The Woman from Hamburg Read online

So, he will be judged on how he lived: how he offended his wife, shoved a dog off his lap, and denied his home to a man from the underground.

  And he will be judged on his mission, his writing.

  Under one condition, naturally.

  That God not guffaw at the sight of him and cry out, “Writing? But that’s a joke! It was only a joke that you treated seriously. Well, well, don’t be angry. I did it out of pity. So you could live. You don’t think, do you, that you would have known how to live your life without writing?”

  The Back of the Eye

  1

  The village is situated in a bowl. A local artist produced picture postcards depicting an unchanging, unblemished panorama. The dark green of forested hillsides, the brighter expanse of a meadow, the red of sloping rooftops above white houses, and across the center a strip of bright blue, the Murg River. The river rises in the nearby mountains and flows into the Rhine. The mountains are part of the Schwarzwald massif.

  On one of the postcards the artist photographed a bench. Constructed of four boards and painted red, it stands to the side, beneath a tree.

  The boards were probably from the local sawmill. They look old. It is not impossible that they were cut from trunks that were taken to the sawmill by French soldiers.

  They brought them there after the war. No sooner had they occupied the village than they started trucking timber down from the forest. (What did the French liberators need those boards for? Tables? Coffins? A bridge? A dance floor?)

  Stanisław W., called Stani by both the French and the Germans, arrived in the village shortly after he was liberated from the concentration camp. He worked in the sawmill. It may well be that it was he who sawed the boards from which the red-painted bench was constructed.

  2

  The French soldiers and their captain lived in a small house in the center of the village. They took their meals in the former café. Gizela worked upstairs from the café. She worked for a family. She had excellent qualifications. The convent school of the Franciscan Sisters provided a comprehensive education for future maids: sewing, cooking, infant care, cake-baking (the local specialty was the famous Black Forest chocolate cake, a unique composition of sponge cake, cherries, cherry liqueur, chocolate, and cream), and impeccable manners. How to sit down on the edge of a chair in the presence of a count; how, listening to the countess’s orders, to bow one’s head … The graduates had no trouble finding positions in the best families, and, as the world war came to an end, the best families fled ahead of the advancing front, taking their servant girls with them.

  Gizela worked for a family that had escaped from Düsseldorf. The family lived on the second floor; the former café, occupied by the French, was on the ground floor, and Stani frequented that café.

  Stani was tall and diffident, and he danced the foxtrot better than anyone in the entire village. The first time Stani and Gizela went to a dance, it turned out that the best dancer among the women was a refugee from Prussia. It is quite likely that the refugee from Prussia was in love with Stani, but she had three children and was waiting for her husband who had not yet returned from the eastern front. Most certainly, it was not a matter of any importance.

  Stani and Gizela moved into one of the white houses with a red, sloping roof. It can be seen on a postcard. On the same postcard one can see the spire of the church that Stani used to go to with his Polish prayer book, the flat roof of the laundry where Gizela worked, and also a tourist hotel. The tourists were not rich. Wealthy people traveled to nearby Switzerland; the village’s guests were the exhausted inhabitants of the Ruhr Valley. Dressed in shorts and hand-knit woolen knee socks, they strolled conscientiously through the neighboring forests and inhaled deeply. They loved these forests—praise be to God. Thanks to them, Gizela had work all year round.

  Stani didn’t want to go back to Poland. His mother was no longer alive and he was under the impression that he would not like the communists. He also didn’t want to remain in Germany. They planned on going to Australia, but every time they were packed up and ready to leave they had to unpack their suitcases in a hurry, because Gizela was pregnant again. They stayed in the village—praise be to God. What would she have done in a foreign country with four children and without Stani?

  3

  Stani was neat, hard-working, and didn’t like to talk. He didn’t talk about the war or about Poland, but sometimes he asked questions.

  “Did you know that there were concentration camps?” he asked Gizela.

  “No, I didn’t know,” she answered.

  “What about your father?”

  She answered, “Mama didn’t allow him to discuss such things.”

  Shortly before the end of the war she had seen people in striped clothing in Düsseldorf. They were getting out of a truck; they were terrifyingly skinny, and passersby threw them packs of cigarettes that they concealed under their clothing with trembling hands. Two men in black uniforms came running over, with whips and shouts. The passersby scurried away. She was shocked. She hadn’t imagined that a man could be so skinny.

  She described that scene for Stani: “I thought they were from a normal prison. How could I have known they were from a concentration camp?”

  “It’s good,” Stani replied, “it’s good that you didn’t know.”

  She asked him, “What exactly ought I to know?” “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? If you think I ought to know something, why don’t you tell me?”

  She didn’t understand it. Stefan, their son, didn’t either. When Stefan grew up, he asked her, as Stani once had asked, “Did you know there were concentration camps? And what about your father?”

  Stani told her about two incidents—how they’d had to run around the barracks, barefoot, in the snow, in the frost; and how they used to count off during a roll call: One—two—THREE—four—five—SIX—seven—eight—NINE. The prisoners who were numbers three, six, and nine stepped out of the ranks and the count began again: One—two—THREE—four—five—SIX. When it was over, the threes, sixes, and nines left the camp and the rest of the prisoners went off to work.

  People said that the threes, sixes, and nines were working in a village, for a Bauer. Stani envied them. He dreamt about the lighter work and country food and prayed that the count of three, six, or nine would fall on him at the next roll call. His prayer was not heeded. After the war he learned that the threes, sixes, and nines had not gone to a Bauer; they’d been shot.

  She told Stefan about this when he grew up, but her son was angry at Stani: “He could have fought. Why didn’t they defend themselves?”

  One day Stefan said, “Mama, I think I finally understand him.”

  This was many years after Stani’s death. She was talking with Stefan through a thick, bullet-proof glass panel. The glass divided the cell in two; it was set into large, steel frames on top, bottom, and sides. There were slots in the two side frames. Sound passed through them muffled and dull, and in addition the glass in the pane sometimes behaved like a mirror. At those moments, instead of seeing the person on the other side, one saw one’s own reflection. It was to this pane of glass, to himself reflected in the glass, that Stefan said in a muffled, unintelligible voice, “Mama, I think I finally understand him.”

  “What do you understand?” she shouted at the glass.

  “Him. I’ve been reading …”

  “What?” she repeated several times, but she could not make out his answer.

  The guard signaled that the visit was over.

  4

  Before the war, Stanisław W., his siblings, and parents had lived in Łódź. His father was a weaver. They’d rented a room in a garret; it was narrow, long, with a tiny window and a sloping mansard wall. In it were beds for seven people, and when the grandparents were still alive, for nine. In addition to the beds there was an iron stove with a stovepipe, a basin for washing and two buckets, one for clean water and the other for waste. On the floor under one bed, potatoes were sto
red. On the floor under another bed, they stored coal. There must have been some chairs, at least one, because during the war, when his mother came home from smuggling, all frozen and wet, his father would seat her on that chair, wrap her in a blanket, and place a tin basin with burning alcohol by her feet. The children would gather round and look at the flickering blue flame, while their mother thawed out.

  Stanisław W.’s younger brother remembered the apartment. After the war he moved to a small town in the western territories. He worked in a uranium mine. It was shut down a couple of years later. While it still existed the town was a secret military zone; outsiders were not permitted to enter, and soldiers checked the documents of passengers arriving on intercity buses. The brother’s wife worked in a carpet factory. The carpets are still nice-looking, but production is declining and they’re beginning to lay off workers. They have too many kilims, all of them depicting the Madonna of Częstochowa, 1 meter 20 cm by 90 cm. They are sold to the workers for 170,000 zł. each; on the free market the price can be as high as 1,000,000 zł. They tried weaving the Madonna of Ostrobrama, too, but the gold color came out too dull; there were problems with the dye. Recently, something has gone wrong with the legs of Stanisław W.’s younger brother. Many people in the town have something wrong with their legs: without warning, they collapse onto the floor and are unable to stand. Some people say it’s because of the uranium ore slag piles; others say it’s from the Chernobyl fallout, which was heaviest in nearby Śnieżka; and still others say it’s from vodka.

  The younger brother was a child during the war and doesn’t know why Stanisław wound up in a camp.

  First, their father was taken away to forced labor. Then their mother took the children to the country and concealed her oldest son in a haystack, but he was found and sent to forced labor. In the autumn of 1940 their aunt, their mother’s sister, came to see them and brought some food. By then their father and Stanisław W. were gone.

  The following autumn their aunt was standing at the window and whispering the names of the dead for whom a mass would have to be ordered on All Souls’ Day: Father, mother, sister Czesława … She shuddered: Why Czesława? She’s alive, after all. At that very moment she caught sight of her sister through the window, walking toward them down the middle of the street. She was pretty and young, just as in the past. “What am I seeing?” their aunt marveled, and hastily threw the window wide open. She leaned out. “Czesiu!” she called, but there was no one in the street. A few days after All Saints’ Day she received a letter: “Dear Auntie, please come, Mama is dead and the street is feeding us.”

  The younger brother knows where their mother is buried: the fourth section, fifth row, nineteenth grave. That’s what the gravedigger told the children, so they could memorize it. They repeated in a chorus: “Fourth section, fifth row …”

  Stanisław W.’s mother was thirty-five when she died. She was on her way home from smuggling; she had stopped off in Łódź at a friend’s home and asked for some tea. The friend went into the kitchen and when she returned with a glass of tea, their mother was lying on the floor.

  The mother looked older than thirty-five. The photograph shows a thin woman, hunched over, with a haggard face and tired eyes. The woman was trying to smile at the camera lens, but what came out was a grimace that emphasized the wrinkles around her mouth and her sunken cheeks.

  She had a modest funeral on a chilly, cloudy day. In the photograph one can see a small group of people near the excavated grave, earth, a painted coffin, and the gravedigger’s rope sling.

  Beside the grave stand small, sad children.

  Behind the children stands a tall youth, staring at the coffin.

  That youth is Stanisław W.

  He was taken away for forced labor while his mother was alive, but he was standing over the coffin.

  He had said something to Gizela about running away from forced labor.

  Perhaps he escaped to get to the funeral, and they punished him by sending him to the concentration camp. Only how did he know that his mother had died?

  Perhaps he saw her as a young, pretty woman, as she had once been, walking down the center of the street? But he could not have remembered his mother as young and beautiful. Rather, he saw that thin, hunched-over woman, with a grimace at the corners of her mouth.

  Stanisław W.’s sister-in-law asked if he and Gizela had met during the war. If so, he might have wound up in the concentration camp because of Gizela. When the sister-in-law was in forced labor, they hanged a lad in the square for having had a romance with a German girl. They drove all the Poles into the square; they had to stand there until the end and hear how the lad pushed away the noose and screamed at the hangman. The sister-in-law doesn’t know how to spell this in German, but it sounded like “Lass mich leben, lass mich leben …” So, if Stanisław W. and Gizela met during the war … But no, they met after the war, at a dance. When it turned out that Stani danced the foxtrot better than anyone in the village, so well that he didn’t need to dance with that refugee from Prussia at all. They must have sent him to the camp for something else.

  5

  He was in three camps; it’s not known when and for how long. In the archives in Warsaw there’s a card file from Dachau: small pink and yellow slips of cardboard, made by Polish prisoners after they were freed from the camp. Drawing upon their own sources of information and memory, they inscribed on each card a prisoner’s name, his camp number, where he came from, and where he was sent to. There are eighty-five cards with the surname W. in the archive—the most popular Polish surname after Kowalski. There are seven cards with the name Stanisław W.

  Stanisław W. from Bolimowo came from the Flossenburg camp; he was handed over to the Gestapo. Stanisław W. from Pieścirogi came from a camp in Działdowo and was sent on to Mauthausen. Stanisław W. from Sierpc, Stanisław W. from Zielonka, Stanisław W. from Anielino, Stanisław W. from Horbaczów, Stanisław W. from Kutno. He arrived in a group transport and was sent on to the camp in Natzweiler.

  Stanisław W. from Kutno was Gizela’s future husband and Stefan W.’s future father. The camp number checks out: 122962.

  Stanisław W. died on October 9, 1953, at 7:30 a.m. in a clinic in Tübingen. Thanks to the autopsy records we know that he was 180 cm tall, weighed 79.7 kg, and suffered from chronic glomerular nephritis.

  He was twenty-seven years old.

  6

  Gizela spent the last week in the clinic. On the last day the professor entered, looked at Stani, and gave orders to transfer him to a private room. Stani comforted her: “Tomorrow, I’ll be better, you’ll see.” He started to doze off, then woke up: “Tomorrow, I’ll be better.”

  When she came to, she understood that she was already at home, sitting at the table and holding her arms around a small cardboard box. In the box was Stani’s clothing and a tattered Polish prayer book: We Sing to the Lord.

  7

  Dark green, bright green, a stripe of blue, the tall roof of the hotel. Gizela washed dishes and cleaned rooms; the flat roof of the laundry—Gizela folded and packed men’s shirts …

  The tourists’ favorite occupation was going for walks in the neighboring forests. The children’s favorite occupation was throwing pine cones at the tourists. The director of the school summoned Gizela: “Your son is throwing pine cones at our tourists.”

  “All the children throw them,” said Gizela. “Why are you complaining only about my child?”

  “Your daughter,” the director of the school said on another day.

  “Your son …”

  “Your daughter …”

  “It’s because the other fathers,” Stefan explained, “were war heroes.”

  Gizela was upset. The other children told stories about their hero-fathers—beautiful, noble stories. The fathers fired guns, primarily on the Eastern front. The fathers perished, but to the last drop of their blood … And what could her children tell them? That their father dreamed of being a number THREE or SIX? Could a fath
er who ran barefoot around the barracks and prayed that one of those numbers … Could such a father be compared with heroes of the Eastern front? Could the son of such a father arouse kindly feelings in the director of the school?

  (A woman from their village whose birthday is the same as Stefan’s sends him a greeting card every year. As a postscript she adds one sentence, always the same: “If it weren’t for the director of the school, you would have grown up to be a decent man.” Stefan already has twenty-odd cards from that woman and twenty-odd times that sentence as a postscript: “If it weren’t for the director of the school …”)

  “Anyway,” the other mothers told the other children, “if his father was in a camp, there was a reason for it. Hitler or no Hitler, nobody was sentenced without a reason.”

  After yet another incident when Stefan ran away from school, Gizela requested advice from pedagogues. These were pedagogues in the Department of Youth Services. They advised her to entrust her son to a reformatory. “He’ll wind up there sooner or later,” the pedagogues said, “but if you hand him over voluntarily, it will be easier to get him out when he wises up.”

  Stefan says he was in the reformatory for a year.

  Stefan sits in an isolation cell, in a particularly well-guarded part of the prison known as the Maximum Security Section.

  He’s been in this cell for twelve years.

  After twelve years of isolation, the past has become blurred in his mind; space and time are foreshortened. It is sixty kilometers to the city where Gizela lives now; it seems to him that the city is nearby. It seems to him that he was in the reformatory for one year, but the documents in his case file—the case for which he’s serving time in the Maximum Security Section—clearly show that he spent six years in the reformatory.