We never failed to be stirred by Grand-Uncle Zenon’s words. We sang and we danced. And we lifted our glasses to him when he finished.
Then one Christmas when I was ten years old the door opened as it did every year to reveal Pan Kazimierz standing there with his violin and the gifts which he had brought to our family. Snow was circling in a little gust around his head and beside him was a man with a high silk hat and walking stick in his hand we had never seen before. We learned later that he was a French architect on his way to Moscow whom Pan Kazimierz had met in Paris, but just then he could not be introduced because Grand-Uncle Zenon was in the midst of his recitation. Tears flowed as ever and the Frenchman listened with his long fingers folded over the top of his walking stick. It was only after Grand-Uncle Zenon had spoken of the great luminaries of our country and we had all shaken the walls with our cries and our cheers for the motherland that we learned the identity of our guest. Not only not Polish, but from France! The room went silent. Heads turned away to look at the walls. Mother’s hands moved over her lap as though she was knitting. Even at ten the shame hit me with a force I have not forgotten. I could see from the look on their faces that everyone in the room, even Grand-Uncle Zenon – even the Frenchman – could feel it. We were like schoolchildren caught boasting of adventures we had not experienced. We did not sing or dance that Christmas Eve night. And in all my years of wandering that followed, if just a single Pole at a gathering began to extol the glories of our nation, this painful sensation of shame that had been born in my grandparents’ house would gather in me like a wave of nausea and I would have to leave the room.
The year of the Frenchman’s visit was 1938.
At the border, the meanings of words change. Did M. feel that, I wonder? He and I can both understand ‘teacup’ and ‘river’. Such words do not change. But how are words like law or destiny or freedom carried over a border from one world to another? We have a history that has schooled us in defeat. We wait for deliverance and when it does not arrive we return to our homes. We do not ask questions. We do not complain. We refine our stoicism. I never looked for Angelina after she went away. I just tried to move faster than the picture of her that haunted me.
What has made us this way? You need only look at us on a map. We’re like a virgin with a bouquet just off a bus from a village, standing between two convicts.
One bright August morning we stood together on the church steps in the sunshine – twenty-two boys in shorts and pressed shirts and with neatly combed hair, little satchels in our hands. A boy named Andrzej Przesmycki demonstrated tricks with a yoyo sent him by an uncle in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The priests were taking the altar boys for a swimming outing in the lakes. The bus was waiting, the engine running. Father Boleslaw who was in charge of us was standing at the door talking to the driver. Father Boleslaw had a red face and round ears which stuck out from the sides of his head like poker chips. I guessed from his face that he was telling the driver a joke. Halina Makiela walked by with her mother on the pavement across from the church. I could barely see her. The sun was so bright that it took all the definition from people’s faces. But I know that she smiled at me, with a particular sweetness. That embarrassed me a little, but also pleased me.
Just then the woman we all knew as Pani Ewa rushed from a side door of the church and spoke urgently to Father Boleslaw. When she stopped the two of them stood in silence, she looking into his face and him seeming to look at nothing at all. Then he placed his hands over his two eyes and leaned back against the bus. We all ran over to see what had happened. ‘It’s the Germans and the Russians,’ said Pani Ewa. ‘They’ve made an agreement not to fight one another.’ After a long while Father Boleslaw dropped his hands. His skin was grey. He suddenly looked as though he had been suffering from a long illness. ‘We’re doomed,’ he said then. I understood, soon enough, that we were once again to be the playthings of the monstrosities to either side of us. Maybe once again there would be no Poland. But for us then gathered around Father Boleslaw and Pani Ewa there was just that single unforeseeable word that settled over us like dust raised by passing horses – ‘Doomed’.
Our skies filled with our enemy’s planes and our roads with their vehicles. I could not understand how there could be so many of them or how they possessed so much machinery for war. I was alone, for Jerzy had not returned from Lithuania to our school. Then my mother and Renata came to Naklo to get me.
We moved out into the roads. There were little cars, wagons pulled by dogs, people dragging bundles. I saw an old woman in black who must have weighed more than the three of us put together being carried by boys my age, one at each corner of a chair. Trucks went by with people spilling off them, others trying to leap on. At night there were small fires and the sounds of praying and of sickness. No one knew where to go. Everyone seemed to be moving in different directions, following a different rumour. We were like a colony of ants that had lost the entrance to their home. It was only the Germans who seemed to know where to go and what to do.
We came to a town. We had been walking for twenty-two days but I don’t think we were so far from Naklo. In my memory the fires are everywhere. They come up from the sewers, they surge from the windows of broken buildings, they rise like fountains from holes in the ground. Some are a deep red, with black smoke going up into the clouds. But mostly they are pale yellow. And very fast. They move like a beast in a mad, cold rage.
I am running with my mother and Renata through the streets. I don’t think there were so many fires as I picture. But our fear is great and that is how the memory forms. The Germans are sending the fire down from their planes and the big guns they have set up on the bank of the river. Men tell us that this is the third time since the invasion that this town has been pounded by these weapons. People are running with bags strapped on their backs and photographs in their hands. The fires are making a roar like a terrible wind in a tunnel.
At every corner we do not know where to go. If we make a wrong choice a bomb will drop on us. With a wild look in her eyes my mother asks me to choose the street. For luck, she says. I never saw her like this before. We turn left at a bakery. A woman carrying only a handbag is standing still looking through the window at the empty shelves as though she is wondering what to buy. We run on. Up ahead of us two old men have had the idea of making a barricade. They are trying to push a mattress into place. What they are protecting only they can know. We have to slow down because of all the furniture they have piled in the road. To our left is a big hole where a building was. There are small fires among the bricks.
I see two dogs howling there. This street is quieter and I can hear them clearly. They are moving around among the bricks and the broken pipes. They make little charges forward and then run back. Someone is throwing stones at them but they won’t go away. When they step forward another stone passes them. We begin to make our way around the barricade and I look back. I see Pan Kazimierz. He is standing against a wall with a piece of grey meat in his hand. His boots and his coat made of seal pelts are smeared with mud. It is some days since he shaved. He is trying to eat the meat and whenever the dogs try to advance on him he takes a stone from his pocket and throws it at them. He sees us and he turns. Mother and Renata do not notice him and continue on their way but I stand still and look at him. Our eyes meet. I remember so well his look in this moment. His wild ravaged expression fades away and his eyes narrow. He passes a hand over his head to smooth his hair and draws his lips into a tight, bitter smile, as if to say, What do you think of this, my boy? Do you remember how they danced when I played the violin? Would you like to hear a poem now about the psychology of the eagle?
Somewhere to the east of where I had found Pan Kazimierz and a little to the south we found a cellar with a Jewish clarinet player and his son hiding in it and we lived there with them nearly until Christmas. The man drew a piano keyboard in the dirt with a stick and taught us the scales and chords so that sometimes we made concerts by pressing our finge
rs on the keys and making the sounds of the music with our mouths.
One night I was climbing a stone wall. I had some trouble when my foot got snared in a vine but finally I got it loose. I was after eggs, I think. My mother had given me a silver-handled hairbrush to trade for them. Just before leaving the cellar I watched as Renata held our lamp in one hand while painting my mother’s eyes with the other and I felt so much the man of the family with my father back at home operating the trams that I told them not to waste fuel on vanities such as that. ‘You’ll not be going to the opera tonight,’ I told her. It was one of those things which it might have occurred to me to say but which normally I suppressed, only this time it slipped out whole. Renata aimed a kick at me and called me a hyena and I saw my mother turn away, ashamed of herself in front of the clarinet player. Renata I did not see again until I arrived in Chicago in 1957. My mother I never saw again at all.
At last I got to the top of the wall. Above me was the domed sky, blue-black, a silver crescent moon among the starlight. I sat there and forgot about everything and watched it for a time with a feeling of being made of the air itself, as though if I let go of the wall I could drift up through the dark blue space into the white light of the stars. Never before, it seemed, had I seen so many.
After a while I thought of the eggs. I leapt from the wall and landed in the dust just at the feet of a German soldier patrolling for transgressors of the curfew they had imposed on us. I got a tap on the ear from the butt of his rifle. I stood and looked at him. The white light from the sky gleamed on his helmet, his face shadowed. I felt a little streak of blood run down my neck.
I cannot remember the next part so well. I was driven like a goat by the soldier along roads, down stairs into the cellar of a building, out on to more roads and down more steps and finally out again to a railway line where I was put into a wagon with sixty-eight men and boys. We didn’t say much to one another. The train lurched, it ran for a while and then stopped. For hours we listened to the sounds of heavy pieces of metal crashing into one another. Then we moved again. We didn’t know our fate. We had no means of asking. Sometimes we got soup. Almost everything was in darkness.
Then the way the memory forms for me now I awake from one kind of dream into another on a bright, cloudless summer day in a field of golden wheat. The land rolls away into hills. A river sparkles in the sunlight. There’s a red house at the end of the lane where I have been put working for an old German couple. They have laid out straw and a blanket for me in a barn. They give me my meals in the kitchen. They turn on the radio at night and every Friday they dance around the carpet with one another for an hour. They smile at me all the time and say almost nothing. They treat me as if I am their cat.
I pass years this way, watching the wheatfields change colour.
Later, I lived these years again in the memory of Jerzy.
In the darkness, in the train to Germany, we did not know one another. The only light came through small gaps between the boards of the door. Whether the light came from the moon or the sun, you could not always tell. You could see shapes inside the wagon, like small hills and trees, but no features of a face. Many stayed silent. Some spoke privately, like two cousins at a wedding. Then once when everyone was quiet and it was completely black outside the door of the wagon a man lying on his back on a high shelf announced himself as Roman from Bobrowniki, and began to tell a long story about an accordion player and an abandoned wife. I remember it all, but I won’t say it just now. He let out a long sigh at the end and then fell into silence. I think maybe he was asleep.
Then after another while, maybe it was a day or even more later, he started without any introduction into another story. This one was about a carpenter who lost his teeth in a fight with his sister’s husband and who then with all the care of his craft made a new set for himself out of a beautiful piece of pale blond wood. He lived with a small grey dog he called the Admiral and was always out in the lanes greeting people when he finished his work. Nobody in the village ever smiled so much as this carpenter with the new teeth. Even when someone was telling him something grave he leaned forward with his lips opened in a wide smile like a horse’s.
It happened then that he was missing for some days. People didn’t pay attention at first, but then they went to his door. They rapped and then shouted, but there was no answer. They looked through the window and saw nothing. Finally then his nephew was lowered down the chimney on a length of rope and was able to open the door from the inside. The crowd came in and searched through the house. They found the carpenter in a bed in the attic with the covers pulled up to his chin and his lips drawn tight over his mouth as if they had been sewn together. He looked nearly dead with the hunger. ‘What happened to you?’ they asked. ‘Why didn’t you answer?’ He lay there under his blanket looking from one to the other, his jaws clamped shut. His sister pushed forward and knelt beside the bed, imploring him on the grave of his mother to tell them what was wrong with him. Slowly he opened his mouth, turning his head from side to side so they could all look into it. Everyone could see that the teeth were not there.
‘Is it your teeth?’ they asked. ‘Do you want us to bring them to you?’
‘It’s no use,’ he said in a weak voice.
He told them then that it had all happened because of the Admiral, that treacherous dog who had repaid him for rescuing him from starvation and nursing him and protecting him by reaching up to the table beside the bed while he was asleep and snatching away with his snout the wooden teeth it had taken him so many months to make. He’d looked everywhere for them, he said, but they were nowhere to be found.
‘I’ll never get another piece of wood like it,’ the carpenter said. ‘And what’s worst of all is the self-satisfied expression on the Admiral’s face!’
They were all crowded around his bed.
‘But why didn’t you come out?’ they asked him.
He stared at them with watery eyes, his mouth a dark hole.
‘The shame,’ he said at last.
When this Roman from Bobrowniki began to speak, I thought, Please be quiet. Then because the rest of the wagon was silent and there was nothing else to do, I began to listen – but with low expectations. His voice got me. I felt as if I was gliding down a river on a raft. By the time he finished the story about the carpenter, I couldn’t get enough of him. I thought, I could listen to you for a month.
When the train stopped in Germany and the door of the wagon was opened, I saw him for the first time. He surprised me. His voice was so smooth I thought he was a boy like myself, but when the light fell on him I could see that he must have been fifty or more. He made saddles, he told us. On one saddle which he made for the man who owned the village and the land around it, he spent two years. I imagined him sewing and polishing and working the silver with no thought at all of the time it was taking him. I envied him his stories. I pictured him telling them in Bobrowniki the way he made his saddles – the basic ingredients already known to everybody yet with him somehow able to make them his own, he with all the time in the world for the telling, and the people around him with all the patience to listen. There are stories told by wanderers who return and tell what they have seen and others by those who stay at home and gather what is already known. And then there is another different kind of story in which the teller can see through the pattern of others’ movements and thoughts himself looking back at him the way a face appears in the veins of a stone or in a bank of cloud. I haven’t stories like the first two kinds because I don’t come from a single place in the world. The stories I know are of the last type. These are found, and told, alone, as I am doing now, in this room, imagining M. listening to me.
4
Mathilde and Ritso
HANNA’S MOTHER DANCED through trees because of something she saw in a single moment when she was seven years old. Her name was Mathilde and she lived on a farm outside the city of Rouen in France. On the day that her life changed direction her mother had taken
her into the city to buy shoes. Just as she was coming out of the shop a man was nailing a poster into a tree advertising the arrival of a ballet from Paris. On it was a picture of a ballerina sailing through the air, arms, legs and neck fully extended, her face set and in profile. Already the trucks were unloading the scenery into the theatre. The dancers were in the cafés smoking cigarettes, long scarves around their necks. People stood on the pavements looking in at them.
Mathilde begged her mother to take her to the ballet. This was something that never would have occurred to her mother, but she agreed nevertheless.
Mathilde went on the first night, and then again on the two nights after. Her father went once and judged it ridiculous, her mother struggled in vain to find some meaning in it, her elder sister swung her foot against the tempo of the music and drew glasses and beards on the pictures in the programme, but Mathilde watched with her eyes wide and barely drawing breath as though it was her own life being presented on the stage. The leaps and shapes and all the little flicks of the feet, they seemed to tell her the story of who she was. She was a child. She hadn’t any control over her life. But she knew that she wanted to perform the same movements, wear the same shoes and tie her hair up in the same way as she saw on the stage in Rouen. It was something simple and complete. It was her first truth.
Her mother found a Hungarian woman who offered ballet classes in an old foundry. From the first time she went, she was the way some people are with horses. They want to stay with them all the time. Even the smell of the stable is sweet to them. They would put their favourite horse into bed with them if they could. With Mathilde it was the satin shoes, the feeling of the wooden barre under her hand, that lofty, frozen look on the dancers’ faces. But there was also something about it that frightened her. It was the wonder of the thing itself, and the fear that she would lose it. The more intense her feeling of excitement became, the greater was the fear that rose up with it. She did all her lessons at school. She did everything her parents asked of her. She never did anything she thought might upset people. She did not want to give anyone the chance of preventing her going to the foundry.
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