Wartime Lies (2 page)

So it happened that Tania came to live with us, to make a home for my father and to bring me up.

We continued to occupy the house where I was born, bought with my mother’s dowry directly after the marriage. The house stood in a garden on the principal street of T. Our family quarters and my father’s office filled the one-story wing that ran parallel to the street. In the other wing, at a right angle with ours, with its entrance in the courtyard, a
gimnazjum
teacher and his wife lived on the ground floor; the second-floor tenants were a stationery store owner, Pan Kramer, his wife, and their daughter Irena, who was two or three years older than I. Until the Germans came, Irena and I never played together: my father did not think it proper.

Like every male in Poland old enough to shave, father Kramer was addressed as Pan; only servants, peasants and manual laborers were denied that honorific syllable. Mother Kramer was Pani Kramerowa or Pani Renata to all but her family and intimate friends. Irena should in
time have been known as Panna Kramerówna or Panna Irena or, because the Polish language loves diminutives for food, drink and names, Panna Irka.

Our living room was separated from my father’s study, where he received patients after their turn in the examination room, by a wide, padded, white door. Adjacent to the door was a huge white porcelain stove. Sometimes in the night, through that door or through the space between the stove and the wall, where kindling and some of my toys were stored, emerged the square-shouldered white giant of my nightmares. It served no purpose when my nurse opened the door and carried me, screaming and rigid, into the familiar terrain of my father’s study, or laid out on the rug in front of the stove one by one each piece of kindling and each little truck or shovel so that I could see that nothing, nothing at all, let alone a giant, could have hidden behind them. My terror only increased along with my screams, and soon it would be necessary to send a horse cab to fetch Tania or my father from the restaurant or café where they might be.

At that time, when my memories of the monster and the other circumstances of my life begin to be my own, rather than stories of that idyllic time that Tania later told me during the war years, she and my father were out most evenings. My father finished his house calls early. He would then play with me until it was time to meet the two married Jewish doctors and their wives for dinner or for coffee. The café, understood as a Viennese institution, thrived in T. It was never too soon or too late to find a friend there. One lingered, or perhaps went to another
café or a restaurant where there was dancing. Tania sometimes accompanied my father. More frequently, she joined Bern, the richest Jewish lawyer in T. and an acknowledged old bachelor. In contrast to my father, Bern was a bon vivant, proud of his legendary ability to absorb Tokay and vodka. He was also an expert dancer. To coax me out of my dread at the prospect of her going out, Tania would sometimes have him wind up the gramophone when he came to call for her, and they would rehearse his specialties: the slow waltz and the tango.

In the summer, after his nap, my father met Bern, the Catholic surgeon, and one or the other of his Jewish doctor friends for tennis. Tania often took me to watch these matches. On other afternoons, we would go to the beach—a strip of riverbank painstakingly covered each season with a thick layer of white sand. An entrance fee made the beach exclusive and entitled those who paid to the comfort of deck chairs, parasols and changing cabins. Only the more intrepid swimmers braved the river’s swift currents, using a leisurely, face-out-of-water style of breaststroke. Men and women alike wore white rubber bonnets. Some finicky bathers, my father among them, also put on white rubber shoes like ballet slippers to protect their feet from pebbles and the slimy feel of the bottom. By the time I was four, Tania and my father took turns teaching me how to swim. To their relief, I was an eager pupil.

Much as Tania tried to protect my reputation, it was understood in T. that I was a difficult, troubling child. The wet nurse remained with us for the first year after my
mother died—to keep her longer was against Tania’s principles and, probably, my father’s as well—but it was discovered soon after her departure that I didn’t want to eat. Mealtimes turned into tests of will between Tania and me, with the cook, the maid, the current nurse and, at moments of great crisis, even the laundress in attendance. Tania usually won. I took my revenge later by vomiting whatever combination of delicacies and essential sources of iron and vitamins I had been made to ingest. The chamber pot also tested her resolution and mine. Like all nicely brought up children of that era, I had been toilet trained very early, and I took the training to heart. By the time I was three, getting me to excrete was an elaborate process, involving installing the pot in the middle of the kitchen, sitting me on it, and pleading and threatening, with the same group that witnessed my defeats in the struggle against intake assembled to see the output. Tania had a repertoire of helpful incantations. Quickly now, one-two-three, we’re all waiting here to see. Make, Maciek, make. If encouragement failed, an enema would be administered. I loathed my own smell.

A cardiologist specializing in children heard an irregularity in my heartbeat. Another specialist confirmed it. A third disagreed. My father could not hear the offending noise himself but thought it wrong to disregard the views of two eminent professors. It was obvious to all that I was scrawny and nervous. The nightmare of the giant recurred with increasing frequency. I filled the house with shrieks. No nurse proved equal for more than a few months to contending with both Tania and me during the
day and then with me at night. These nurses all were called Panny, spectacle-wearing young ladies, daughters of impecunious but relatively assimilated Jewish families, earning their way to a place of higher learning. Tania would give them scarves and hats and advise them on makeup and permanent waves that would bring out the best in their looks and yet were suitably modest. She scolded them about runs in their stockings and corrected them at the piano. Mousy, high-strung, these young women were good at reading to me and teaching me to read. They were grateful to Tania, pitied her (such an extraordinary person wasting her life in T. out of love for her family!), and left with letters of reference from my father.

Then Zosia arrived, on the recommendation of the Catholic surgeon. He had lanced a boil on my thigh and returned several times to rebandage the wound. What Maciek needs, he told my father, is to touch our holy Polish earth. I know that no Jew loves our country more than you and our adorable Panna Tania, or has a truer national character. Still, to have a fine boy like yours educated by these city Jewesses is an error, a scandal. Give him one of our own. Salt of the earth. He will drink strength from her.

My father could not be indifferent to this line of reasoning or to his colleague’s hierarchal position. Romantic nationalism was ascendant. My father’s fine baritone voice could be heard singing marching songs commemorating the exploits of Piłsudski’s brigade as often as Verdi arias. Such compliments as I received, when he took me
for an evening stroll, were apt to be on my Polish, truly blond Sarmatian look. The Aryan look had not yet come into fashion in T. Nostalgia was directed to the Black Sea, whence came the Sarmatian warrior hordes, swords in hand, to settle our sainted Poland. Besides, the nurse’s position was vacant again, and the surgeon had a candidate ready to start immediately.

Zosia was the oldest daughter of the assistant station-master in Drohobycz, a town some fifty kilometers from T. This functionary had been a corporal in the surgeon’s battalion and later his patient. Having finished the first classes of
gimnazjum
, Zosia was helping out in a pastry shop. She needed to be placed.

Her golden beauty filled me with wonder; I think that something literally moved in my heart. To be sure, Tania was taller, her hair almost the same amber color. I loved the smell of Tania’s perfume and powder, her furs that she was always happy to explain to me and let me play with and the softness of her hands that ended in long pale fingernails. But Zosia was soft and hard all at once and laughed with her head thrown back at everything that she or anyone else said. As soon as we were left alone—her interview must have been conducted days before she arrived, since it turned out that her little suitcase and bundles were already installed in her room—she swung me onto her shoulders, told me to hang on to her pigtails and set off at a run to inspect our garden. The raspberry bushes were heavy with fruit. She stuffed her mouth full and then mine and told me they were the sweetest she had eaten that summer. She thought the birds must be very respectful
of my father to leave such fine berries alone and laughed her silver laugh when I informed her that they were covered with muslin except when the cook was ready to pick them.

From then on, it was understood that I would ride on her shoulders and hold her pigtails, which she would let down for me from the coil around her head as a reward for certain good actions. These included eating more than a third of what was served, especially if she helped just a little, chasing her at full gallop around the lawn, hanging by my knees from the jungle gym in the yard, not crying after my nap and being cleanly dressed and ready when my father offered to take me with him for an evening walk or to take Zosia and me on his round of house calls after office hours.

My father always used the same horse cab. He had confidence in the driver, who kept his carriage particularly clean and had a pair of horses capable of a sustained trot if we were going to a patient in a village outside T. I would sit with my father, holding his hand. Zosia would be on the jump seat, next to my father’s black instrument bag, facing me, my knees squeezed between hers. When we arrived at a peasant’s house, while my father was busy with the patient, she would ask for a glass of fresh buttermilk. If I drank it, my reward was a visit to the barn and a talk with the cattle and the hens. That was how I learned to caress the cheeks of a cow very slowly to make her my friend, to scatter grain for chickens correctly, and never to get within the reach of a chained dog.

For more important matters, there were other pacts and
other rewards. The giant now came into my room to lean over me almost every night. I feared going to bed. Tania, if she was not going out, read to me; often she refused early invitations so that she could read a chapter she had promised to finish. Then, after Tania left, I would call Zosia. She left the door open that separated her room from mine, and she could hear me immediately. I listened for the sound of her bare feet with exultation. She would sing for me, and if I promised to be asleep after ten of her songs, she laughed, undid her pigtails and let me play with her loose hair. She sat on one of my little chairs, her head on the bed, hair spread over my quilt. I could run my fingers through it or pile it over my face. Her hair was very thick. It smelled slightly of soap. Zosia’s own smell was a mixture of soap and fresh sweat; she teased me because I seldom sweated and would show me how wet her armpits became after our garden races. If I could not keep my promise, I told her. Zosia would sigh and kiss me, and sigh again or laugh. She would tell me I was her own cretin monster, her own nightmare, and let me bargain with her for more songs or caresses. If I chose caresses, I could touch her neck and ears. Then she would put her hands under my pajamas and stroke my chest, my stomach and my legs until I finally fell asleep, all the while sighing and laughing because I was so thin and because I was so ticklish and because I loved her too much.

My father had grown very concerned about the nightly apparitions. Was I hearing the Erlkönig’s melodious blandishments? We decided that we should search for the giant and confront him. Together, we loaded the Browning
pistol my father kept in his locked desk drawer. He showed me how to put a bullet in the chamber. So armed, we visited each room in the house. The wardrobes were opened; we poked behind coats and dresses and turned the linen in the drawers upside down. The smell of mothballs made us sneeze. There was no telling what shape the giant took in the day and where he might roost. To inspect the tenants’ wing seemed too embarrassing; besides, it would not do to frighten them as well—our situation was already difficult. There remained only the cellar, with its barrels of pickles and sauerkraut, bins of potatoes and beets, and huge, empty leather trunks. These we examined one by one, I shining the flashlight, my father with his gun at the ready. Tania, who had declared at the start that we would find nothing, remained in the garden and read. Once again, she was right; in the day, the giant was invisible. My father felt my forehead and asked Zosia to keep me very quiet. It was the beginning of the fever that in a few days turned into whooping cough.

S
INCE
my birth, the Jewish holidays were the occasion of my maternal grandparents’ annual visit to T. This autumn the holidays fell very early. My grandparents had not yet returned to Cracow for the winter from their property near S., a town to the north of T. Metternich once spent a night in S.; in his memoirs it is recorded that his enjoyment of the admirable natural beauty of the site and the surrounding countryside was spoiled by the large number of Jews living there. To relieve Tania of some of her responsibilities and to spend more time with me, they decided
to come to us directly from the country, although my father had assured them I was not in danger. I was allowed to get up from bed to welcome them at the door. They arrived in their old, broad, open carriage. The coachman, who was my friend, was on the box. A wagon pulled by two horses followed with their luggage. As we had no stable, the horses would return to S., which made me cry with disappointment. My grandfather, rubbing his mustache against my face, patting me on the back, and crying a little himself, said that a man like me really needed his own carriage, that Jan would bring the horses back as soon as I was well enough to keep them busy going out every day; if I liked, I could even learn to drive the carriage myself.