The Woman from Hamburg Page 17

  You enjoyed telling your friends similar stories. Despite your dreams and agitation, you liked having a good time. You were “an inexhaustible source of jokes”; people grew accustomed to the quick-witted jester’s emploi, they idolized “your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar.” (These words are about Yorick, the king’s jester, but why should I bother mentioning this?—you knew all of Hamlet by heart.)

  It began to torment you. You complained that you were a monkey who has to put on a show. You confessed to a woman whom you met in South Africa, “On stage and in conversations I acted like an artist and like a clown.” (The woman in South Africa has to be, naturally, the daughter of Mrs. Slosberg, who sent you parcels and money after the war. Unfortunately, I don’t know her name. There will be no punch line.)

  19

  From Stefan Askenase, pianist, professor at the Brussels and Bonn conservatories, to David Ferré (recorded on tape):

  “I am old, I am almost ninety. I still play and give concerts. Rubinstein played until he was ninety-two.

  “I met Andrzej at the Chopin Competition; I was on the jury. He had a marvelous talent and an unusual personality. He became my student. He was not a student who consents to everything, oh no, but he accepted most of my advice. He became more of a friend than a student.

  “Will you drink a glass of sherry with me?

  “Have you ever heard Andrzej’s Inventions? I have a recording of it by the BBC. I also have his Piano Concerto. Radu Lupu performed it in London; it’s very lovely.

  “A couple of months before his death Andrzej conducted a master class in Mainz. He visited us in Bonn. We spent the whole day together; he took the last train back to Mainz. He didn’t feel well in the train; he was in terrible pain. He was operated on the next day.… He had bank loans to pay and immediately after the operation he had to perform. He wept into the phone, saying that he would lose his home if he didn’t pay off his debts. He played splendidly, but he got sick again.… They took him back to England.

  “I have the recordings upstairs; please come with me. Oh, here’s the Inventions.

  “We forgot to take the sherry! Would you go back and get our glasses?

  “Someone asked Rubinstein why Czajkowski didn’t have a great career. ‘Because he didn’t work at it,’ Rubinstein said. That book of Rubinstein’s is good, only there’s too much caviar, champagne and crabs in it, and there’s not a word about Andrzej. Andrzej once played Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata for Rubinstein seven times in a row. Rubinstein was impressed only by those pieces that he himself had not played.

  “Would you believe that I was personally acquainted with Alban Berg? A charming, exquisite man. He fell in love with my first wife. She was very young and very beautiful. When she went to have her hair done before the premiere of Wozzeck in Brussels in 1932, Berg waited a whole hour for her. She wrote him a letter afterward: ‘Listening to Wozzeck I knew which parts you composed when Schönberg was in Vienna, and which you composed during his absence.’ That’s what she wrote to him; that wife of mine was not shy. He answered her that she had touched upon a matter that was the burden of his life.… He was not better than Schönberg, no, but he was different. My friend played his wonderful violin concerto, with Paul Klecki; Klecki was the conductor in Dallas then, but he left a year later. I asked him why. He said that it’s impossible to live in a city without sidewalks. In Dallas there wasn’t a single sidewalk because everyone rode in cars.

  “The greatest composer of the century was Bartók. Naturally, there was also Stravinsky, and others as well, but Bartók is Bartók.

  “I heard Andrzej play several of his Inventions in Lisbon. I told him that they were as good as Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives. I once heard Prokofiev himself play them.

  “I’ll play the Inventions for you.

  “Wonderful. It’s true; not since Bartók has anyone written such a beautiful piece for the piano.

  “I’ll put on his Shakespeare Sonnets for you. They’re beautiful, though a trifle monotonous.

  “And what about The Merchant of Venice? He said that he tried to interest the English Opera in it, but they didn’t want it.”

  And so forth.

  I read this with genuine envy.

  I wish that you could have spun similar stories at age ninety: a young and beautiful wife, music, a glass of sherry. This is exactly how an elderly artist ought to natter away on a pleasant afternoon.

  20

  From your diaries:

  Jerusalem, 3 December 1980

  “I’ve just woken up from a dream in which … I had been handling buried radioactive material. As a result, the skin on my hands was already peeling and I was showing them to the woman concerned (whom I cannot identify).… For once I think I can explain the dream. The buried dangerous stuff is my Ghetto past; for the past two weeks I have been delving in it, with increasing horror and revulsion; I’ve made myself read the Ringelblum Ghetto archives, which appalled me, and Wojdowski’s novel on the subject, which I cannot bring myself to continue. I now realize how little I knew, how sheltered I had really been. And how egocentric.”

  Cumnor, 14 January 1981

  “Only now am I experiencing … some shadowy sense of kinship with the dead—all of them, not only my mother. They seem that much less dead to me, and I less alive. And now that I see myself as one of them, my fate strikes me as incredibly lucky, almost indecently so, as if I had stolen my survival.”

  Caracas, 11 February 1981

  “(I heard in a dream) a middle-aged German voice (perhaps that of the amiable old German whose daughter let me practise on her piano, and who can be seen both around the house and on a photograph standing on the same piano):

  “ ‘Du, da war noch etwas!’

  “And suddenly, in that split-second before the shock woke me up, I was about to see, I actually caught the first glimpse of what the German had seen …: the ovens, the lot.

  “I am afraid.

  “My first reaction to the dream was to jump out of my bed, drop on my knees and pray to God to preserve my soul.…

  “I am playing the K.488 here on Sunday, with the first rehearsal tomorrow, so now is just the time to take Valium.…

  “… But I am frightened of the 5-day holiday in Miami on the way back. What will befall me there at night, alone with my subconscious in an hotel room? …

  “BOŻE, BĄDŹ WOLA TWOJA. [LORD, THY WILL BE DONE.]

  “I’m afraid.”

  16 February 1981

  “The K.488 went very well yesterday! I love the work and it shows. Somehow the sustained peacefulness of the first movement lends its calm to my own attitude … so that I can attend to each detail without haste or panic. I see it as a Madonna, with the Andante as a Pietà.…”

  21

  “I hereby bequeath my body, or any part thereof, to be used for medical purposes in conformity with the regulations of the Law on Human Tissue, and request that the Institution which receives my body should have it cremated afterward, with the exception of my skull, which the Institution is to donate to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performances.

  “Signed by the testator in our presence, and then by us in his presence …”

  You signed it as A. Czajkowski. For the first time since Hurok.

  22

  Would you like to know how IT is done?

  The head is cut off and macerated.

  “Macerate” is a professional term used in anatomy. In the nineteenth century the job was entrusted to ants, which are the best at this work. The head was placed in an ants’ nest and a week later in the springtime, or four days later in the summer (in the summer ants are more industrious), a skull was removed, clean as clean can be.

  Nowadays, after soft tissue like the eyes and lips are removed, the head is heated in a pot of water to no higher than forty degrees Celsius. In order to avoid damaging the delicate bones, among which the most delicate is the lachrymal bone, the
head must not be boiled. The lachrymal bone is located near the inner corner of the eye and contains a narrow groove through which the tears flow. Gasoline is used to remove the fat from the bones. Since the synovial capsules and ligaments are destroyed, the jaw is connected to the rest of the skull with fine wire.

  That is how it is done in Poland. In the modern world, electric vessels are used. The Warsaw Institute of Legal Anatomy has just received a brochure from a Swiss firm. They are offering a macerator made of nickel-chromium-molybdenum steel, with a two-year guarantee, for one hundred thousand francs. The Institute of Anatomy can’t afford that, so you were fortunate that you arranged the matter in England.

  Your skull was offered to the Shakespeare theater. First they kept it in the sun so that it would dry out thoroughly and be nicely bleached, and then they performed Hamlet with it. After a couple of performances it turned out to be fragile, so they placed it in a carton and put it away in the props warehouse. But before that, they photographed it. Hamlet was holding your skull with both hands, looking into its empty eye sockets. As everyone knows, he was thinking about Yorick, the king’s jester, his gibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment.

  The photograph was enlarged and made into posters.

  Do you know that the inmates in a Polish prison wrote and staged a Hamlet—in prison argot?

  The actor addressed the skull with this monologue:

  I’ve got a question to put to you, corpse:

  Should one keep dragging on or drop into the grave?

  In short, I have a fear

  that instead of politely smelling the roses

  this harmful soul of mine

  is going to start spilling its sins …

  You like it, right?

  I can see you laughing joyously at the thought of your skull in the hands of a criminal who is serving a fifteen-year sentence. You should have left it to the Division of Prisons in Opole instead of the theater in Stratford.

  “Nobody loved that Hamlet, and the dude didn’t care about nothing else,” the recidivist actor in Opole explained to his fellow prisoners. The perceptiveness and simplicity of this ought to impress you.

  The green-eyed pianist said that in the matter of the skull you were being completely yourself: inventive, audacious, filled with art, and yearning to live on in art.

  He assumed that you had thought this all up in your youth.

  In old age a man begins to think about what comes AFTER and, just in case, prefers to be buried with everything accounted for.

  Your body “or any of its parts” was not used for transplants because it was diseased.

  Your London girlfriend kept the urn with your ashes in her house for a couple of years.

  A while ago she took it to the riverside meadow where your best thoughts used to come to you.

  It was a sunny, windy day.

  She opened the lid of the urn and waited for the wind to carry off its contents.

  23

  English became your language. Except for your letters to Halina S., you wrote everything in English. Even your childhood memories, in which your grandmother, Aunt Dorota, your mother, and you appear—you all speak English. Even your diaries.

  With the exception of four words in Caracas, written in Polish in block letters in the middle of the page:

  BOŻE, BĄDŹ WOLA TWOJA. LORD, THY WILL BE DONE.

  You told your psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, in English, about the wardrobe and the Aryan side.

  I cannot believe that they understood.

  You were walking around with an undiagnosed illness. It is called “survivor’s syndrome.” In Toronto I witnessed an attempt at curing it—group psychotherapy for a couple of people your age. It was based on narration without an ending, so one woman told about her little brother whom she “had not kept an eye on” in Auschwitz, and the other told about the wardrobe she had tried to enter in the presence of strangers. They had been telling these stories for thirty years, always with terror and weeping.

  A year ago the sickness claimed Bogdan Wojdowski, whose book, Bread for the Departed, you were reading in Jerusalem. His wife opened the door to his room in order to call him to dinner, and saw him hanging from the window frame. “We both survived, but not completely,” Henryk Grynberg wrote after his death. “… we paid a price for our survival—a very high price. So high that sooner or later our resources are exhausted.”4

  24

  You also wrote down your conversation with your mother in English.

  Apparently, a Polish original existed. It came into being shortly after the war, the day before Mother’s Day. Your school assignment was to write an appropriate poem. You had no ideas. Your grandmother was sitting near you, knitting.

  She said, “It’s simple. Begin with ‘Mother, where are you? Why aren’t you here?’ ”

  You began, “Mother, where are you? …”

  You wrote the rest at one go, not lifting your pen from the notebook.

  No one knows what happened to the original. I know the version re-created by you, a grown man, thirty years later.

  I was afraid to translate it into Polish. I asked Piotr Sommer, a poet and translator of English poetry into Polish, to help me. I wanted to soften the terrible, obscene words, but he wouldn’t agree. This is what you screamed at her, and that’s how it should remain; these are your words.

  This is what you screamed …

  Even had I not known what you wanted done with your skull, I would have thought that it was a cry of Hamlet’s.

  Hamlet screams at Gertrude—a son crazed with jealousy and yearning.

  Hamlet after Treblinka …

  “Mother, where are you?”

  You wrote the rest in a single breath, without lifting your pen from your notebook.

  You knew why she wasn’t with you. She had stayed in the ghetto. She had stayed with Albert, her beloved. She preferred to die with him than to survive with you, her son. The poem was a conversation with your mother, so you allowed her to explain herself. “Darling,” she said to you, “it was easier to hide a child than a grown woman. I wanted you to be saved.…” You started screaming at her. You didn’t need her sacrifice. You needed her! You had as much right to death as she had. She deceived you. (“And you lied to me like a slut,” you screamed.) You knew, you knew it instantly, that she was lying. She said, “Mummy will be with you in a few days.” You knew that she was lying! She begged you to stop screaming. To stop yearning. Your yearning hurts you and it doesn’t help her. You exploded in a burst of fury:

  Miss you?

  You fucking sentimental cunt.…

  Did you have a nice honeymoon?

  You must have looked a picture, dying in each other’s arms.

  She tried to calm you down: “Men and women died in separate chambers.” She assumed that you knew very little about Treblinka. She was mistaken. You knew a great deal! You knew that sometimes the flow of gas was weak, and it took many hours for people to die. You hoped that there had been enough gas for her.

  Answer me this.

  I am sorry for all I’ve said. But just answer this!

  That’s how you talked with your mother.

  That’s how you screamed!

  I think that you were talking with her and screaming throughout your entire life.

  Even if she didn’t know the arrangements you’d made for your skull, she still would have thought that this was Hamlet’s scream.

  Hamlet screams at Gertrude—mad with jealousy and a son’s yearning.

  Hamlet after Treblinka.

  1. See note.

  2. Janowska, Anita, ed. Mój diabet stróż. Listy Andrzeja Czajkowskiego i Haliny Sander (Warsaw: PIW, 1988).

  3. There is more information about Halina S. in Anita Janowska’s book, Krzyżówka [Crossword Puzzle] (Wrocław: Siódmioróg, 1996).

  4. Grynberg, Henryk, “Bogdan Wojdowski, My Brother.” In Bread for the Departed, trans. Madeline G. Levine. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1997, p. vii.

  The Decision

  1

  I spent a day with Peter Schok. I didn’t like him. This was in Amsterdam; Benjamin G., a translator of Polish literature and a theater director, introduced us. He loved Peter Schok. He said that he had a beautiful, melodious voice. He said that all of him was beautiful, that he was covered with soft, raven-black hair. “Tender violence,” Benjamin G. called it in English—a combination of tenderness, masculinity, and strength. This was embarrassing for me, because I liked the previous boy with whom Benjamin G. was still living even though he no longer loved him. I especially liked his photographs. He was particularly fond of photographing interiors without people, with a couple of simple objects: a flower in a vase, peeling paint on a door frame, threadbare tapestry. These things, as is often the case with details, were a metaphor for the eternal questions; they symbolized loneliness and transience.

  Peter Schok turned out to be short, pale, and uncommunicative. Everything he wore was black and made of leather. We went out for a walk. He was a Jew, so first he took me to the Portuguese synagogue. He assured me in his melodious voice that it was modeled on the Temple of Solomon and rivaled it in beauty. He came to life in the Jewish museum. He had recently quit his job at a hotel reception desk and accepted a position as a masseur in a sauna, but he looked intently at the portraits of diamond cutters, physicians, publishers, thinkers, and bankers, their wives and children, their rings, tiaras, and strings of pearls, with the pride of someone who was an heir to all of this.

  We walked along the canals, which Peter Schok liked; we stopped talking and it became more enjoyable. We drank his favorite wine and ate Indonesian pancakes with seaweed sauce. In the evening he escorted me back to Benjamin G.’s house and said goodbye. He didn’t come inside; he didn’t want to upset the boy with whom Benjamin G. was still living although he had stopped loving him.