs. In our kitchen, he leaps to his feet. He shouts in German, stomps—SS boots crunch pine needles. He is hunter and hunted, all at once.
The SS men search awhile, then give up. What is one Pole? Not worth a cold night. Not worth a bullet. They will tell the commandant that they shot him and left him for dead. The Pole would die out here anyway, in the forest, in the cold.
By morning light, my father creeps from beneath the branches of the tree. He crawls to the edge of the forest. He skulks toward a farmhouse. He steals a bike and rides three days to his mother’s farm. In the barnyard, a new dog barks and strains at the end of its chain. My grandmother carries milk pails out of the house. She doesn’t recognize him. Then she does. She drops the pails and splashes through milk to hold him tight, her boy, her baby, her youngest.
My father must keep moving; he must leave Poland. He clings to the underbelly of a train and rides it into the American Zone—a day’s journey. When he emerges from beneath the train, he can’t straighten his arms, can’t unclench his fists.
He lives under an alias in West Germany for eleven years, scraping together a living, sometimes as a lookout for back-alley con artists, sometimes as a machinist—a trade he learned in one of the camps.
In Munich he goes hooliganing. He works odd jobs and makes enough to buy a radio, his only possession. It plays such beautiful music that some mornings he doesn’t want to get out of bed for work. The radio is made of highly polished wood with golden swirls in the grain. It has a gold brocade face and yellowed plastic keys like a piano. If you press a key it makes the little gold ticker jump from city name to city name: Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, Budapest, Amsterdam.
In the house I grew up in, the radio sat on top of my father’s dresser. As a child, I pressed the keys and listened for sounds from another continent, but the radio no longer worked. One day my mother discovered a family of mice living inside it. They had chewed through the pressed-board backing and made a nest for themselves among the wires. My mother carried the radio into the backyard and let the mice scamper across the lawn. The cat looked up, blinked, and went back to sleep.
Eventually, my father boards a ship that stops in Copenhagen. He buys a small blue-and-white plate with a farm scene. It will hang above our kitchen sink, beneath the exposed wires of a torn-out light fixture. My mother would like a little light by which to wash the dishes, but my father never repairs it. During my father’s last days in the hospital, my brother extracted the wires and installed a new light. Ceramic, with little painted flowers. Then he repainted the walls and hung valances above the curtains. The Danish plate remains.
My mother’s accident left a scar on her head—a wild zigzag above her left temple. When I was little I assumed that a scar like a lightning bolt could mean only one thing: my mother had been struck by lightning.
She recovered in a sanatorium called Kudowa-Zdroj in southwestern Poland, where people stroll down a boulevard flanked by elms and take the waters in mineral baths of different temperatures, some so hot that steam curls from them all year long. These sanatoria held dances, and my father, between jobs back in America, devoted six months of his life to scouting those dances for a wife.
My father admires my mother across the room. Here is a woman hit by a truck—a truck!—and look at her dancing, laughing, holding a porcelain cup with her littlest finger extended. A real lady, but peasant stock. Look at those hips, begging to bear children. No stranger to farm work either, he can tell. He’ll call her boss at the factory in a couple of days: a good worker, her boss says. Good at taking orders, never lazy, almost never sick. At worst a little nearsighted—she should have seen that truck.
My mother is stunning and demure in black gabardine and pearls, low black heels. She has wide cheekbones and a kind, steady gaze. Her hair is piled high in a stiff bouffant, carefully arranged over her brow to conceal the scar. She sits at the edge of th
e checkered stone dance floor. My father extends his hand. She likes his suit: good quality, American-made. He wears a striped silk cravat, has a closed-lipped smile, a large nose, sharp eyes, a slick black widow’s peak. When he speaks, his new gold tooth winks in the light.
They dance. But he jerks her around the dance floor to some other music—some rhythm in his head that beats faster and sharper than the music played onstage. He will ask why the lady is trying to lead—it’s his job to lead—and my mother will blush, lower her gaze, apologize. She will say she didn’t mean to lead. She will try harder to surrender to his rhythm—no rhythm at all.
The next day they meet for a walk, but my father won’t enter the lobby of her dormitory, where other people wait. She doesn’t know, of course, that he can’t abide a crowd, can’t abide people. She doesn’t know about the camps, won’t know until much later. At dinner, he raises his hand and snaps his fingers to get the waiter’s attention. Boy, he calls. Over here. My mother’s temple begins to throb. She lifts her fingertips to the scar and rubs, but she ignores the signs. He’s a rich American citizen who owns a house in California. There may be other reasons: physical attraction, some sense of destiny. Love at first sight, even. In French—coup de foudre.
I began reading my older sister’s Harlequin romances in the sixth grade, when I no longer shared a room with my parents. I read them in bed late at night by flashlight, so my father would not see the overhead light glowing through the drapes on the glass-paned double doors separating his room, the dining room, from my room, the den. Every night I read until I heard my father’s mattress springs and then his heavy footfall on the kitchen floor. I plunged my book and flashlight under the covers and pretended to sleep, while my father came to check that my windows were locked.
One night I was too slow to get the book under the covers in time. The book lay facedown inches from my hand. When my father passed the foot of my bed, he paused. The pages rustled as he examined the book in the light through the door. He snorted, then shut the door. He took the book with him.
The next evening, he called me over to his chair at the kitchen table and patted the seat beside him. “Sit down,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”
He told me never to marry for love. He told me to marry a hard worker, a good provider, someone like him. He told me how he’d decided on my mother. He brought his brother to the train station and told my mother to walk a few paces ahead of them. “Because,” he said, “you wouldn’t buy a horse without checking its legs first.”
While my mother was in labor with my brother, my father planted a redwood sapling at the edge of the yard, so it would grow up alongside my brother. The next year he planted one for my sister, then one for my other sister, then one for me. But after I was born, he did not stop. He lined the perimeter of the yard in redwood saplings. Most of them he dug out of other people’s gardens at night. Sometimes he took all of us on long drives north to the redwoods, shovels in the bed of the truck, wet cloths in a bucket for wrapping the roots. Everyone dug.
The day my brother came home from the hospital, my father put on his Sunday suit and fedora and carried him up and down the block, ringing doorbells. My son, he said, with a fat cigar in his mouth. When my brother began learning to walk, the bare wood floors bruised his knees, so my father went to the flea market in Sebastopol and bought Oriental carpets.
But also, imagine this: An eleven-year-old boy wants to buy his father a birthday present. His mother gives him a little of her secret money. He rides his bike to the drugstore and walks to the back, jingling his one dime and his mother’s coins in his pocket. He runs one grubby finger along the edge of a dusty metal shelf. It holds the cheap little paperback joke books. One of these books might be perfect for his father, who does not smile often, who is, in fact, angry rather often. Maybe the father needs to hear more jokes.
He sees that the books are organized by country: The Little Book of Irish Jokes, The Little Book of Italian Jokes, The Little Book of Polish Jokes. Of course! Here is something that will make his father laugh and thank the boy and love him. His father will be proud of how smart and clever he is. The boy bends his head to count the coins in his palm. His father cuts his hair every month in the kitchen; he gives him a tidy little buzz cut with a cowlick in front.
The boy has enough to buy the book. He rides home and wraps the book in Sunday comics and gives it to his father. His father looks at it and puts it down on the table. He gets up and takes his belt from the peg inside the basement door and takes the boy into the garage and locks the door from the inside. The mother rattles the knob and yells that the boy is only eleven, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know any better. But she can’t save him.
Nor can she save him a year later, when the father takes the boy to Poland, to see the place in which he worked, the place where work would set you free. He stands at the gates, beneath the iron sign, and with a pointed finger directs the boy’s gaze. Arbeit macht frei, the father says. Repeat after me. Arbeit macht frei. The boy squints up into his father’s face, which partially blocks the bright summer sun. The boy puts his hand to his forehead to shield his eyes, as if he were saluting.
Arbeit macht frei, the boy repeats.
The father strikes the side of the boy’s head so hard he tumbles onto his knees in the dirt. A passing tourist gasps. Czego tak ostro, she says. Why so harsh?
In America, the boy begins sleeping in his yellow dirt-bike helmet, because you never knew when. Or why.
When we were children, my mother occasionally caught my father lost in thought at the kitchen table, extending his hand palm-down at the side of his chair, as if imagining the height of a child changing over the years. But he didn’t have to imagine our heights. Beside the swinging door of the dining room, which was actually my parents’ bedroom and mine until I was in the sixth grade, my father periodically marked our height in ballpoint pen. We stood as motionless as possible while he drew an unsteady line above our heads and noted the date beside it.
My father blamed his stunted height on being the runt of twins and malnourishment in the camps. Nightly he lined us up at the kitchen table and poured milk from the carton. We all drank out of the same glass, to save dishwater. The line started with the eldest, my brother, then my two sisters, and finally me.
My brother left for college when I was ten, and after my sisters left, my father told me to get the milk and pour a glass myself. I would spend those last six years at home alone with my parents, sleeping in the room next door to theirs, separated by French doors covered on both sides with wine-red drapes. It was a substantial improvement over sleeping in the trundle drawer between my parents’ twin beds in the dining room. We had all always slept downstairs, so the upstairs rooms could be rented out to “young professional men,” as our ad in the paper said.
In the room my sisters had vacated—formerly a den—my bed was actually a bed, not a drawer. It was pushed up against the French doors, and my father’s bed was pushed up against the other side. Several of the panes of glass were broken; my father inserted a large sheet of cardboard behind the drapes so that I would not throw my hand up against the glass in my sleep and break a pane or cut myself. The cardboard did nothing to prevent the travel of sound. I could hear everything—my father calling my mother a cripple, my mother’s alarm clock beeping at six every morning, my father snoring through the night and rattling the glass panes with his nightmare screams. Every sound was as loud as if we were sleeping in the same bed.
At work, my father made parts for machines that made missiles. When he miscalculated a setting on his lathe—even a sixteenth of an inch—the part could not be used. The faintest mis-shaving of metal destroyed the utility of the piece. My father brought those ruined parts home, and laid them beside his plate on the kitchen table.
When my mother saw my father’s truck pull into the driveway, she ladled his soup into one bowl, sloshed it into a second bowl, and then sloshed it back into the first bowl, to help it cool
.
While he ate, I removed his shoes and socks as he’d taught me. I carefully peeled the edge of each sock from his calves and rolled them down his leg to the heel. Then I hung the socks over the edge of the sink for my mother to wash after dinner.
My mother carried his loaded plate from stove to table, while my father ranted about the German who stood at the lathe next to his. I never learned the man’s name; my father called him only Niemiec, “the German.” The German tended to speak just as my father began shaping a hunk of metal. How are your kids? May I borrow your level? My father’s ruined parts were always the German’s fault.
Sometimes, when the soup was still too hot, my father swept the bowl off the table so that it shattered around my mother’s feet. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he yelled: Ty kaleka, ty krowo, ty bydlo. Always my mother went from being a cripple to being a cow to being cattle. When she became a cow, I wondered, was she still crippled, or suddenly intact? And how could she be both cow and cattle, singular and plural?
When the bowls shattered on the floor, my mother would not let me pick up the shards. I might cut myself.
My mother taught me how to sew buttons onto shirts. She taught me how to change a pillowcase and to cut strawberries with a plastic knife so they wouldn’t taste of metal. She taught me how to make glue by mixing flour and water. She tried to teach me how to knit. She taught me to put a burned finger to my earlobe instead of running cold water over it; earlobes don’t have many nerves, she said. They’ll absorb the pain.