The Woman from Hamburg Page 12

  A Fox

  The two of us women were staying in a pension and would pass the time by going on easy walks. We’d stroll alongside the Świder River, which was somewhat wider and deeper than usual that spring. We left immediately after breakfast; we wanted to get out before the drunks woke up around noon. They’d be lying about in the nearby woods, surrounded by empty beer cans, jars that had held their snacks, bits of string and plastic wrap.

  Pani Miecia seemed not to see the trash. Through the blue eyes of a gentle child she saw gardens, flowers, and wicker armchairs.

  “The veranda was over there,” she said, “on the left. We used to play poker on it. Would you believe that I once won all the money Henryk Kuna, the sculptor, staked?”

  The veranda had been a feature of Mrs. Szychowa’s pension seventy years ago, but Pani Miecia came back to these parts every year. In Świder, she had played poker with the sculptor, Kuna; in Śródborów, she had played pinochle with Duracz, the attorney; for New Year’s Eve they would travel to Otwock to be with the Góreckis. True, they charged twenty-five zlotys a day, which was five times more than other proprietors did, but they served French sardines and partridges in oranges.

  Every couple of days Pani Miecia was visited by her husband, Pan Waldemar. He would drop by for only a little while, because he was still in business. Lately, he had been thinking a lot about baby carriages. He had read that five hundred thousand babies are born annually in Poland, but very few baby carriages are being manufactured. One could import them from Taiwan and sell them for two million and more.

  Pan Waldemar had learned economic thought in his youth, from a commercial attaché in the French Embassy. He must have been a quick study, because when the attaché went on a hunting trip to Mexico he entrusted the administration of the entire bureau to Pan Waldemar.

  Pan Waldemar was supposed to have married a different woman, namely, Antonina Wajman. Her father owned shares in sixteen sugar refineries and drove a Citröen with such a fabulous suspension that you felt as if you were in a cradle. The wedding date was set; a dinner at the Hotel Europejski and tickets for a honeymoon trip to Seville had been ordered, but Antonina’s brother came home from Oxford. He took a close look at the groom and said three words to his sister: “I don’t advise …” She listened to him. The brother committed suicide immediately after the German invasion. Antonina was arrested on the Aryan side. Despite her Semitic beauty she hadn’t accepted that there was a war on. She had not moved to the ghetto. She did not want to hide. She was taken away from the Simon & Stecki Restaurant; someone, no one knows who, had called the police.

  Six months after the marriage that didn’t take place Pan Waldemar went on vacation and noticed Miecia at a dance hall in Jastarnia.

  When I made their acquaintance, at the pension in Świder, they had been married for fifty-seven years.

  I liked going to their room for English tea and Pani Miecia’s stories, which were always pleasant and ended on an unanticipated note.

  “We had spent New Year’s Eve in Otwock,” she began one afternoon. “We had danced all night long and on New Year’s Day until dinner; Waldzio left for home only in the evening, and I stayed on. It was snowing on Three Kings’ Day. In a couple of hours there were huge drifts, the tracks were covered with snow, and we were cut off from the world. Do you know what my husband did? He came by sleigh from Warsaw to comfort me. ‘I’m managing fine on my own, darling,’ he said. ‘Stay here and relax.’ So I stayed and relaxed until an acquaintance of mine, a waitress at the Frigate, phoned. ‘You’re having such a pleasant rest in Otwock? In the meantime, that husband of yours, the engineer, has been coming here every evening all week, and always with the same woman.’ I ordered a sleigh. I caught the train in Falenica; in Warsaw I went to my hairdresser. You should know, Miss,” Pani Miecia added in a didactic tone of voice, “in such situations a woman must have clean, well-coiffed hair. I phoned his office and uttered five words, very calmly, ‘I’m waiting at the Frigate.’ ”

  Pan Waldemar was clearly off somewhere in memory as he listened to his wife. He reached into his briefcase and extracted a photograph. It showed a young man in plaid plus-fours, with self-assured, seductively half-closed eyes. “That’s me,” he said. “In those days. Do you find me attractive?”

  “Very much,” I admitted. “But how did that conversation in the café end?”

  “With a brand new fox,” Pani Miecia laughed. “From Apfelbaum’s. Do you know who he was? Maurycy Apfelbaum, 25 Marszałkowska Avenue—the most elegant furrier in Warsaw. A marvelous silver fox; when I flung it across my shoulder it trailed down my back to my ankles.”

  “From Chowańczak,” Pan Waldeman interjected, and propped the photograph of the man in plus-fours against the sugar bowl.

  “From Apfelbaum, darling,” Pani Miecia insisted. “You know that no one had lovelier foxes.”

  “Miecia. From Chowańczak. Apfelbaum was dead by then.”

  “You know …,” she considered this, “you’re right. Apfelbaum had been dead for a long time by then.”

  I realized then that all the stories they had told me—the romances, the betrayals, the snowdrifts, the fox—had happened during the Second World War.

  For quite some time I was affected by this realization.

  In the summer, Pani Miecia fell ill. Even in the hospital she had gentle, trusting eyes; she talked about the pension she had discovered in Międzylesie and vowed that we would go there as soon as she felt better.

  I telephoned in the autumn.

  “So you don’t know what she did to me?!” I heard a clear note of irritation in Pan Waldemar’s voice. “She died! She died on me!”

  “And I told her,” he said in despair, when I visited him, “let’s move to Tahiti. In 1939, in Le Matin, a French bank was advertising a guaranteed lifetime annuity in Tahiti for 8,000 zlotys. I begged her, ‘Miecia, let’s sell everything. Let’s go. The temperature is never above 25 degrees centigrade there, summer and winter, night and day.’ And do you know what she answered me? ‘And will Mrs. Szychowa move her pension there? And what about snow? New Year’s Eve without snow?!’ So we didn’t go. And now she’s died on me.…”

  “The French bank guaranteed immortality in Tahiti?” I asked, but Pan Waldemar didn’t hear me. He stood up. He led me to his wife’s room and opened the wardrobe.

  I know. It sounds unbelievable, but Pan Waldemar took out a stole made of silver fox.

  “My wife asked me to …,” he said. “Please take it as a memento.”

  “I would prefer something from Apfelbaum’s,” I confessed. “After all, you know that no one had more beautiful foxes …,” and I quickly hung up the stole, afraid that Pan Waldemar would tell me where they bought it, in the Wola department store, for example, and that he would ruin my punch line.

  The Tree

  1

  An old, bearded Jew, wearing a black hat and a long black coat, leaves his house before eight o’clock and boards the trolley on Targowa Street, near the Różycki Bazaar.

  It happens sometimes that, two stops later, at Jagiellońska Street, another old Jew boards the same trolley, but as a rule they take different trolleys.

  A third old Jew, who is supposed to get on two stops before the bazaar, at Zamoyski Street, is very weak and goes to the synagogue only on Saturdays.

  In the synagogue they say the morning prayer, after which they eat a free kosher meal.

  They return home and go to bed. They gather strength. They have to get up at three and go to the trolley. They have two prayers to say, the morning and the evening prayer.

  On Saturdays, if it’s not slippery outside, if it’s not raining, and if there’s not a strong wind, about twenty of them pray.

  They are the last East European Jews in Warsaw, maybe even in Poland, and maybe even in the entire world.

  2

  They cling to a couple of streets in the Praga district, near the preschool. The preschool has a playground with swings and a small pla
tform to which one ascends on stone stairs. A round synagogue once stood here, the oldest in Warsaw.1 Modest, unadorned, it was one of the first round synagogues in Europe. It was burned out during the war; after the war, the walls were taken down. The stairs lead nowhere.

  The property belonged to the Bergsons, whose forebear was King Stanisław August’s banker, Szmul Zbytkower. His son, Berek, donated it to the Jewish community as a gift. “All the buildings and squares from the depths of the earth to the limit of the sky I give as an eternal gift, unsolicited, of my own volition, not liable to revocation in future,” he wrote in the deed of gift in 1807. “My wife and mistress, if only she were still alive!, supported me in this matter. I raise my prayers to God in the highest, that day and night His eyes may be turned toward this house.”

  Berek’s sons requested that vice-regent Zajączek grant them permission to live in Warsaw on a street of their choosing outside the Jewish quarter, even though they wore Jewish attire and had beards. The vice-regent supported their request and presented it to Alexander I. The tsar expressed his agreement as to the street, beard, and Orthodox attire for the oldest of the brothers only.

  The youngest, Michał, emigrated to Paris. He was a student of Chopin’s, a composer and pianist. He composed operas and pieces for the piano.

  Michał’s son, Henri Bergson, was the French philosopher and Nobel laureate.2 He wrote about the roles of instinct, intellect, and intuition. After France was occupied by the Germans, the Vichy government advised him that he would not be subject to anti-Jewish restrictions. In response, Bergson renounced the distinctions with which France had honored him and, octogenarian that he was, stood in line for many hours. In conformity with the orders of the authorities, he inscribed his name in the registry of Jews. He died soon afterward. He was close to Catholicism. He did not accept baptism. “I wished to remain with those who will be persecuted tomorrow,” he wrote in his last testament.

  Two buildings are part of the property above which hover the spirits of bankers, artists, and philosophers. One is a one-story, modest building of red brick, intended once upon a time as a mikva, a ritual bath; the East European Jew who boards the tram at Jagiellońska Street lives there. The other is a multistory, grand building that has replaced the former asylum for beggars, wanderers, and reformed sinners. A plaque informs us that the Michał Bergson Instructional Facility of the Warsaw Community of Orthodox Believers is located in this new building. One of the apartments is occupied by an East European Jewish woman who doesn’t go to synagogue on any trolley.

  3

  She was given the name Ninel. N-i-n-e-l, Lenin spelled backward. Her older sister was presented with the name Rema, an acronym from a Soviet slogan of the twenties: Revoliutsiia plius Elektrifikatsiia Mira, which means, “Revolution Plus Electrification of the World.”

  Rema emigrated from Poland and Ninel remained all alone with her name. She was asked about it by clerks in the Bureau of Civil Records, by postmen, the midwife, and acquaintances at summer resorts. “Ninel?” and they’d pause, while she would feverishly consider whether she should lie or assume this burden one more time with mournful dignity?

  When she was fifty she went to Israel and learned that nin-el is a fusion of the Hebrew words for great-grandchild and God.

  The day that she stopped being Lenin and became the great-granddaughter of God was one of the happiest days of her life.

  Ninel’s grandfather, a carter who drove someone else’s horse, and her father, a journeyman tailor, came from Święciany. Her grandmother had died young and on her deathbed had called for her son, the future father of Ninel. She was no longer alive when he arrived at the hospital. The nurse wanted to show her to the boy, took him to the morgue, and got the boxes mixed up. He opened one of them and they saw a pile of amputated human hands and feet. The boy returned home, lay down, and fell asleep. He slept for several days. The doctor was called. He didn’t know what to do, but he said it was an interesting case and he would happily purchase a patient in a coma. Grandfather agreed. The doctor left him money, gathered up the future father of Ninel, and grandfather bought himself a horse. The future father slept for twenty-three days, after which he woke up in amazing good health. The doctor wrote up “The Case of Patient K.,” and one can find it to this day in certain reference books.

  The future father of Ninel became a communist. He emigrated to Moscow. He graduated with a degree in Marxist philosophy and then taught the subject himself. He brought over his siblings from Święciany, Abram and Rachela. They were all arrested in 1937. The father was in prison for nine years, and both Rachela and Abram for eighteen years.

  They returned to Poland. Ninel graduated with a degree in electronics. She is an expert in Jewish customs and Talmudic law. Her son studied Hebrew and learned Jewish prayers. He was bar mitzvah at age thirteen. From then on he had the right to put on a tallith, to pray with the adult men, and to read aloud from the Torah in the synagogue. It was the first bar mitzvah in the Warsaw synagogue since the end of the war.

  4

  The East European Jew who lives in the one-story house had a pious father who was a councilman in Łaskarzew. He had three brothers and three sisters. He had two children and a wife. He had a horse, a wagon with a tarpaulin for a cover, and a shop that he co-owned with his brother. His name was Srul.

  He dealt in cattle and meat—in Izdebno, Leokadia, Zygmunty, Melanów, Chotyń, and Wielki Las.

  The peasants with whom he had done business and to whom he had loaned money (he would say “Open the drawer, take as much as you need, and pay me back when you can”) decided that he had to survive.

  They gave him the name Zygmunt.

  They allowed him to spend the nights in their barns, woods, and haystacks. They fed him bread, soup, and potatoes. When his wife Jochwed and his daughter Basia died in the ghetto, they told him that he had to live for his son. When Szmulek died, they said he had to live for them.

  He survived thanks to the peasants of Izdebno, Leokadia, Zygmunty, Melanów, Chotyń, and Wielki Las.

  After the war, he went to the Office of State Security; he testified that a certain Home Army prisoner had not killed Jews.

  He went to factories and said, “This girl’s father saved me, and you don’t want to hire her?”

  He arranged for them to get invitations to go abroad. He sold them meat from his kosher butcher stall without a ration card and gave them calves’ feet and veal for free. He was a guest at their family parties. He danced with other men’s fiancées at other men’s weddings and sat at the table near the parish priest and the village headman.

  In the one-story house over which hover the spirits of bankers, artists and philosophers, in a room that used to be the bath-house dressing room, the East European Jew looks at holiday greeting cards. They come, as they do every year, from Izdebno, Leokadia, Zygmunty, Melanów, Chotyń, and Wielki Las.

  Finally, he reaches for an envelope from New York.

  “Read it aloud,” he says. “I’m almost blind.”

  The envelope has been cut open. The thin airmail paper, covered with awkward writing, has been read many times.

  “Reading your letter, I wept bitterly. I, too, regret that I ran away from the train. Life is lonely. I wish you good health, Your Mojsze.”

  They were traveling in the same freight car to Treblinka: Mojsze Landsman, a friend from Łaskarzew, and he with his four-year-old son. When the son smothered to death in the freight car, Mojsze Landsman whispered, “Now,” and jumped first.

  “Write,” he says to me. “I’m almost blind.”

  He hands me note paper and starts dictating:

  “Dear Mojsze, you are right. For whom did we jump? Why the hell did we jump? Did we have to jump from that train?”

  But no …

  He has changed his mind. He takes the paper away from me and hands me a shiny card. It is a picture of a Christmas tree with a lot of colored lights and burning candles.

  “Write,” he says. “Dear Moj
sze, on the occasion of New Year’s Day 1995 I wish you much health and …”

  “And …?”

  “Well, write, write. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to wish people for the New Year?”

  5

  The son of Ninel, God’s great-granddaughter, was prepared for his bar mitzvah by the bearded Jew who boards the trolley on Targowa Street.

  He was a shochet, a ritual slaughterer. He was taught the art of slaughtering by Izaak Dublin, while Mosze Tipnis taught him Talmud—both of them the most pious, the most learned Jews in all Rokitno.

  When you have reached sixty years of age you can no longer be a slaughterer. Your hand might tremble, the knife would wound the animal, and the meat would be treyf.

  When the Jew from Targowa Street stopped being a shochet, the last one in Warsaw, the last one in Poland, he decided to emigrate to Israel.

  He got his furniture ready for the journey, locked it up in one room, hung a padlock on the door, and hid the key in a linen pouch. He moved into the kitchen. Pots that there’s no point in washing, jars that should be recycled, stale baked goods, old newspapers, pieces of aluminum foil, old shoes, bottle caps, corks, and rags all piled up.

  When he comes back from morning prayer he takes off his black suit and lies down in his underwear on the bed, which there’s no point in making up with fresh linen. He stretches out his white beard and grayish-yellow bare arms on the grayish-yellow comforter. He sinks into a short, alert sleep before his afternoon prayer.

  He would like to sail to Haifa on a freighter with his furniture. He would like to travel free of charge, so he visits the Israeli Embassy and asks for a ticket.

  They reply that that is impossible.

  A couple of years pass. He visits the Embassy, asks for a ticket.

  They say it’s impossible.

  A couple of years pass.