This Is How It Begins

by Joan Dempsey

  “So much trouble you went to.”

  Back then he would have laughed. Now, as he tried unsuccessfully to arrange his face into a smile, Ludka’s easy feeling began to slip. She wanted to ask what had happened to him—he seemed almost fearful of her—but then she touched the package and knew at once what it was and looked at him urgently. He nodded, and sat.

  “You have not opened it then?”

  “Oh no, of course I opened it. But this is more dramatic, don’t you think?”

  His words sounded hollow, rehearsed. She threw out a string of questions, and Oskar leaned away and held up a hand as if to ward off a blow.

  “Good grief, Polly, just open it. Here.”

  With an abrupt gesture he pulled off the wrapping, and there was the tin box she’d last seen in 1939. The tarnished lid opened easily to reveal the burlap-wrapped vodka bottle. The burlap shed coarse threads as Ludka hurriedly unwound it. Oskar had of course already broken the wax seal. Ludka tried but didn’t have the strength to pull out the cork, so Oskar used his teeth.

  “Be careful with the paper. It’s seen better days.”

  “Please, you will do this.”

  Her hands shook, and she wrapped them again around her mug. Oskar upended the bottle and with a knobby forefinger worked at tightening the rolled paper so it could pass through the narrow neck.

  “Two years ago, after I’d gotten involved with the artists here at the university, I arranged a commission to dig for it. Ogród Saski has been restored like so much else around here, and it was shockingly easy to find the roots of that old tree. And there it was, right where I’d left it. I couldn’t believe it. I told them it was something else, though, one of Xawery Dunikowski’s drawings from Auschwitz. I did have one; now it’s at Królikarnia. They have his whole collection.”

  He set the bottle aside, shoved away the box and burlap, and gave her the paper. She pulled it open. It trembled in her hands like a newly hatched butterfly. She scanned the names until she saw the one that should have been last on the list—Laura Ciechomska—but penned below it, in faded, bloated ink, written in Polish in Oskar’s hand, was a final entry: Transferred for safekeeping to Ludka Zeilonka, 28/30 ul. Piwna, Warszawa, Polska, Września, 1939. Ludka frowned, confused.

  “But when did you write this? How could you know my—”

  “I knew everyone’s names, Polly. Did you really think we wouldn’t thoroughly check you out when you first joined Żegota?”

  Ludka let go, and the paper furled into a loose scroll. She stared at him in disbelief. He avoided her gaze and ran a hand back and forth over his head. The bench felt suddenly too close, and she pushed her back against the wall. Oskar sighed and rubbed at the loose skin under his eyes. He closed them and forcefully massaged his lips and jaw, as if to arrest whatever words he might be tempted to say. He sat back, his hands lying limp on the table, and that’s when she noticed the first joint of his right pinky was missing. In a practiced gesture, he casually covered his right hand with his left. Without thinking, Ludka abruptly said, “Pawiak?” and when he winced, she knew it was true, even though he shook his head and said, “skill saw.”

  “All this time, Oskar—”

  “I kept expecting life would get simpler, but it never did.” Again his words sounded rehearsed. “And then you had your first baby, you had Izaac, you seemed happy.”

  She lifted her hands as if she might cover her face but seemed to forget what she’d intended—her fingers collapsed into loose fists, which fell to her lap where they lay like wary sparrows. Outside, across the street, a young woman leaned from her fifth-floor window and shook out a small throw rug. The roiling dust mingled in the air with the woman’s icy breath. Oskar lowered his head into his hands. Ludka spoke in a measured tone.

  “Always people have asked why I am Zeilonka and not Rosenberg, sometimes with an undercurrent of suspicion that maybe I did not want Jewish name, and always I claimed professional reasons, that to change it would be detrimental. But Zeilonka was for you. On the off chance … So many times I thought you must be … I never stopped searching, Oskar. Never! But you … fifty-eight years ago was my first baby!”

  Her fists were tight now, her voice high and terse.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to see me, Polly. Not after what I did—”

  “Not want to see you?”

  She thumped her fists on the table, and it was Oskar’s turn to appear confused. He searched her eyes, frowned, then let out a long breath and shook his head, slowly and methodically, as if trying to ratchet back time.

  “Żegota did not rest while you were in Pawiak, Oskar—I did not rest—until a guard accepted our bribe. I waited in your attic. All week I waited. Waited and waited. And then Milosz said he’d seen you. In Krakow.”

  Oskar lowered his head and held it in both hands as if trying to staunch a migraine. A thick vein popped out on his temple, and he inhaled deeply through his mouth.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “A bribe?”

  “How else did you think? That they would release you for no reason?”

  He muttered to himself as if he were alone in the room, his words indecipherable. Abruptly, he smacked both hands on his head, startling Ludka, and then he straightened up, screwed his eyes shut, and nodded, as if resigning himself to something only he understood. A chill crawled up the back of Ludka’s neck and advanced like a regiment of lice across her scalp. She touched her hair with both hands.

  “I never knew,” said Oskar. “I didn’t know.”

  He broke the brittle threads off one edge of the burlap and rubbed them into a ragged dust. The skin on his neck hung slack, stippled as if plucked, raw from shaving. He cleared his throat and gazed into the distance, as if searching for words.

  “For me … for me I had my first and only baby fifty-nine years ago. I thought it was the virtuous thing to do, marrying his mother. You see? But I don’t know, Polly. I just don’t know. ‘For this we survived?’ my wife, Basia, used to say. She blamed me for ruining our son, and I blamed her for blaming me.”

  Ludka had the distinct impression he was telling her the truth, but not the whole truth. Jar of jam, she thought, with a surge of compassion for Basia.

  “I suppose it’s what I deserved. My son spent his life doing despicable things, then shot himself in the head. Thank god Basia didn’t live to see that. And now there’s my grandson, another fucking waste.”

  Ludka recoiled at his sudden vulgarity, so much like Stanley’s, and in that instant she wanted nothing more than to be on the plane with Izaac, the door irrevocably locked, the flight attendants instructing them to buckle up. Oskar wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something foul and rubbed again at his eyes. He pushed back from the table.

  “I’ll make us some more tea.”

  The woman across the way was back at the window with another rug, and as she shook it out, she burst into laughter and said something over her shoulder. Oskar busied himself at a hot-plate on top of the oak sideboard, and, for just a moment, Ludka saw him as that young man who had held the damaged canvas over the steaming kettle, while the tanks shuddered past in the street. “Voilà!” he had said, when he was done. They stepped back to view the results. “Only we will ever notice,” she had told him, even though she knew, and suspected he did, too, that a practiced eye could easily pick out the damage. He’d lifted her off her feet then, and she’d wrapped her legs around his hips.

  Now she wanted to go to him and take his face in her hands and kiss away the angry sorrow from each eye, ask him what was truly going on, what he wasn’t telling her. An inadvertent whimper escaped her throat—all this time he’d known where she was!—as she imagined that young man on a trolley in New York. She would have run after his outstretched hand, pulling herself up to his side, while behind them, mouth open in disbelief, Izaac would have stood where she’d left him, Lolek squalling in his arms.

  She furiously maneuvered herself along the bench to get out. She stepped unsteadily into
the studio and stopped in front of an unfinished portrait, mixed media, Cubist-inspired. She leaned toward it and laid a hand over her throat. The disembodied features were small and flaccid, bitter and weary, as if they could hardly bear to have made an appearance. Heavy bags dragged down the familiar, averted eyes. Ludka cradled her elbows, rubbed her arms. The kettle began to shriek and then abruptly wound down.

  “I’ll bet Stanley told you I wasn’t an artist,” said Oskar. “He doesn’t know one damn thing. Home Depot’s trash was full of material, not to mention the scraps from all those kitchens.”

  Oskar spoke far too fast, with an unsettling, freshly manufactured cheer that must have taken heroic energy to dredge up.

  “I never stopped working. I just never shared it with anyone. For years I kept a little place down on East Fourth Street, then in San Francisco a friend let me use a corner of his loft. And now! Now I find myself represented by Galeria Zapiecek, the best gallery in Warsaw. Not that it was my doing, understand—a friend arranged all of it without my knowledge.”

  “If self-portrait is any indication, I am not surprised you are in best gallery. Is this the only one you’ve done?”

  “No.” He rubbed the stump of his missing finger, then filled the teapot. “But it’s the only honest one.”

  A dull metal strip, lead maybe, barricaded the mouth, and dirty cheesecloth covered the ears. Ludka had an impulse to heave it out the window. Oskar handed her a mug of tea, too heavy now, she thought. She concentrated on gripping the handle so it wouldn’t tip. Oskar studied the self-portrait.

  “I’m sorry for my language earlier. My grandson brings out the worst in me, I’m afraid. I should have done far more for that boy. Breaking and entering is his bread and butter, not to mention fraud, so I’m not at all surprised he’s trying blackmail. I’m sorry I wasn’t more careful with my papers, though. I should have brought them with me.”

  “Like drawings of me?”

  Oskar said nothing.

  “Stanley presented a drawing of me as the old woman I am. I thought you had the keen imagination.”

  “Chicago. That lecture you did at the Art Institute.”

  “You were there?”

  “I took photos, worked from those. I should have said hello.”

  “You should have said hello,” Ludka said disdainfully. The mug had begun to tip, and she righted it before the tea spilled over.

  Again as if Oskar were alone, he muttered something Ludka didn’t catch. His eyes shone with a sudden excitement, and he reached out to take her hand, then hesitated and drew back.

  “I know where to find Stanley, and I know how to get through to him. I can get your Mieroszewski. It’s the least I can do.”

  Your Mieroszewski. Ludka flashed him a look, as the consequences of his little present finally dawned on her. She thrust the mug at him and didn’t hear him swear when the hot tea slopped over his hand. She hastened to the table and unrolled the provenance papers.

  “Yes, Polly, it’s all perfectly legal. Remember Wojno at the university? I consulted with him about adding your name. ‘Extraordinary circumstances,’ he told me. That was the last time I saw him. Treblinka, I heard.” He fell silent for a moment, and then spoke gently.

  “But you see, Polly? The Chopin belongs to you.”

  Weakness tackled her at the knees, she sank into Oskar’s chair, and for the first time Oskar laughed his old laugh.

  “This solves everything, don’t you see?”

  She did see, and she waited eagerly for the relief she knew she should feel. A spark of panic took hold instead. A fiery heat rushed into her face, and the room began to waver. She locked her gaze onto Oskar’s self-portrait, and after a moment she frowned, wondering why he’d need to barricade his mouth, what words he couldn’t say. But maybe the lead strip was about something he shouldn’t have said, something from his past—from their past. An idea began to take shape in her mind, an unclear notion that she couldn’t quite grasp but that nevertheless amplified her anxiety, and just as the idea was about to come clear, it vanished. She closed her eyes with relief.

  Later, though, when she was once more safely ensconced at home, the idea would materialize again, this time fully formed and glaringly clear, at which point she would fervently wish that Oskar had simply stayed missing.

  Part IV

  28

  Brothers

  Late in the afternoon on the day Ludka and Izaac returned from Warsaw, Lolek was in his office when Aggie called out to him from the other room.

  “Hey Senator, look who just came in from the cold!”

  In a more normal tone she said, “I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age, Frank. How the hell are you?”

  When Lolek got to the door, his brother Frank, decked out in dress uniform with white chief’s hat in hand, was giving Aggie a one-armed hug. When he let go, she stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and looked him up and down.

  “You certainly have come up in the world. Nice to see all those gold stripes on your sleeves.”

  Frank grinned. “I’m actually dying to take this thing off. I need a stiff drink. I don’t know how you can walk around all day on all this marble. My feet are killing me. Not to mention all the glad-handing. Makes me want to be back on the truck.”

  “I expect your brother can oblige you with that drink, can’t you, Mr. President? I’m on my way out, so we’re officially closed.”

  Lolek smiled and shook Frank’s hand.

  “I thought I might see you. Lot of dress blues walking around this place today. How was the public safety hearing?”

  “You know how it goes. It’s over, thank God.”

  “Come on in. Scotch? Neat?”

  Frank smiled. He undid the top button of his crisp white shirt and loosened his tie. Lolek admired the gold-buttoned, double-breasted jacket. It enhanced Frank’s already commanding presence, which along with his solid, calm demeanor, meant emergencies felt less catastrophic with him in charge; Frank had made a wise career choice, and Lolek found himself feeling proud of his kid brother. Frank took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. He laid his hat on the conference table.

  “I just had a call from Dad,” said Frank. “He and Matka are home from their trip.”

  “They okay?”

  Frank nodded. Lolek handed Frank his Scotch. They touched glasses and drank.

  “But they came home to a freezing house and a busted dining room window. Brick. Another hate note about Tommy, this one more threatening. No one seems to have entered the house, but I’m worried. I alerted Shelly and got one of our bomb guys over there to check things out, just in case. Someone’s clearly targeting Dad. I talked to him, and of course he says they’ve weathered worse and they’re just glad to be home—they’re exhausted; it took them almost twenty-four hours—but I spoke to your wife, and she suggested they stay over at your place tonight. They also have that student art tour on Friday, but Matka won’t hear of putting it off. I’m just not sure it’s the best idea to have a bunch of strangers traipsing through their house right now. I was hoping you could check in on them, try to talk sense.”

  Lolek sat down behind his desk.

  “You spoke to my wife?”

  Frank went over to the cold fireplace and squatted down to poke in his head.

  “When’s the last time you cleaned this flue?”

  “1873. What do you think! It’s fine.”

  “I just thought Marta could go over there and check on them, since you and I are here. She’s probably getting there about now.”

  Frank stood and stared at the logs piled on the fire grate. The brothers fell silent and sipped their drinks.

  When Lolek had first decided to run for office, he never anticipated he’d end up viewing everyone—including his brother—with such suspicion. Everything seemed like posturing, everything had the trappings of calculation. Had Marta’s familiar way of greeting Frank that morning in their kitchen been deliberately sisterly? Even as Lolek became aw
are that this memory had been niggling him, he forced the thought from his mind; his brother was as honest as a summer day was long. Lolek wasn’t so sure about Marta.

  “I’ll check in on them, Frank. Did Shelly say anything about his progress? Have they IDed that car?”

  “No one saw it clearly enough. But I guess Tommy was finally able to give them details for a composite, so Shelly’s working that angle. And he’s still hoping for some traction on the phone calls. I feel bad for Tommy and Robert though, having to listen to them. Must wear them down. At least Dad and Matka got a break from all that.”

  “Dad say how their trip was?”

  “Overwhelming, I guess. Can you imagine? But of course all he wanted to do was hear about Tommy. Hey, what’s the word on appealing the arbitration decision?”

  “Abe filed for it the next morning, last Thursday—he was ready for it. In the end he thinks the Christian kids got through to Kinney, and then the pastor cemented things by letting Kinney know how many other kids had come to him with similar stories. Still, I don’t think Abe will have any trouble securing an appeal. Turns out Kinney’s old law firm is largely comprised of Redeemer Fellowship members. He should have recused himself. That said, Abe’s preparing for the next step, too. Even if Tommy wins on appeal, they want to file a discrimination complaint—they’re working on that now. Abe’s pulled together the attorneys for the other teachers so they can orchestrate their filings. I’m sure he’ll also end up filing for damages and injunctive relief in a civil suit, but that has to wait until ninety days have passed since filing the complaint.”

  “Long haul, isn’t it? Tommy getting any money at all from the school?”

  “Not a penny, but I think Robert does pretty well. Tommy says they’re okay financially. Did you know, by the way, that they’re married?”

  Lolek watched his brother through narrowed eyes. Frank froze, his glass halfway to his mouth. He turned to Lolek with genuine surprise.

  “Married?”

  “Married. Over a year ago. Tommy sprang it on me when he was in the hospital.”