The Upright Heart (10 page)

So a couple of months ago my life changed when I found a room with an old blind lady who still lives in Kazimierz. She took pity on me because she lost all three of her sons during the war, and she wanted to save just one lost boy.

“Just one,” I heard her whisper to herself, standing in the hallway the first time I walked out the door. She let me live with her for free, and I helped her with the shopping, the cleaning, and the cooking. Living in her house meant I could even take a bath once a week. I didn’t need the magic pill like I used to, which is partly why
I am showing it to you, because it is important to share, because I can see that you too need rescuing.

For a while I was really feeling like life was on my side once again. I could see a future, and it looked bright. I walked along the Wisła River at night and smiled. The earliest signs of spring were coming; I could feel the moon looking down on me and I would look right back up at it. I felt like saying, “
You
did it, moon. I know you did.”

Spring is so beautiful in Kraków that it is easy to forget that winter ever existed, as if it would never come around again. You hide your heart from the deep freeze, from the cold.

Two weeks ago the old lady got very sick. I woke up one morning to find her doubled over on the kitchen floor. A neighbor helped me carry her to the hospital. Now I am without a place to sleep again until she comes back home. I hope she comes back. I have returned to sleeping in the train station, or when nights are warm like this I roll out some newspaper (it has so many uses!) in Planty or by the river, and I lie down under the stars. In the evening I go and visit the old lady in the hospital, but these last few days she hasn’t looked so good. I still have hope she’ll get better. The pill helps me to believe in so many things. I know my hope won’t help to keep her in this world. I learned that a long time ago. She wouldn’t be the first Polish woman to ever lose her life to heartbreak.

He was the first young man Elżbieta met after the war who looked clean-shaven. His broad forehead with the widow’s peak and thick, dark hair, together with his serious expression, called to mind the perfect picture of an elegant man. He may not have had a lot of money, but his suit was still made of fine, hand-tailored wool. He
still wore in his lapel a tiny white spray rose. Twenty years later Elżbieta would see the portrait of a great French writer—an aviator who wrote a children’s book her son would use as the text for the audition that got him accepted into the Warsaw drama school (the French writer’s name sounded like Expray)—who would also remind her of him. The photo would confirm something that she felt deeply, that this was an elegant man, the sort of man a lady such as herself should have in her life.

During the war, many of Rybnik’s young men, boys fresh as sixteen, were taken into the Wehrmacht, the German army at the time, to serve the Third Reich. Rybnik was a town inside Upper Silesia, a region of Poland that was German up until 1921, when the League of Nations organized a border referendum and the Second Polish Republic was established. Suddenly Upper Silesia was Poland again, and depending on where a person came from one could feel more Polish or more German. Brothers were torn apart over this issue of national identity. Families fought constantly, and the region saw three bloody uprisings. Assimilated Jews who considered themselves German left Rybnik in large numbers when it was declared Poland, only to be replaced by Jews from other parts of the country, Jews who were less acceptable to the local population. Several assimilated families did stay behind. They did not feel so much German as they felt themselves to be citizens of Rybnik.

When the war began and Silesia was occupied by the Germans, most Silesian boys were still considered German, depending on the area they lived in, and could therefore be drafted into the war. Though they weren’t SS men, they wore uniforms with the symbol of the German army on their jackets, consisting of an eagle with a swastika at its feet. Though many of them resisted, they still saluted the Fuhrer. They were, in effect, German soldiers.

Some boys went to Russia while others were stationed in Italy or France. Some were expected to do things that were brutal,
painful, that supported the Nazi agenda, though it was understood that the Wehrmacht did not hold the same kind of destructive power as the security service, the SS.

Elżbieta’s friend, Bernard, who had studied French, recalled being stationed in the south of France. He was quietly guarding a post when he overheard two French soldiers talking behind him. They were chewing tobacco and looking out over the sea.

“The Germans will never win with boys like that fighting for them,” he overheard the older soldier saying. The younger soldier grunted in agreement. Bernard crouched down. He was only seventeen.

Elżbieta’s husband, Bolesław, was eighteen when the war broke out. The Germans planned to take him to Stalingrad, and he had only two days to say goodbye to his family and prepare for departure. For the rest of his life Bolesław would recall the night before he was to leave. He lay quietly in bed, still as a mouse, and the more motionless he became, the more agitated he felt. His older sister, Wanda, was snoring in the room across the hall, the full moon pouring into her bedroom through lace curtains, casting the apartment in a cold blue light. He felt as if the moon were taking over the world. He was too young to lose this battle with life.

I will lose. Never will I make love to a girl, never toast a friend’s wedding. I will lose
.

He would forever recall the shouts that emanated from the kitchen. He could hear his mother begging and pleading with his father for hours, but Bolesław couldn’t decipher what was being said.

The next morning, at the crack of dawn, she threw on her coat and covered her head with a scarf, and ran uphill to the church. She begged Mother Mary to take care of her beloved son, promising her everything, lit a candle, standing very still until she could see the flame rising, dancing in the cold, damp air, and then she walked straight down the hill, right into Nazi
headquarters (also known as the town hall). Shaking on the inside, she asked to speak with the highest-ranking officer, and once she was inside his office with the door shut, she removed from the lining of her coat three Viennese paintings rolled up into a single narrow tube. The paintings were masterfully executed and valuable, worth more money than a year’s salary for the handsome young officer.

He took them gently into his hands, unrolled them onto his massive oak desk, and glanced at them with a satisfied smile. He then proceeded to roll them tenderly back up. He looked up at the woman, seemingly calm and at ease. He noticed the fine wool of her coat, the delicate curls of her dark hair, pinned up beneath a floral-printed scarf. She was not unlike so many proud middle-class women in Germany.

The corners of her mouth twitched a little, but she was unable to smile. She simply stood before him, hands clasped, waiting for a reply.

“Stalingrad is no place for a young and talented boy such as your son,” the officer smiled and nodded his head. “We have soldiers stationed in Norway, above Bergen. This will be a much better place for him to spend his time.”

Her solid thank you and swift departure felt like a dream. Hidden waves of sweat poured from her body as she bowed to the officer and left the room as quickly as possible. When she reached the corner of the town square and was certain that nobody from the headquarters could see her, she hid beneath a small archway, leaned her hot cheek against the wall, and wept like a baby. Relief is like a tidal wave. It hits you at the strangest moments, and with it often comes the endless well of your deepest, hidden sorrow.

Bolesław would live. He had always wanted to become a lawyer, but he would wind up a bookkeeper, first working in
agriculture, and later in the coal mines. He did go to Norway, one of several boys from his region. He excelled at skiing, and so was put to work transporting mail on skis from one post to another. These were the most beautiful moments, when he could imagine that he was free, that there was no war, when he would fly down a mountain or stop to take photos of the distant horizon. He was also given a post guarding French prisoners of war. Sometimes there were aerial attacks, but mostly things remained calm up there in the mountains above Bergen. So many lonely nights, yes, and days when he hid in the barracks and cried for the pain of missing his mother, his father, and even his sister, Wanda, who had always only cared about herself.

When I take this pill, I feel all quiet inside. Then I know that there are no whispers crawling down into my heart at night. No ghosts to disturb my mind. Here is the cemetery where nobody goes. See that mausoleum over there? It’s a good place to hide for an hour or two. You can fit your body, if you are small enough, between the headstone and the overgrown grass. The tall green blades may scrape your ankles and your elbows, but they smell so fresh, as if nothing bad could ever happen to you there. And that is the best place to disappear.

I want to tell you something, but don’t tell anybody else, okay? There is a woman here. The first time I saw her was out of the corner of my eye, like a shadow passing beneath the bridge near Wawel Castle, but then I saw her whole figure tracing the paths between gravestones. She has been here for two days already. She didn’t notice me, but I saw her wandering through the cemetery and through Kazimierz at night. It’s like she’s looking for somebody.
I tried calling out to her, but she just kept mumbling to herself, pulling on her long gray skirts and weeping. I can’t understand how she can cry so much. I have no more tears to shed.

“Can I help you, lady?” I ask, but she doesn’t hear me at all. I wish I knew just what she was looking for. I could help her if only she could hear me or see me.

Sometimes even with the pill I can’t seem to get through the day without feeling this dark emptiness creep in. There is a sinking feeling that comes upon me without warning—as if I am drowning in a sea noticeable only to me, as if the waters of invisibility are surrounding me. For the rest of the world it looks like I am just a boy standing on the street, but for me it is hard to breathe. “Don’t take me,” I whisper to the darkness. First it beckons, and then it recedes.

One night last winter there was a commotion over on Bożego Ciała, not far from the church on the corner. I was crossing Plac Wolnica on my way to the river to sleep when I heard shouting and the sound of glass breaking, so I ran back down the street and hid in the churchyard of the bazylika, next to an old, burnt-out lamppost. I stayed still all night, and I am pretty sure my breath never even made a sound.

Two people were murdered in their apartment that night. The papers called this an “incident.” Things like this happen all the time but nobody seems to talk about them anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if I am becoming invisible. Everyone who knew me and loved me is gone. First there was death, and then there weren’t any people anymore. Now there are new people who want to forget that the old people were ever there. But there is a different kind of flower that is sprouting on the ghetto side of the river. Maybe my pill is changing shape and someday the earth will grow plants to make everything right in the world. I will be first in line to celebrate when that day comes.

On his wedding day just four months after the war was over, Bolesław refused to have his picture taken. He who had passed the time while in the Norwegian fjords photographing mountains and lakes could not bring himself to immortalize this one crucial moment. “Later, later,” he told Elżbieta, as he would continue to do for the next forty years, putting her off as he always would from savoring her pleasure.

From now on, whenever she wanted to make sacred what was beautiful, he would always complain.

This was an invisible line written on their wedding certificate. And so it was. Some vows remain silent.

Now there was a new generation of frightened, masculine men to contend with. To care for a dog, an orchard, a few hens, that was safe, but to love a person, that was an altogether different story. Going to war had frozen the hearts of so many boys. Leaving Mama—the comfort of her clean home, the baked bread and the churning of butter that turned into the war machine of death and confused innocent minds that had no time to differentiate between one world and another—was a killer to the childlike soul. And in those endless days, bowels opened and memories became vibrant. Men sat and waited.

Memories of fresh linens hanging on the lines behind their mothers’ houses cast endlessly wet days in the forests and the trenches in a faint light of hope. Bodies no longer living were wrapped in wide muddy sheets. While men watched their friends being rolled up like carp in today’s newspaper ready to be cooked for Christmas Eve dinner, their hair matted with blood and mud, onlookers turned away from the lifeless image and chose memory. They smelled the sweet divine call of Mama’s fresh apple cake and remembered home. If Mama
were here she would lift that sheet, suddenly spotless, suspend it with her line between these two trees, and with her tender touch, her aching heart, the lifeless body would rise and become new again.

All those crucified futures still hang in the atmosphere like mist. I can see it now, from golden autumn until early spring. I hear it whistle in the faint rustle of life as the wind passes through wet molecules that hover effortlessly in the air. They smell like distant smoke. Somewhere in the wet grassy dew there is a fire smoldering, a childhood dream that was never extinguished. If you listen carefully, ear to air, you can hear all those little boys, hearts crying, smothered and alone in this silence that blankets the world with its memory.

And now there are men like this:

Karol, who wanted to become a priest just so he could wear those beautiful velvet vestments, and day in day out stare at the beams of light as they played shadow games across the stained glass windows, hypnotizing him. Frankincense and myrrh and the heady imaginings of devotion—serving someone so great that he could never be found. Karol, who saw so many friends die before him en route to France that he decided never to count on people again. Life was too unreliable for him. Money and possessions were a much safer bet, and drink helped him forget. There was a dimension to this world that he would prefer not to know, but now he knew, and a gold chain on his dead friend’s neck now carried a monetary value that meant more to him than the sentimental desires of any poor mother’s heart.