The Woman from Hamburg Read online

  “The mess kit …,” Lina would prompt.

  “Right. She was holding an empty mess kit.”

  “How do you know it was empty?”

  “Because she was dangling it without any effort.”

  “That could have been Miriam,” I said when Lina and her husband, Władek, told me about the woman. They didn’t understand.

  “Miriam. The one whom the Christians later referred to as Mary.”

  This possibility hadn’t occurred to them yet; rather, they had assumed it was the tzaddiks who had intervened.

  Władek was reminded of a wartime joke, a witticism that was repeated in the ghetto. When the Germans drove people out of the church for Jewish converts one man remained in the church—the last Jew, the one on the cross. He descended from the cross and beckoned to his Mother, “Mame, kim …” which in Yiddish means, “Mama, come …” And so she went to the Umschlagplatz. But wearing a suit? Not likely, because she appeared in her robe from the church images and with a halo. With an empty mess kit? There was food in it before, but she asked someone, “Is it true that you are hungry?” She fed them and went to Ciepła Street and the rack wagon.

  My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles and holes in them, in which everything is obvious, tend to be untrue. And things that cannot be explained in any fashion really do happen. In the end, life on earth is also true, but it cannot be logically explained.

  3

  Dawid of Lelów’s remains were buried one hundred eighty years ago in the local cemetery. The cemetery is gone, but recently the tzaddik’s grave was restored. Chaim Środa, the son of Josef the glazier, pointed out the spot. Dawid was resting in the community co-operative’s store, in the hardware section. (After the war a warehouse and two stores—a grocery and an agricultural implements store—were built on the Jewish cemetery.) A rabbi from Jerusalem asked the director of the store to move the hardware, and Hasidim who were followers of Dawid started digging. After a couple of hours they uncovered the foundation. They found a skull, the tibias, and individual bones of the tzaddik’s hands. They laid down their shovels, lit candles, and said Kaddish. The rabbi arranged the remains and covered them with dirt. A couple of months later a tomb was constructed and a wall was erected to separate it from the rest of the store. On the anniversary of the tzaddik’s death his pupils came from around the world and left letters with requests as they used to do in former times.

  Chaim Środa was born in Lelów, near the Białka River. He went to work with his father. On his back he carried frames holding panes of glass secured with belts of woven linen; in one hand, he held a can of putty, and in the other hand, a sack filled with tools. They glazed windows in Sokolniki, Nakło, and Turzyn. Every day they walked up to fifteen kilometers; they charged one zloty for each window they installed.

  The Lelów Jews sold their goods at markets. In Pilica on Tuesdays, in Szczekociny on Wednesdays, in Żarki on Thursdays, but on Fridays they went only to nearby villages in order to make it back home in time for the Sabbath. On Friday mornings they carried essential items in the baskets: hair ribbons; sugar in paper sacks, each packet weighing ten dekagrams because there weren’t any peasants who could afford a whole kilogram; dye for linens; and starch, also in sacks, but weighing less than the sugar. They would come back at dusk. In their baskets they now had eggs, white cheese, and bottles of milk. They washed up, changed clothes, and went to the synagogue. After the prayers they ate challah and fish. Of the eight hundred Lelów Jews, eight survived the war; one of them lives in Poland—Chaim Środa. His father, Josef the glazier, was shot in Częstochowa. His mother, Małka, née Potasz, his three brothers, Hirsz, Dawid, and Aron, and his three sisters, Ałta, Sara, and Jochwed, were sent to Treblinka. Chaim escaped from the camp. He hid in sixteen different houses, houses in which he had installed windows before the war.

  Over the grave of Dawid of Lelów, the great-great-great-grandfather of Andzia, the same conversation takes place every year.

  “Our tzaddik taught: you will not achieve salvation if you do not recognize yourself and your errors,” says the rabbi from Jerusalem, the leader of the Lelów Hasidim. “But remember, it is never too late to turn to God, blessed be His name.”

  “Here, there was no salvation, rabbi. Here, there was no room for any God,” invariably retorts the son of Josef, the Lelów glazier—Chaim Środa.

  Hamlet

  1

  Czajkowski, Andrzej, b. November 1, 1935, Warsaw, d. June 26, 1982, London, Pol. pianist and composer. Studied, inter alia, with L. Lévy, S. Szpinalski, and S. Aszkenazi (piano), K. Sikorski and N. Boulanger (comp.). 1955 eighth place in the Fifth International F. Chopin Competition in Warsaw; 1956 third place in the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels. From 1956 resided abroad. Gave concerts in many countries under the dir. of, inter alia, K. Böhm, P. Klecki, D. Mitropoulos, F. Reiner in repertoire ranging from Bach to music of the 20th c. Made many recordings for RCA Victor and Pathé Marconi. Compositions—seven sonnets and “Ariel” inspired by Shakespeare, for voice and piano, two string quartets, two piano concertos, a piano trio, the opera The Merchant of Venice.… (From Encyklopedia Muzyczna PWM, Warsaw, 1987.)

  2

  We don’t know each other.

  I saw you once, a long time ago, from a great distance. You were seated at the piano, in the Philharmonic, your right profile turned toward me.

  The people I used to write about I knew personally; I knew how they laughed, perspired, drummed their fingers, whom they emulated, and with whom they shared a drink. You, I have looked at in photographs. Once again you were seated at the piano, invariably displaying your right profile.

  Małgorzata B. found a photograph en face in the archives. It had been glued onto a card with these words inscribed on it: Department of Protective Services for Orphaned Children. A Mrs. Slosberg from the city of Kimberley in South Africa sent you, an orphaned child, parcels and money. In the first quarter, three thousand zlotys, in the second another three, in the third four and a half thousand. Not bad. An acquaintance of mine used to get that much for managing the literature department at the Czytelnik publishing house.

  You were eleven years old at the time.

  You had a part on the right side and big, serious eyes. A white collar was placed on your blue-black shirt, dark as soot, and a patterned handkerchief, batiste, it appears, had been tucked into your pocket.

  I know those postwar photos and postwar serious eyes. An acquaintance of mine who is also a writer says that eyes like that are not the privilege of Jewish boys. Little Greek boys have almost identical eyes. A man asks them about something in a language they have never heard. They look at the man with knowing eyes and lead him, unerringly, to a shop where they can put cars on a lift to work on them.

  A stupid comparison. Little Jewish boys with serious eyes indicate how to reach God, not a service station.

  It is time to explain why I am writing.

  Because of the case of Halina S. The woman with whom you want to have a son named Gaspard.

  She sent me a letter:

  “Andrzej appeared to me in a dream. He said, ‘Die already, die; I am bored here without you.’ I interpreted the word ‘here’ as interplanetary space. I imagined that the Spirit of Andrzej is circling there like an astronaut for whom there is no return to earth.

  “He appeared in my dreams for the last time before my heart attack. The doctor came every day and asked me, ‘Why are you getting weaker by the day?’ I scrawled my will on a sheet of graph paper. I left Andrzej’s letters and papers to you, Hania.

  “I felt I was doing exactly what he wanted. Because although he didn’t know you, you were close to him, closer perhaps than I. He read your Shielding the Flame.1 That was important; it was precisely because of that book that he didn’t destroy his notes.

  “Now the Spirit of Andrzej will appear to you and you will give it shelter.

  “Love,

  “H.”

  So:
/>   She left me your papers and your Spirit in her will.

  Could I refuse?

  Halina suspects that you are among us. She was talking about you when she suddenly turned pale and fell back onto the bed. The doctor ran an EKG and sent her to the hospital. I returned home. I was laid low with back pain.

  When both of us recovered, Halina asked me, “Do you remember what we were talking about when I passed out?”

  Naturally, I remembered. We were talking about your attempts at summoning a son named Gaspard to life.

  “That couldn’t possibly please him,” Halina exclaimed. “You mustn’t write about that.”

  Is that the truth? Do you intend to interfere with my writing? The hero’s spirit would be an even greater annoyance than a living hero?

  An acquaintance of mine, the editor of The Fortune Teller magazine, assured me that the spirit was all right, but the cause of the sicknesses was Scorpio, the zodiac sign. Five planets were within Scorpio’s reach at the same time. Because it is a sign of carnal love and of death, good energy, flowing toward us from the planets, was negated. That is the source of the many recent sicknesses and misfortunes, like the bursting of the hot water pipes, or flooded apartments. But the power of Scorpio is already coming to an end. On the twenty-third of November the planets will pass into the sign of Sagittarius and will send good energy.

  Andrzej.

  We are constructing little jokes here out of the stars, but, after all, you were born on the first of November.

  You are a Scorpio!

  The sign of death and carnal love!

  3

  One more thing, in connection with your presumed interference.

  David Ferré, a middle-aged bearded guy, an American engineer with General Motors and Boeing, and also a music critic, read about the skull in the newspapers. It was July 1982. The news was reported by the Associated Press: “André Tchaikowsky, the Polish-born pianist who died of cancer in Oxford, has willed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.”

  Some newspapers wrote that all your life you had dreamed of being an actor. Others, that you loved the theater and it bothered you when Hamlet held a plastic skull in his hands.

  David Ferré was touched by this news. He took leave from Boeing and flew to London to hear some music and to inquire about you. He rented a car at the airport. He looked for somewhere to stay; a rental agency recommended a house in Chelsea. He walked into the front room. A book was on the table: My Guardian Devil: The Letters of Andrzej Czajkowski and Halina Sander. The house in which he found himself belonged to two close friends of yours.

  Conversations about you took up six years of David Ferré’s life. He wrote a biographical sketch titled “The Other Tchaikowsky.” When he finished it he settled in a mountain village and took up carpentry.

  Thanks to him and a few other people I know a lot about you. I intend to tell you about this; you used to like stories about yourself. You would listen with interest, insisting that you don’t remember your own life.

  4

  Your grandmother, Celina S.

  She was born in the last century, in 1889. That is what is recorded in the registry of Jews who survived. She may have been older; when replacing destroyed documents women liked to make themselves younger.

  She had a daughter, Fela, and a son, Ignacy. Her husband, a doctor, came back from the First World War with syphilis. They divorced. Two admirers proposed marriage; she asked the children which one they preferred. They cried out, “Uncle Mikołaj,” because he brought better candies. She married Mikołaj, the owner of a law firm, but she lived with the other man.

  She was a brunette of medium height, with a short neck and light, impudent eyes. She played the harp, knew foreign languages, liked poker, and sought out strong men. She was one of the first beauticians in Poland. She founded her own school and a beauty-cream plant under French license. The firm was called Cédib. When the business starting going under, she sold half the shares to a doctor named Muszkatblat.

  Your mother, Fela.

  She was prettier and taller than Celina. She was her opposite: calm, pensive, lacking energy and strength. She graduated from the beauty school. She liked changing hair color. She played the piano fairly well and read a lot. She grew weary of that very quickly. She got married in Paris to a refugee from Germany, and gave birth to you a year later. She left her husband and fell in love with Albert. She was with him until the end. She died in Treblinka at the age of twenty-seven.

  Your father, Karl.

  He studied law in Lipsk, fled from Hitler to France. He worked in the fur business. He couldn’t stand either furs or business. He wanted to be a lawyer, but France did not recognize his German diploma. He suffered bouts of depression; he was treated with electric shocks, after which he developed Parkinson’s disease. It tormented him until the end of his life. He died in Paris. He saw you when you were twelve and when you were forty-five.

  5

  In a 1938–39 telephone book there is an S. Mikołaj, attorney, Przejazd 1, telephone 115 313. All of them lived there: Celina and her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law, her daughter, and you. They had affairs, played poker, danced the fox trot, liked lilies of the valley, sent snapshots from Ciechocinek—the men in white panama hats, the women in veils and with a swirl of hair falling over one eye. Prehistoric times. Some kind of Tertiary period, but with the useful discovery of photography.

  Przejazd 1 …

  In the same building lived a medical student, one J.S., who was in love with the singer Marysia Ajzensztadt. In the same building lived Helena, pale and morose, the queen of the ball in the Lwów Literary Casino, and her little daughter.

  Downstairs, in the Art café, Władysław Szlengel read his poems.

  Yes, the same building. Two stairwells, with an entrance on Leszno Street.

  6

  Celina S.’s partner, as I have said, was Dr. Muszkatblat.

  His original first name was Perec; after he converted, he became Bolesław. His wife managed the Cédib firm on Three Crosses Square. Their two children were looked after by “Panna Marynia.” With the savings she accumulated in the doctor’s household, M. purchased a modest apartment on Sienna Street. When the children entered school she completed a course of study in tailoring with Pani Wiśniewska—the most expensive course in Warsaw (it cost 200 zlotys, not counting chalk and the paper for patterns).

  The war broke out. (That was the end of prehistoric times—of harps, betrayals, the fox trot, and resorts.)

  Bolesław Muszkatblat, Celina S.’s partner, swallowed potassium cyanide. His son and daughter were in a camp. Ruta Muszkatblat decided to go over to the Aryan side. She made a mistake: it was a sunny day and she dressed in a warm overcoat. A szmalcownik, a blackmailer, brought her to the police station.

  “That will cost you four thousand,” said the policeman. “We’ll wait until 1:00 p.m.”

  Ruta M. asked them to notify Maria Ostrowska, “Panna Marynia,” the children’s nanny.

  Maria had one thousand at hand.

  It was 10:00 a.m.

  She ran to her wealthiest client, the owner of a dairy store on Pańska Street. She wasn’t there; she hadn’t returned from her summer home.

  She remembered a doctor, one of Dr. M.’s colleagues from medical school. He lived on Poznańska Street; it was the third or fourth house on the left if you approached it from Aleje Jerozolimskie.

  He opened the door.

  She said, “Pani Ruta is at the police station on Krochmalna. They want four thousand and I have one thousand …”

  “I have nothing in common with Jews!” the colleague from school days shouted, and slammed the door.

  She went to Anin to see an acquaintance who used to sew ball gowns before the war. It was almost twelve o’clock. She said, “I have one thousand …”

  Her acquaintance gave her a gold ring. She asked her to pawn it, keep the receipt, and redeem it after the war.

  There was no train back to Warsaw. There
was no time for pawning it. Maria ran with the ring to the police station.

  “You’re fifteen minutes too late,” said the policeman.

  7

  Celina’s husband, the one who brought the children the better candies, died. Tactfully, in his own bed, just in time. Celina S. buried him and left the ghetto with a group of laborers who worked outside the wall. One of her former pupils gave her Aryan papers; from then on she was Janina Czajkowska. Another pupil prepared a hiding place for her. She went back for her daughter and grandson, but Fela did not want to leave.

  “Just the two of you will manage to survive; as a threesome, we’ll all perish.”

  Celina tried insisting.

  “Save him,” Fela repeated. “I don’t have the strength; I’m going to die.”

  With her beautician’s skill, Celina S. applied hydrogen peroxide to the boy’s hair. She put a dress on him. She said goodbye to her daughter.

  “Mama will come back to you in a couple of days,” Fela promised.

  Celina S. led the blond “girl” to the gate on Leszno Street. She held the child’s hand firmly in one of her hands; with the other, she slipped the gendarme 50 zlotys. They crossed the street and set off in the direction of Theater Square.

  “Don’t look up,” she whispered.

  They were on the Aryan side.

  8

  You moved in with Panna Monika. There was a wardrobe in the main room. The apartment was on the ground floor; tenants passed by your door, neighbors looked in—the safest place was inside the wardrobe. A chamber pot was placed there. You found it by touch and learned to pee without making any noise. The clothing had been taken out; in the wardrobe were darkness, the chamber pot, and you.

  Every so often grandmother would visit you. You would come out of the wardrobe and Panna Monika would stand watch over the front door. Grandmother would give her money, after which she would take a bottle of hydrogen peroxide out of her bag and wet your hair where it was growing out dark. Next, she would set the liquid aside and take out a prayer book. She taught you prayers (she did not know them herself; she had to look at the book). At the end, she would drink tea and listen to the landlady’s complaints about the rising cost of living and the danger your presence exposed her to. Both the one and the other were true, so grandmother would reach into her wallet again. Finally, she said goodbye, promising that she would visit you soon. She kept her word. She kept coming—with money, prayers, and hydrogen peroxide. You didn’t ask her where she was living, where she was going, and where she got the money. You didn’t ask why you had to sit in the wardrobe—children didn’t ask stupid questions then.