The Woman from Hamburg Read online

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “How could I know all that?”

  “Look in the dictionary,” her husband advised her.

  8

  Twenty-two years after their first conversation, The Woman from Hamburg invited Helusia to visit her for a couple of days. She showed her old photographs. She played Chopin mazurkas for her on the piano. (“The war interrupted my studies in the conservatory,” she said with a sigh.) She recited Tuwim. She talked about men. She had had two husbands after the war who adored her. She hadn’t had children.

  “And what is your husband like?” she asked.

  Helusia confessed that her second marriage was falling apart.

  “It’s because he bought several hotels. He doesn’t come home at night. He said that I should make a new life for myself.”

  She spoke to her not as to “The Woman from Hamburg” but as to her own mother, and The Woman from Hamburg panicked.

  “Don’t count on me. Everyone has to survive on his own. One has to be able to survive. I was able to, and you must be able to.”

  “You survived thanks to my parents,” Helusia reminded her.

  “Thanks to your mother,” The Woman from Hamburg corrected her. “That’s the truth; thanks to her alone. All she had to do was open the door and walk a couple of meters. The police station was across the street. It’s extraordinary that she didn’t open the door. I was amazed that she didn’t do it. Did she ever say anything about me?”

  “She said that if it weren’t for you …”

  “I had to.

  “I wanted to live.”

  The Woman from Hamburg began to tremble. She repeated, louder and louder, faster and faster, the same sentences:

  “I was afraid.

  “I had to.

  “I wanted to.

  “Don’t come here.”

  9

  What do you really want?” the lawyer she consulted after her return from Hamburg asked. “Do you want her love or her estate? If it’s about love, my office doesn’t deal with that. If it’s about her estate, the matter is no less difficult. First of all, we have to prove that she is your mother. Do you have witnesses? No? Well then, you see. The testimony of Mrs. Barbara S. should have been recorded. It should have been notarized. Now all that remains is a blood test. Are you determined to sue? So why did you come to a lawyer’s office?”

  10

  “Then which woman’s are you, really? And who are you?” her son asked her.

  “I am your mother,” she said, although, for effect, she ought to say, “I am the one who survived.”

  But people respond that way only in modern American novels.

  Phantom Pain

  1

  Axel von dem B. can trace his ancestry back to Countess Cosel. It is not entirely clear who fathered her child. According to one version, it was August II the Strong, a Polish king and elector of Saxony. According to another version, it was a Polish Jew, a rabbi who, involved in a conflict with other rabbis, left the country and settled in Germany.

  Both versions—the king and the rabbi—have been kept alive in the family of Axel von dem B. for two hundred and twenty-five years.

  2

  She had luxuriant, raven-black tresses; large eyes that were extraordinarily expressive; skin as white as marble, and a small mouth. That is how Anna Cosel was depicted by memoirists and painters, and by the novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski.

  August swore to her that she would be queen. He broke his promise, abandoned her a few years later, and ordered that she be imprisoned. Her place of exile was the Stolpen castle. She lived in the castle’s tower and remained there (voluntarily, in later years) until her dying day.

  The imprisoned countess’s favorite reading was Hebrew books. Or so Kraszewski wrote. She surrounded herself with Jews. The rabbinical works were translated for her by her pastor, a scholar of Oriental languages. She paid him generously. At first, she sent him the money through a discreet emissary; later, they would meet and conduct lengthy discussions about the Talmud and the Jewish religion. The pastor’s wife put an end to these conversations; she was jealous of the countess, who was still beautiful despite her sixty years.

  3

  Who was Anna Cosel’s Jewish lover?

  (He definitely existed. How else can one explain this peculiar fascination—with Jews, with their religion? He was a fascinating man, that’s obvious.)

  So: a rabbi—Poland—a conflict with other rabbis—departure for Germany …

  Jonatan Eibeszic?

  He was born in Kraków. He was a sage. He was invited to Hamburg to rein in the angel of death, because women were dying in childbirth. He handed out cards to women inscribed with a strange prayer, with mysterious symbols. He was accused of believing in a false messiah. He appealed to the rabbis in Poland. The Diet of the Four Lands rejected the accusation. Despite the Synod’s verdict, many Polish rabbis, including Mojżesz Osterer, the great rabbi of Dubno, pronounced anathema on Jonatan E. and his science.

  Salomon Dubno?

  He was born in Dubno, from which he drew his surname; he died in Amsterdam. He was married off when he was fourteen years old. He studied in Lwów and in Berlin. He became a tutor for the son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and theologian (whom many consider the greatest figure of the German Enlightenment after Lessing). Salomon D. persuaded the philosopher to undertake a new translation of the Pentateuch into German. He himself wrote a commentary on the Book of Genesis. When he was in the middle of writing his commentary on the Book of Exodus, Naftali Herc, the grand rabbi of Dubno, came through Berlin. He criticized the friends his fellow countryman was associating with and ordered him to change his milieu. Salomon D. left Berlin without completing his work and set off for Amsterdam.

  Jakub Kranc?

  He was born in the Wilno region. He was a magid, an itinerant preacher. True, he did not quarrel with the rabbis, but nevertheless he left for Germany in order to study and debate with the scholars there. He quit Germany for Dubno. Here he was paid six zlotys a week; later, he was paid two more zlotys and his stove was repaired.

  (The Magid of Dubno was asked: “Why is it that a rich man is more willing to give alms to the poor who are blind and lame than to poor sages?” He replied: “Because the rich man has no assurance that he himself will not become lame or go blind, but he knows for certain that he will never be a sage.”)

  In portraits, all three men have white beards, sad eyes, and a distracted look. Perhaps this is because they had been unwilling to raise their eyes from their open books. But the countess might have met them earlier, when they had black beards and a twinkle in their eyes.

  She did not meet either the Magid of Dubno or Salomon Dubno. The former was born shortly before her death, and the latter after she died. But Jonatan Eibeszic was twenty-six years old when she was sent to the tower.

  So, could it have been Jonatan? Who, other than he, accused and anathematized, would have dared undertake such a romance? And with a shiksa! With the King’s discarded favorite.

  There is another possibility. Contrary to Axel von dem B.’s family tradition, it was not a rabbi who was their forebear.

  It was a merchant. Let’s say it was Herszel Izaak. He lived in Dubno and was a fur merchant. He frequented the Leipzig trade fairs. He traveled in the company of his servant, Michał Szmuel. We know nothing else about him, but Dr. Ruta Sakowska, who has translated Yiddish texts for me and helped me discover Countess Cosel’s Jewish lover, believes that he was married off when he turned fifteen and that his wife bore him numerous children, became fat, and wore a wig. Should one be surprised, then, that he lost his head over an elegant, beautiful lady? He was handsome, that is clear: blue eyes (they must have looked charming with his black curly hair), a broad smile, dazzlingly white teeth, and a sable fur coat. It is not unlikely that he presented the countess with some sable pelts as well. (Hasn’t Dr. Sakowska confused Herszel Izaak with Dmitri Karamazov?)

  Well then, the Dubno merchan
t traveled to Leipzig in Saxony and, as we know from Kraszewski, Jewish merchants were frequent guests in the Saxon castle of Stolpen. They brought goods, newspapers, books; once, they even attempted to help the countess escape from the tower. She succeeded in descending a rope ladder, but the castle guard caught her before she was able to get away.

  This happened, this escape attempt supported by Jews, in 1728. This is what Józef Ignacy Kraszewski wrote in his novel, Countess Cosel.

  And in that same year of 1728 the merchant Herszel Izaak came from Dubno to the Leipzig Fair. That is what is written down in the history of the city, in the memorial book, Sefer Zikaron, published in Tel Aviv. So, could it have been he, Herszel Izaak, with his inseparable servant Michał Szmuel, who organized the headlong escape down a rope ladder?

  It doesn’t really matter if it was a merchant or a rabbi. What is important is that Axel von dem B. must come from Dubno. Since the Great Scriptwriter arranges and intertwines all these mysterious threads, he knows their future endings, too. For Dubno and for Axel von dem B. as well. So He could not have neglected to provide a common prologue for their eventual common history.

  4

  Dubno is located in Volhynia, one hundred and ninety meters above sea level, on the Ikwa River, which flows into the Styr. “It looks beautiful from a distance, situated on a hill surrounded by the Ikwa marshes,” an old guidebook says. It was a Polish-Jewish town from the beginning. Poles and Jews had to be equally concerned about the condition of the bridges and roads. Jews could bathe in the city bath house on Thursdays and Fridays, and Christians on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Jewish shops had to be closed on important Christian holy days, but on less important ones they could be open for the poor and for travelers. In 1716 two women were put on trial in Dubno—a young unmarried woman and a widow accused of having converted to the Jewish faith. The young woman was brought before the court straight from her wedding ceremony, along with her Jewish fiancé, the rabbi, and the clerk who wrote out the marriage contract. After sixty blows, the young woman still professed the Jewish religion; after forty more, she returned to Christianity. Both women were sentenced to be burned to death, and the Jews were sentenced to be flogged and to pay a fine in the form of wax for candles for the monasteries, churches, and castle. In 1794 a synagogue was built in Dubno. The lord of the town, Michał Lubomirski, contributed bricks, lime, sand, and his peasant serfs’ labor for its construction. During the celebration of the laying of the foundation stone he drank vodka and ate honey cakes with the Jews, after which he expressed the formal wish: “May you pray successfully to the God who created heaven and earth, and in whose hands rests every living being.”

  Dubno belonged to the Lubomirskis for five generations. Michał, the Lubomirski who helped build the synagogue, was a general and a Mason, and he played the violin. He founded a Masonic lodge in Dubno—the Lodge of the Perfect Mystery of the East. Every year during the annual trade fair he hosted sumptuous balls attended by up to three hundred people a day. Józef, his son, was a card player and a miser. (“He made not a single repair in Dubno because of his miserliness,” wrote a chronicler.) Marceli, his grandson, also played cards, but he always lost. Abandoning his home, he went abroad with a French actress. He befriended the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, participants in the Hungarian uprising, and French socialists. His discarded wife warned the Russian tsar about a coup attempt that she learned about in a dream. His out-of-wedlock son became an actor in the Paris Odeon. The last owner of Dubno was Józef Lubomirski. He played cards just as passionately as his father and grandfather. He fell into debt. He married a millionairess who was ten years older than him, the widow of a perfume factory owner whom he met through a marriage bureau. Thanks to his marriage he stopped having a dream that had tormented him for thirty years—a dream in which he could not escape from a hotel room because he had no money to pay his bill. He died without issue in 1911. Before he died, he sold Dubno to a Russian princess.

  During the two decades between the world wars, Dubno was the provincial capital of Volhynia. It had a population of twelve thousand, the majority of whom were Jews.

  5

  Axel von dem B. was born on Easter Sunday of 1919. His family home stood on the northern slopes of the Hartz mountains. It had two stories and two wings, and was surrounded by a garden; one hundred meters from the front entrance flowed the Bode River. The locals called it a castle. The family called it a house. They abandoned it in two hours in November 1945, taking only hand luggage. He returned to it for the first time with his daughter and grandsons right before the reunification of Germany. The castle was used as a school of Marxism-Leninism. The director wanted to call the police, because they had driven into the garden through a gate that was actually no longer there. During their second visit, after reunification, the police were not called and they were allowed to go inside.

  “Do you still teach Marxism-Leninism?” they asked the director.

  “We’ve switched to English-language classes,” the director replied. “But do you know what, Baron? When you’ve gotten everything back, I’ll be glad to lease it from you and convert it into a hotel. What do you say to that?”

  His father had managed the estate and studied Far Eastern cultures. He had traveled to Japan and China, and was also interested in the history of civilization. They had had an old gardener, young maids, a faithful valet, a timid governess—all as befits a castle.

  Axel von dem B.’s favorite memory was of his governess’s conversations with the old valet. Every morning, punctually at eight o’clock, they met on the stairs; the governess was going up to the children, and the valet was going downstairs to Axel’s father. The valet was not accustomed to being the first to greet a young lady, so they would pass each other without a word, after which he would stop, turn his head, and say, “Miss Kuntze. Did you say good morning to me, or did you only think that you ought to say it?” This dialogue was repeated day after day, punctually at eight o’clock, for eight or ten years.

  Later, Axel and his brother went away to gymnasium. Still later, they went to Potsdam to join the army. And then the Second World War erupted, 1939 to 1945.

  6

  “A corner of Dubno, four synagogues, Friday evening, Jewish men and women by the ruined stones—all fixed in memory. Then evening, herring, I’m sad …,” wrote Isaac Babel, who was in Dubno in 1920 with Budenny’s army. “… pasture, plowed fields, the setting sun. The synagogues are ancient buildings, squat, green and blue.”1

  There were a lot of trees, especially near the Ikwa. People went down to the river for evening strolls. In the summer they went for boat rides outside the city. In the winter ice was chopped out of the river; it lasted until autumn. All year round, water was drawn from the river and carried through the town in horse-drawn water carts. Gas lamps were lit at dusk. On market days dust and the smell of horse droppings filled the air.

  The scribe Josł had the loveliest penmanship in Jewish Dubno. Young Pinhasowicz wasn’t bad either, but Josł was more popular and people brought petitions only to him.

  Doctor Abram Grincwajg (“electric-light healing”), who had come straight from Vienna, received patients on Cisowski Street, telephone number 30.

  Photographer R. Cukier’s business was called “Decadence.”

  Lejb Silsker had a horse and wagon. He drove to the railroad station, delivered and brought back the mail.

  Knives were sharpened by Reb Mejer. He specialized in butcher knives for ritual slaughtering.

  The cantor in the great synagogue was Ruben Cypring. He sang beautifully, and also played the clarinet in a wedding band. Eli Striner played the violin, and Mendek Kaczka, formerly a soloist in the Łuck military band in the tsarist army, played the trumpet. Mendek Kaczka’s piety was so great that during the four years he served in the army he didn’t touch any cooked food, because it wasn’t kosher. The Dubno band played throughout the entire region at Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian weddings.

  The amateur theater presen
ted Goldfaden’s play about Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish uprising against the Romans. Bar Kochba was played by Wolff, the fiancé of Miss Brandla, a seamstress. He was handsome and had a pleasant baritone. The father of Dina, his beloved, was Lajzer, the proprietor of a metal workshop near the well.

  Dubno was known for its excellent matzoh, which was thin and exceptionally crisp. In December, right after Hanukkah, they began baking matzoh for sale. Only in the spring, after Purim, did they start baking the matzoh for their own use.

  The great merchants traded in hops and timber; hops were sold to Austria, and pine, oak, and fir to Germany.

  There were many poor people. Every Friday money was collected for them so that they would not be without fish and challah for the Sabbath.

  “A quiet evening in the synagogue, that always has an irresistible effect on me, four synagogues in a row,” wrote Babel. “There are no adornments in the building, everything is white and plain to the point of asceticism, everything is fleshless, bloodless, to a grotesque degree, you have to have the soul of a Jew to sense what it means.… Can it be that ours is the century in which they perish?”2

  7

  Axel von dem B. crossed the border into Poland on the first day of the war, right behind General Guderian’s tanks. On the second day, his friend Heinrich died. That was in Bory Tucholskie. The sun had already set, it was growing dark, and in the darkness he caught sight of the soldiers from Heinrich’s platoon running away. They shouted, “The lieutenant’s been killed!” and kept on running. The Poles were firing from above, tied by their belts to the crowns of trees. It was not pleasant. They spent the night in the woods.