‘Renata, sit next to Kasia,’ Mrs Dabrowska was saying. ‘We are learning the alphabet at the moment,’ and as we took our seats she turned to a girl in the front row.
‘Iwona, will you explain to Renata what the alphabet is and why we have to learn it by heart.’
The girl obediently stood up but before she could open her mouth I stood up and said, ‘But I already know the alphabet by heart. It’s the letters that words are made up of and we have to know it so we can read. And I can read already.’
A little giggle went round the class. Mrs Dabrowska glared and silence fell.
‘So you can read?’ Her voice was icy. ‘And who taught you to read?’
‘A lady called Jadwiga. She was a teacher.’
‘Really. I hope she didn’t teach you incorrectly. Reading is difficult to master and must be taught properly. So, tell me, Renata, what exactly can you read?’
‘Anything.’ I was so excited to be in a classroom and desperately wanted to impress my teacher. ‘I belong to a library and the librarian says that she will soon run out of books for me and I will have to start reading them all over again. But I don’t mind at all. I just love books. Don’t you?’
The look on Mrs Dabrowska’s face made me stop. She held up her hand.
‘Little girls who show off,’ she said, ‘come to a sticky end.’
All the children in the room giggled and this time the teacher didn’t try to stop them.
‘I’m not showing off. I can read. I’ve just read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens again. It’s an English book but it’s been translated into Polish. It’s really sad about a little orphan boy called Oliver who …’ I could feel my cheeks getting hot.
‘Sit down and be quiet!’ she ordered me.
Finally I understood. She opened her briefcase and pulled out a newspaper, and brought it over to me.
‘Read us the first paragraph on the right,’ she said, looking round the class with a big smile, ‘so that we can all hear for ourselves how well you read. Unless of course you would prefer to stop this silly game right now.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You know as well as I do that little girls of your age cannot read, but they are old enough to know that it is wrong to tell lies.’
What a funny woman, I thought. She thinks I’m telling lies. No wonder she’s cross. So I looked at the paper and began to read in a loud clear voice the paragraph Mrs Dabrowska had indicated. It was a report of a fight between a Pole and a Russian, both drunk. The Russian had pulled out a knife, but the Pole was strong and had killed the Russian with his bare hands. He was now in prison awaiting trial for murder.
Mrs Dabrowska came and looked over my shoulder as I read.
‘Now read this,’ she said, pointing to another part of the page. I did as I was told.
‘So, you really can read,’ she exclaimed, and the whole class began to clap.
‘Quiet!’ she shouted. ‘I told you to sit down, Renata. I apologise for not believing you. Right, everyone. Silence. It’s time for our history lesson. Now, Iwona, who was the first King of Poland?’
‘You really can read,’ Kasia whispered, ‘that’s amazing.’
It wasn’t just Kasia who was impressed. Some of the other girls clustered round me at break time asking questions. I remembered what Uncle Julek and Aunt Zuzia had told me. I didn’t mention my family but talked about books and how much I enjoyed stories, and I began to tell them the stories I had read. Every break time after that a huddle of girls would gather round me, their eyes wide, always wanting to hear more. I, of course, was only too pleased to tell them what I had read but I always stopped at the exciting bits.
‘You will have to wait,’ I would say. ‘I will tell you what happens next time.’
Learning wasn’t what I’d expected. During the hours spent alone in Jadwiga’s cottage or lying on my bed with the library books in my bedroom at Aunt Zuzia’s, I’d wonder about the words I was reading. I’d ask Aunt Zuzia what the words meant and she would offer several more in return. I thought about the meaning of the words and how words and their meanings overlapped. Then I’d consider the meaning of the sentences and how, if I changed one word, the meaning would change. Stories became stories within stories. I took apart everything I read.
I thought that school would be the same. But it wasn’t. The teacher stood in front of the class and talked to us and we sat and listened. She wrote on the board and sometimes we copied down what she had written into our exercise books. We kept our handwriting small so we didn’t use up too much paper. And we weren’t allowed to say anything. Then Mrs Dabrowska made us repeat our lesson, chanting it back like a song without a chorus, over and over again until we knew it off by heart and could repeat it without a single mistake. We were like parrots. Ever since I had left my home, I had been remembering things in my mind by repeating them over and over again so I was very good at learning this way.
Not everyone was impressed, though. Soon I began to hear the whispers. They watched as I walked towards them and sniggered after I’d passed by. I learned to take a deep breath and put my nose in the air and hope no one noticed how red my cheeks were. The more they sniggered behind their hands, the more exciting I made my stories – just to annoy them.
‘She thinks she knows it all,’ I heard one girl say.
‘She’s so stuck up,’ said another, ‘with all her stories and showing off that she can repeat everything without making a mistake.’
‘She’s no better than the rest of us, but she thinks she is,’ complained a third.
Then I began to worry that I had drawn attention to myself and Uncle Julek and Aunt Zuzia would be cross with me, and one day even Kasia was unusually quiet as we walked home.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, trying to link arms with my friend.
She pushed me roughly away.
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ Kasia snorted.
‘Yes there is. Why are you angry with me?’
‘I’m not. Only you’re a show-off. They’re right.’
‘I’m not a show-off. They are only jealous because I’m cleverer than them.’
‘There you go again. You’re showing off now.’
I tried to change the subject, desperate for things to return to normal.
‘Come home with me and see if Aunt Zuzia has made anything nice for us to eat,’ I suggested.
Kasia relented and was about to run off up the street ahead of me to ask her mother when I grabbed her by the arm.
‘You say I show off, but you’re always showing off that you have a mother when you know I haven’t. So that makes us the same. You’re just as bad as me.’
Kasia stopped and turned round to look at me.
‘Oh Renata, I’m sorry. I never thought of that. I don’t mean to keep reminding you about your mother.’
‘And I don’t mean to be a show-off,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I find it easy and I don’t know why no one else does.’ I looked down at my feet.
‘It’s just that we try so hard to learn everything off by heart and it seems so unfair.’
‘It seems so unfair that all of you have mothers and mine’s dead,’ I said.
‘I wish you had one too,’ said Kasia, ‘but your aunt’s ever so nice and one day your father will turn up. Come on, let’s not quarrel – you’re my best friend.’
‘And so are you,’ I said, and arm in arm we skipped happily up the street, our argument forgotten.
‘What did you learn at school today?’ asked Uncle Julek each day as I came through the front door.
‘Today I learned that Jesus loves everyone,’ I said one afternoon. ‘If Jesus loves everyone then he must be such a kind person. I don’t think I could love everyone. Could you love everyone?’
‘Definitely not,’ Uncle Julek replied. ‘Ridiculous thing to say.’
‘But it’s true,’ I said. ‘Father Pawel told me. He said God loved the world so much that he sent his son Jesus to save everyone so Jesus must love everyone if he wants to
save them. Do you love Jesus?’
Uncle Julek chose not to answer.
As the days went on and I learned more about this wonderful man who loved everyone, I decided that I would love Jesus back. But how could I love Jesus if I had never met him and how could he love me in return?
I decided to ask Father Pawel.
‘Oh my child,’ he said, ‘Jesus knows you for He is watching you all the time. He sees everything you do and knows everything you feel. You just need to accept Him into your heart and your heart will be full of love and you will love Him. But this is not enough. You need to become a Catholic for only by being Catholic can you be sure that He loves you and you will then have eternal life.’
I thought about this all day and realised that all the girls in my class were loved by Jesus and would be going to Heaven and I so wanted to be loved and I desperately wanted to be the same as my classmates. So that evening when I returned home, I told Uncle Julek and Aunt Zuzia that I wanted to become a Roman Catholic so Jesus would love me for ever and I would go to Heaven when I died.
‘Absolutely not!’ Uncle Julek spluttered into his tea.
‘Renata!’ said Aunt Zuzia in an unusually shrill voice.
‘But why not?’ I asked.
‘Because you are not becoming a Catholic,’ said Uncle Julek, ‘and that’s the end of it.’
No matter how much I tried I could not get Uncle Julek or Aunt Zuzia to agree, even though I talked about it every day.
‘I want to be a Roman Catholic like all the other girls. Why won’t you let me go to church and take Holy Communion? They get a wafer to eat and some lovely sweet wine to drink. Why can’t I?’
‘Renata, you cannot become a Catholic until your father comes home. He can make the decision for you.’
‘But why can’t I decide for myself?’ I demanded, stamping my foot. ‘I’m a big girl now. I can decide for myself. And where is he, anyway?’
Uncle Julek began shouting. ‘If we hear any more of this nonsense you’ll get a hard smack and go to bed without supper.’ He stomped out of the kitchen leaving Aunt Zuzia to hug me to her chest and apologise for his harsh words.
I decided to get Father Pawel on my side. I could tell he felt sorry for me because when I talked to him he would shake his head and look at me with such pity in his eyes. He told me the only way I could be saved was to become a Catholic. He spent every lesson making everyone feel sorry for me.
‘This child,’ he said to the class, ‘cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven because of her father. Her father is a Protestant. If her father really loved her then the last thing he would want would be to prevent his daughter from being saved –’
I sat there with my hands in my lap, looking down and wishing I had a father who really loved me and that I could be saved for eternity.
‘Wouldn’t he be so happy, so delighted to find out on his return that his beloved daughter had saved herself from eternal damnation? That his daughter had made the one decision that would guarantee eternal life? What father would not be blessed for letting his child return to the fold? The Almighty is a Father and He knows only too well what it is like to have his Child saved –’
I was cross with my uncle and aunt who said that I was too young to make a decision about becoming a Catholic. I wasn’t too young, I was seven, and I knew what I wanted. And then it came to me – I could make the decision for myself.
So, I told Father Pawel a lie – a lie that I told myself I could confess later, when I had become a Catholic. Then Father Pawel would forgive my sin but I would still have a place in Heaven at the side of the Almighty. I told Father Pawel that my aunt and uncle had decided that I could, after all, become a Catholic.
He was delighted when I told him. Tears sprang into his eyes. ‘This is my work, my life,’ he said, ‘to save the sinners and children and bring them to the fold. It’s nothing less than the Lord Himself would have wished. It is expected of me no less. Does the Bible not say there will be more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance? The same is true for those coming to the fold of faith.’
When he told me this, something heavy lifted itself from my heart.
Aunt Zuzia was pleased that I had become such good friends with Kasia and she was even more happy when Kasia started inviting me to play at her house every Sunday morning. Just after breakfast my aunt kissed me at the door of the apartment and waved as I walked up the street alone to visit Kasia.
What I didn’t tell my aunt was that Kasia and I didn’t really play with each other for as soon as I arrived I would go hand in hand with her and her parents to church and take Communion from Father Pawel. Every week Father Pawel made me feel very special because he said a blessing for the little child he had personally saved from damnation. Every Sunday lunchtime I returned home to Aunt Zuzia feeling normal and happy and safe with my new life of deceit.
‘It’s Mrs Dabrowska’s birthday on Saturday,’ I announced to my aunt. ‘I want you to make her a birthday cake.’
‘A cake?’ said Aunt Zuzia. ‘But Renata, darling, you know how difficult it is to get even the basic ingredients. I don’t think I can make a cake for your teacher. Why don’t you recite a poem or something?’
‘The others will be doing that. Anyway she’s always telling us how much she loves sweet things and how easy it was to get them before the war and she hasn’t tasted cake for ages.’
Somehow Aunt Zuzia managed to make a coffee cake which, despite the lack of butter and shortage of other ingredients, was light and fluffy and rose to a magnificent size. Aunt Zuzia then coated it with a thin layer of chocolate icing and arranged it carefully on one of her very best plates.
As she fixed a single candle right in the middle she said, ‘Now, Renata, here’s the cake for Mrs Dabrowska but under no circumstances do you leave the plate behind. It’s part of my best dinner service and you must bring it home with you.’
I objected but for once Aunt Zuzia was adamant.
‘I most certainly want the plate back. The cake is a more than generous present. Besides, Mrs Dabrowska will divide the cake amongst you all and the plate will be empty.’
On Saturday the whole class met in the street outside Mrs Dabrowska’s house and compared gifts. There was no doubt that my present was the best by far. Everyone gasped when they saw the lovely cake and Kasia with eyes shining said, ‘Oh Renata, your aunt makes the most wonderful things to eat, she is so clever. Mrs Dabrowska will simply love the cake.’
Puffed up with pride I knocked loudly on the door and led the line of classmates inside.
Mrs Dabrowska sat in her tiny sitting room smiling as she watched the little procession come in. We went up one by one to recite the little poems or greetings that we had prepared, then curtsied and presented her with our gifts. In return she complimented every one of us. ‘Oh how lovely… how wonderful … you must have practised so hard … what a surprise … I never expected anything …’ and so on until she had accepted each gift with a gracious smile as the girl pecked her waiting cheek and then stood back to make room for the next one.
When it was my turn, I held out the cake for her to hold whilst I delivered my birthday wishes. Mrs Dabrowska’s eyes were gleaming and she couldn’t take them off the cake even when I kissed her. She then rose from her chair and disappeared with the cake and my aunt’s precious plate into the kitchen. The girls all looked at one another, somewhat surprised by her exit.
‘Oh don’t worry,’ I said in a hushed voice. ‘She’s gone to cut the cake so that we can all have a piece. Aunt Zuzia said she would.’
Then we waited expectantly for our teacher’s return. When she emerged her hands were quite empty. There was no sign of either the cake or the plate.
‘Thank you, girls,’ she said, ‘you have been so kind, so generous. Now I have things to do so you may go now.’
And she stepped towards the door and opened it wide. The girls looked at me expectantly. I didn’t kno
w what to do but as Mrs Dabrowska was staring straight at me I began walking towards the open door and out into the street. We stood briefly on the pavement, surprised and disappointed.
‘But I thought you said we’d have some cake,’ Iwona said.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe that we hadn’t been offered a single crumb of that delicious cake. I turned and, pulling Kasia by the hand, walked away from the disappointed crowd.
‘Where’s my plate?’ were Aunt Zuzia’s first words as we entered the apartment.
‘I couldn’t ask for it,’ I said. ‘She took the cake into the kitchen. It would have been rude to ask.’
‘Did she give you all a piece?’
Kasia and I shook our heads.
I had never seen Aunt Zuzia so cross before.
‘Of all the greedy, ungrateful people,’ she shouted. ‘It took me ages to work out how to make that cake, and she didn’t share it out. Then I shall go and collect the plate from her myself.’
‘Please don’t, Aunt Zuzia. She’ll think we’re mean and everyone will know and they will be horrible to me.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous. If anyone deserves to be called mean and greedy, it’s your teacher. I simply don’t know how she can behave like that, taking it into the kitchen and not sharing a scrap. Did she at least offer you something else to eat or drink?’
‘No. She thanked us all and said she was sorry she couldn’t invite us to stay but she had things to do. You won’t go and ask for the plate back, will you?’
‘Yes, Renata, I will. She should have given it to you when you asked for it.’
‘But I didn’t ask.’
‘Then you’re a very naughty girl. I told you to bring it back. Now unless you ask her for it on Monday I shall come up to the school and ask Mrs Dabrowska for it myself.’
This was the first time that I had failed to win an argument with my aunt and I knew that I had no choice but to pluck up the courage and ask Mrs Dabrowska for the plate myself. I spent the rest of the day tormented by worry, which I secretly shared with the priest at confession the next day. But Father Pawel told me that it was not a sin and I could ask for the plate back.
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