by Joan Dempsey
From the moment Ludka had told Izaac about the invitation, he had stubbornly refused to even consider the possibility of accompanying her, citing the importance of Tommy’s arbitration hearing. But Ludka could tell he felt the same anxiety she did about going back to Warsaw, and Izaac was not one to flee from anxious feelings. Going back would be hard enough without his anxiety compounding her own, and she wasn’t sure she should encourage him further. Still, it was hard to imagine being there without him. He was frowning down at his plate, then glanced at her almost apologetically, and she had a sinking feeling he was going to instigate more questions. He wiped his mouth and laid his napkin back on his lap.
“I’m nearly certain my parents worked with Ringelblum when they buried the archives. They were buried at sixty-eight Nowolipki, which was literally right in their backyard. My backyard, until … We lived on Dzielna, number sixty-seven, which opened back into the courtyard between Dzielna and Nowolipki. Both streets were walled inside the large ghetto. If you walked west on either street, you dead-ended at the wall, and the street just ran on beneath the bricks and continued on the other side, while you had no choice but to turn aside. Directly on the other side of the wall on Nowolipki was the Befehlsstelle, the German’s office compound. My parents must have worried that the Nazis would hear them as they dug, it was that close. I have to say, I feel rather proud that perhaps my parents had a hand in preserving those archives.”
He raised a slice of pizza to his mouth but paused before taking a bite.
“It might actually be nice to see them.”
He nodded once, smiled slightly to himself, and Ludka realized he had decided to go. Now that he had, she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever thought of going without him.
Frank cleared his throat.
“We never really did hear what happened to your parents, Dad.” He spoke offhandedly, as if it wouldn’t matter to hear an answer, but his expression was somewhat hopeful, as if something he’d wondered about for a long time might finally be revealed.
“Your parents, either, Matka,” said Frank.
“It was Nazis. What is more to know?”
She pressed her fingertips into her shoulder and the pain increased. She eased off and the pain receded to its original level.
“I expect,” said Izaac, “that my parents went to the Umschlagplatz and got on a train to Treblinka, like three hundred and fifty thousand others from the ghetto. Unless they’d already died of typhus, or starved.”
Frank let out his breath and set down his pizza. The phone rang.
“I’ll grab that,” called Tommy.
He said hello before either Izaac or Ludka could stop him from answering. They exchanged a look—they didn’t want Tommy to have to endure any more harassing calls than he was already getting at home. Izaac had worked with the police and the phone company to set up traps on both their lines. He and Ludka now had a log on the fridge to track when the calls came in, to note down the specifics: gender and possible age of the caller, noticeable accents or speech impediments, background noise, what was said. They’d report the information to the phone company, which would hand the log and the related phone numbers over to the police, who would compile it with the data from Tommy and Robert’s line and use it in their search for Tommy’s attackers.
“I’m sorry about your parents, Dad,” said Frank. Lolek and Marta both murmured their agreement.
“Yes,” said Izaac. “Me, too. Thank you.”
Tommy poked his head into the pass-through.
“Babcia? It’s for you. That guy Stanley?”
In the study, holding the phone in a tremulous hand, Ludka stood staring at Gela Seksztajn’s sullen boy, so perfectly rendered—so grim—and for the first time, she began to understand Izaac’s impulse to replace the Lebenstein with Stanislawsky’s Irises.
“So this is it,” she said. “All of that about taking gallery in a new direction and worrying for your grandfather was excuse to scope out house.”
“That about sums it up. Listen, I can give you some time. Say about two weeks? I’m not wholly unreasonable.”
Ludka gripped the receiver. Her chest felt tight.
“You think I have this money? Under mattress, perhaps?”
“Of course not. That’s what insurance is for. Report it stolen, get the money, give it to me, get your painting back. Simple.”
They did have insurance, an excellent policy, but only for the paintings they legally owned. Provenance papers and qualified appraisals had been required.
“If I was museum, maybe, but I am person only. Nothing is this simple.”
“Sure it is. Get me the money or I tell the authorities. I know it’s not yours. The FBI thinks some Nazi has this painting. So do your friends over at the Commission for Art Recovery.”
Ludka had to sit down. She sat poised on the edge of the love seat, as if she might have to hurriedly stand. Of course she had thought about the possibility of prosecution, but not for many years, and always it had been easy to trick herself into believing she was safe—only one other person knew about the Chopin, after all. She’d always assumed she could choose to unveil the painting in whatever manner she wished, the story hers to tell, perhaps even after she died, a codicil she imagined attaching to her will at the last possible moment. But Oskar had apparently grown careless. She laid a hand over her throat and closed her eyes. She lowered her voice to a near whisper.
“And if I don’t care about reputation, or prosecution?”
The hair on her arms rose. She hadn’t known she was going to say this. Stanley said nothing. From the dining room, laughter. Could it be as easy as this, then? After seventy years, could she simply surrender? When Stanley still didn’t speak after a long moment, Ludka began to wonder if she might be gaining the upper hand; he clearly hadn’t considered the possibility that she might just let him have it.
“Do whatever you have to do,” Oskar had said to her before they’d all scattered, when it was finally clear that further hope was absurd. “Please. Just save yourself. Promise me. We’ll find each other.”
She had promised, but it bothered her that she couldn’t remember if this was all she had said. There was just a vague memory of his rough cheek dashed against her own, the smell of char and oily hair and damp wool. And then he was gone. Two days later the Nazis imprisoned him at Pawiak.
“Tell me the truth, Stanley,” said Ludka now. “Where is your grandfather?”
“I don’t know where he is: Poland, New York, San Francisco? Like I said, he couldn’t be bothered to tell us.”
“Now I am starting to understand maybe why. You are weasel like your Wall Street father.”
“Listen, Ludka, I’m not fucking around! I need you to get me the money. That’s it. If you don’t want to, I can always take a box cutter to the canvas, and find some easier mark. Like I said, simple.”
Ludka closed her eyes against the image of this newly vulgar Stanley slashing a jagged tear through Mieroszewski’s canvas. She pressed trembling fingers against her lips. Stanley laughed.
“You think I wouldn’t, but I would, you see, no qualms at all. There are plenty of other paintings for the taking. I’ll call again in a couple days—”
“Wait! I go to Warsaw on Monday, for one week.”
Stanley was quiet again. She thought he had hung up. “You know where he is, don’t you? You’re going there to see him.”
She suddenly wondered if he was lying after all, if he knew Oskar was in Warsaw. But no, he hadn’t sounded as if she’d caught him in a lie. He sounded like a petulant, maybe even envious, child.
“I do not know. I have been invited there for symposium. You can Google. It is at Jewish Historical Institute next Wednesday.”
“Hold on.”
She heard a shuffling, then two metallic thwacks, the clasps on Stanley’s scarred briefcase. After a moment she heard the distinctive clacking of a laptop keyboard, and she imagined him seeing the sketch they were using to promote the symp
osium. It was one Ludka had forced out of her mind many years ago, one she’d had to close her eyes against when Izaac had pulled it up on the computer: a teenaged girl sitting on the street, her back against a stucco wall, stick legs splayed in front of her, a dead toddler lying slack across her lap.
Stanley muttered something and then he was back.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing I’m a reasonable man and gave you two weeks to deliver. I’ve got your cell. Have it with you.”
He hung up. Ludka eased herself back against the love seat, hearing the dead air. Then the phone clicked. And then nothing. She replaced the receiver. She felt like a husk of a person, sitting there, insubstantial enough to waft away on a light breeze. How would she ever make the long flight to Paris, the layover, the final leg to Warsaw? She wasn’t even sure she could get back to the dining room. How could she even think about leaving while Stanley had the Chopin? She should have instructed him how to safely store the painting; she should have demanded proof it was intact. Isn’t that what you were supposed to do, ask for a photograph with the current day’s newspaper next to it? Perhaps there was someone she could quietly hire to help her cope, some kind of discreet negotiator or private investigator. After a moment, she checked the caller ID to see if Stanley had phoned from his cell, but the record said number unknown. One of the things the police had advised about tracking the harassing calls was to note any distinctive background noise. Before they’d suggested this, she never would have thought to listen that hard, but during her call with Stanley she’d paid attention. A few cars had started up, others had come to a stop and, throughout the call, the intermittent beeping of self-serve gas pumps. How this could possibly help narrow a search, Ludka couldn’t imagine. Out in the dining room, things seem to have quieted. She had to get back. Slowly, she worked her way to the edge of the love seat and stood, feeling unsteady.
Back in the dining room, the conversation had turned to the attack on Tommy.
“Shelly tells me they still don’t have any solid leads,” said Frank, “but might have a witness who noticed an unfamiliar car?”
“Parked less than a quarter mile away,” said Robert. “They’re hoping to identify it. They’re questioning everyone along that stretch of the road. Between that, and trying to track the phone calls, and Tommy’s description of the guy who attacked him, we hope something might surface. Assuming there’s a connection between the calls and the assault.”
“Oh, there is connection!” said Ludka as she approached. “I have no doubt.”
Everyone turned to her.
“No offense, kochanie, but I’m afraid your certainty means nothing in the eyes of the law.”
She slipped into the kitchen. She pulled the phone log off the refrigerator and carried it into the corner where no one could see her from the pass-through. She logged in the details of Stanley’s call.
21
Preparations
Early the next morning, Saturday, Ludka stood before her open bureau drawer. She and Izaac were laying out on the bed the clothing they would take with them to Warsaw on Monday afternoon.
“I tell you, old man, I did not need this shrink before Warsaw. Already there was stress. At first she treated me like a child, and I told her ‘If you have the psychological theory about me, I want to hear it!’”
“But you see how happy you made me, kochanie, going through with it? And now I’ll be far better company.”
He put his arms around her from behind. She smiled and slapped at his hands. He kissed the back of her head and went to the closet.
“She’s a clinical psychologist, you said, or a psychiatrist?”
“The kind who wants only talk. I told her I do not want all this talking, and she said my reveries are a sign that talk is overdue. ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder, delayed onset,’ she called it. ‘That is some delay,’ I said.”
“I hope she laughed?”
“I am apparently in the final developmental stage of life, according to Eric Erickson’s theory, and I said ‘thank goodness’ and took it as small victory that this got a smile. But she says if there are things unresolved, or if I do not like what I see of my life, I could fall into despair and die a bitter old woman. Apparently, choices are only two: ‘ego integrity’ or ‘despair.’ I asked her which one would take less talk.”
Izaac laughed.
“That poor woman has her work cut out for her. Can she help with the reveries?”
“Something is causing the flashbacks, and only until I talk will the reveries apparently subside. She wants already to see me every week.”
“You’ll go.”
Ludka flapped a hand, but nodded.
“She did clear you for travel?”
“She did. She gave us tips to cope with the episodes, which she says will again most definitely come. You are to keep a close eye on me and call me back to the present if I drift. Or, if I am alone, she said play loud music or suck on a lemon. Also, I could hold an ice cube or sniff peppermint or recite out loud what is around me. Any of these should be interesting at symposium.”
“And that’s assuming you can tell when a reverie’s coming on, which you can’t.”
“I have discovered this is not precisely true. Dr. Jaines harassed me with her questions long enough for me to see a pattern. First I begin to lose track of the moment, and then I grow still, like poured concrete starting to set, and then … whoosh.”
She flung out her hands, then laid another skirt on the bed and stood back, fists on hips, gazing critically at the pile.
“When did we start to need so many clothes? It is one week only!”
She began to put things back into the closet and drawers. She glanced at Izaac’s pile and was about to suggest he do the same, but then she took a closer look at what he had chosen: two pair of his favorite worn brown corduroys, his oldest cardigan, a tightly woven, zippered wool vest she had given him years ago, two soft cotton shirts, two narrow ties he’d always reserved for his toughest days in court, a small pillow he liked to clutch while sleeping, and his favorite soft pajamas. She was shocked to see on top of a small stack of socks a yarmulke, an item she hadn’t even known he owned.
“So you are nervous to go as well?”
Izaac met her soft gaze, then sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders rounded, hands clasped loosely in his lap.
“Terrified.”
“There will be nothing we recognize,” she said softly. “It will be as foreign as Prague or Grozny.”
She wasn’t sure she believed this, but it’s what she’d been telling herself since the phone call with Mandelbaum. Izaac pressed his hands between his knees and shook his head.
“I wouldn’t count on that, kochanie. They rebuilt Warsaw with scrupulous fidelity, apparently down to the smallest of details, using as much existing material as they could. And they rebuilt shortly after the war; those buildings are almost sixty-five years old.”
“Is that what frightens you? That all will be the same, will bring back memories?”
Ludka resumed her packing. Izaac ran a hand roughly through his hair. He stared out the window into the woods, the morning light just beginning to soften the darkness.
“It’s snowing,” he said.
For a time, they were silent. Ludka knew it was only her imagination, but the portrait of the woman glancing back over her shoulder seemed diminished somehow, the canvas insubstantial, like a tired screen in an old porch door. Finally, Ludka stood back and surveyed with satisfaction her smaller pile of clothes. Izaac yawned, stood, and rubbed at his lower back.
“I’m not sure what frightens me. Maybe it’s memories, maybe it’s just that I’ll feel too much, or that I’ll remember something dreadful I hadn’t even known I’d forgotten? I don’t know, none of that feels quite right.”
“We have to first survive the trip, which will be heroic feat. Maybe none of it will be an issue.”
Izaac lifted his bag onto the bed. He started to pack. All at once he stopped
.
“Huh.”
Ludka was surprised to see his eyes were damp.
“What is it, Izaac?”
“I think I’m afraid I’ll wish I’d gone back much sooner.”
Ludka pressed a hand over her mouth. Nowhere inside her could she have retrieved that feeling, but now that Izaac had given it voice, she felt it rushing upon her. Her eyes sprang with tears. Quickly she gathered her favorite shawls from the bed and turned to put them into the small suitcase propped open on the chair near the bureau. They tumbled from her hands before she reached the suitcase and she let out a small “oh!” She stood there, holding on to the bureau, staring down at the disordered pile, thinking that bending and reaching to retrieve them would be impossible to manage.
“We would neither of us have been welcomed back, Izaac, you know that. And don’t also forget it was eighteen years ago only that Communists were ousted. It is different country.”
Even as she was saying this, trying hard to rationalize away her rising grief, she knew it made no difference.
“But don’t you wonder how going back might have changed things? I sometimes feel I left myself back there, you know? Left that boy behind. Does that sound crazy?”
“Dr. Jaines would not think so. I told her I had long ago locked the door on remembering, thrown away the key, and that so far it has worked like a charm. Do you know what she said? She said she is locksmith, and together we will grind a new key. When we get back, you can take my appointment, discover hidden child.”
Immediately she regretted her choice of words, because of course Izaac had been just that, a hidden child who had lived inside from the time he was ten until he was nearly seventeen, with only a few stolen trips out into the city. Izaac didn’t seem to have noticed what she’d said. He closed the cover of his suitcase and slid it to the edge of the bed. Very carefully he lifted a corner, testing its weight.