Family History of Fear Read online

  Then the coach arrives. The driver has a mustache, a huge Polish mustache like the one worn by my Jewish great-grandfather, Henryk, from Przedrynek adjacent to Łęczyca’s main marketplace. He could even wiggle the ends when he held his granddaughter, my mother, on his lap and sang her the song about the cobbler’s wife and her paper slippers.

  “Leave the woman alone!” he cries. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the little girl is scared to death?”

  With a shrug, he invites us to climb into his coach. The horse smiles.

  But this is not Grandfather Przedborski; this is his Polish brother. Not for nothing have so many generations lived together under the same roof. In the name of this house, shared for centuries on Polish soil, he cannot allow anybody to insult us. He takes us under his protective wing, and the enchanted carriage rolls along, clattering on the cobblestones and carrying us, carrying us, carrying. Grandmother is on the verge of saying, in a strangled voice, clumsy words of gratitude, full of shame and thankfulness, and more. She is about to speak when we turn abruptly. The sand is spilling out of my bucket. “What is a bucket doing here?” I wonder. An hourglass with sand in it, perhaps, time passing. The last moments.

  We are approaching Szucha Avenue.

  “What did you think, Żydówo, dirty, fucking Jew?? That I wouldn’t take you back where you belong?”

  What do I do with this dream? I thought. With this story? Life has a cost; you have to do what’s right, pay the price. The wedding band and the engagement ring were not enough. The Omega watch, the gold coins sewn into the garter belt, not enough. So they gave the mother and daughter one last chance. A rich relative. You don’t come across that every day. Welcome to the Aryan side.

  I am still holding the little girl’s hand when I wake up. I am protecting her from her Polish brothers. But then I ask myself how I would treat her. I ask myself if I wouldn’t be afraid to play with her in the backyard, if I would have shared my slice of sugared bread with her. If I would have had the strength, like others did, to hide her in my closet or in my attic. Even when the money ran out and there was no more hope.

  It was easiest not to know anything about all that.

  Is that what mattered to you, Mama?

  My parents started out with nothing. They were married in 1955, a memorable year because of the Festival for World Youth, which brought students from other countries to Warsaw for the first time since the war. They sublet their first place, one room in an apartment they shared with two other families. That was also my first home, though I don’t remember it. A few years later, they were assigned an apartment of their own, a rare achievement for a couple that young. It was located in a new working-class neighborhood called Wola, far from the center of town. Concrete cubes, all identical, uniformly planted in a field that looked like people had just stopped digging up potatoes there. Our street was named Marcin Kasprzak after a hero of the revolution. A black-and-white photo from those days shows a baby carriage, with tiny wheels and removable sides, beside a carpet hanger which soon became the heart of the courtyard. Inside the pram, a chubby little girl puckered her lips as much as she could, for fun.

  We had two rooms plus a kitchen and a balcony on the second floor. It was clean and light. My little bed, like a playpen, with netting on all sides, was where I learned to walk. Just before that, my only living grandmother, on my father’s side, took me to church and had me baptized, without asking anyone’s permission. My godfather, Uncle Włodek, was supposed to attend the ceremony, but he was playing cards at the time and forgot all about it.

  My father came from a family of railroad workers in Łόdź. Mama’s family was from Warsaw. My parents were young and eager for life when they met. Determined to enjoy themselves, to laugh and forget all about their blighted wartime childhoods. They were both active in the ZMP, the Union of Polish Youth, while they were studying journalism at the university. They wore the red ties, they went to gatherings, applauded at meetings of their party, and held long, fervent discussions on the principles of Marxism and Leninism. They wanted to build their lives without looking back. Old paintings in golden frames seemed like meaningless relics to them. In their home, on their walls, they hung reproductions of the French avant-garde. Picasso’s and Miró’s grimacing faces and multiple eyes and noses scared me to death long before I was able to spell their names. They ordered their furniture from a fashionable designer who regarded our living room as the perfect showcase for his ideas. The combination of black metal, glass, and shiny plastic was a sensation, if barely functional. The brightly colored three-legged stools in the shape of a cone with its point cut off were exquisite torture. As for the chairs, those little red, yellow, and green hollow seats clung to the buttocks. Not easy to sit down on, even harder to get out of. This vista of fanciful modernity was saved by the books, a multitude of them, spreading gradually over more and more shelves, of which there were never enough.

  Our house was full of light. Sunday mornings, lazier than all the others, I watched the yellow patches of sunlight rippling across the honey-colored floors of the big room. I closed first one eye, then the other, and watched how the perspective shifted, without moving my head.

  I vaguely remember my father being there. Never both of them in the bed together, not that I can recall, never together at the table or out for a walk. In my favorite photograph, my mother is sitting on my father’s lap in a cabana at the seashore. They are laughing, with their arms around each other, as if everything still could and would work out.

  …

  As early as high school, in 1947, my father set up a local radio station. He wanted to be a sportscaster. He auditioned for national radio, but they turned him down, claiming that he had absolutely no future in broadcasting because his voice was too “shrill,” in their words. He didn’t give up.

  “From the helicopter, following the race, this is Bogdan Tuszyński”—that’s how he always began, every step of the way from Warsaw to Berlin to Prague in the annual bicycle Race for Peace. All of Poland knew my father’s voice.

  At that time, sports were a matter of national pride, perhaps for lack of other events of a patriotic nature. Whatever the reason, the whole country, young and old, went crazy over that bicycle race. All through the sixties, during those two weeks in May, you might say nothing else of any importance happened in Poland. In towns, in the streets, men gathered around loudspeakers broadcasting from various spots along the route or at the finish line. The sound of radios, turned all the way up, in practically every apartment echoed in courtyards. In mine as well. My father’s voice came at me from all sides. The tension reached its highest pitch just at the finish. Thousands of Poles held their breath. When he was in a good mood, he ended the broadcast by saying hello to me.

  My father’s reporting on the course of the race and the struggles of the Polish team was something more than the simple account of a sporting event. He became the voice of the nation; he created a national legend. The fact that he expressed people’s feelings won him a place in the heart of every listener. Everybody considered him a member of the family, one of their own. My father, who at that time had just turned thirty, had become a popular personality throughout the country. Wherever he went—the store, the post office, a café—they recognized his voice. I was so proud.

  I remember some times when he got home late after a long journey. He used to wake me up in the middle of the night. I sat on the floor, half asleep, while he unpacked suitcases that gave off the scent of faraway places. They were filled with endless colors, spilling out of clothes that rustled, scarves for Mama, silk and wools finer than anything you could find in the shops, and lace, and perfume by Chanel, and the unforgettable taste of milk chocolates by Suchard. He seemed different himself, as if all those places had rubbed off on him. We had to get used to him all over again, to his smell and the touch of his hands. And then he’d go away again. My father was always on the road.

  Foreign travel in those days, when a brand-new p
assport was required for every journey, was considered to be a great luxury. It was a doorway onto a world that was inaccessible to most of us, full of booty that for me had the taste of Coca-Cola and chocolates in bright little wrappers. My father’s homecomings punctuated the calendar of our daily life. Both of us learned how to wait. Me, patiently; Mama, less so. He sent colorful postcards from far away. Innsbruck, Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin…the names alone triggered a feeling of restlessness and endless dreams. Even before I started school, I was given a globe as a present. Later, I started to collect maps and learn different countries’ capitals and flags by heart.

  I started reading early, and I read a great deal. And with a sort of greed. I escaped into imaginary worlds, as if the ones I took part in weren’t real enough. I liked stories with wizards and wish-fulfilling beads. My mother used to read poetry to me. Soon, I was choosing books for myself—along with Mary Poppins and Anne of Green Gables, memoirs of the war, of the Occupation and the camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau. I didn’t know why; I just felt I had to read them.

  I liked playing hide-and-seek a great deal more than other children my age. I also liked to play dress-up, constantly trying on new costumes and putting powder and eye shadow on my face. I spent hours in the armoire. It had a huge mirrored door. I shut myself up in it sometimes as if it were a palace or a fortress. I was happy to stay in the corner, but I also liked being onstage. When I was six, I was the king’s daughter in a play at school. I was attracted to worlds different from my own.

  First of all, there was the road. I had the only moments of security in my childhood when we were on our way to Łόdź, to visit my grandma on my father’s side. Everything made sense because my parents were together, my father at the steering wheel of the black Škoda Octavia, my mother beside him, me in the backseat. They didn’t have to bother with me—I was so happy. I listened to their voices; I felt their presence. Nothing bad could happen. Stretched out on the backseat, I watched patches of sky disappearing under my feet or maybe under the wheels, outside my field of vision.

  Trains ran right by my grandma’s house on the edge of town. Glasses large and small clinked in the cupboard, water gurgled in vases, tomato soup spilled out of the bowl onto the dish beneath. Invariably, Grandma would cry, “The Gdynia Express!” or “The local to Opole!” Trains went right through the round table with its best Sunday tablecloth in the big room. They woke up the cats dozing in warm patches of sun, shaking the well and rustling the fruit trees. At number 4 Perłowa Street, not far from the tracks, everybody knew them. Even my dolls from Warsaw, after a couple of days, flawlessly recited the arrivals and departures from the station of Łόdź Kaliska. “The travelers are going back to their kingdoms,” I explained to them, as well as to myself. And then I ran in front of the house to wave to the lucky people in the train windows, who were being carried toward a destination unknown to me but chosen by them. The road was a dream, a promise of adventure.

  My great-grandfather Jan, father of Grandma Mania and all her numerous brothers and sisters, worked on the railroad. He came and went in uniform, which he wore as if he had been born in it, although in reality he was born into a household of domestic servants in a miserable little village on the outskirts of Koluszki. As a child, he took the cows to pasture and knew hunger. As a young employee on the Imperial Railroad (called Zheleznodorozhnaia in Russian), he traveled the thousands of kilometers through the heart of Russia to the Far East. He went there several times and often delayed his return for reasons other than work. His wife, Rόzia, always welcomed him home. She gave him eleven children. Five survived. The eldest was Grandma Mania.

  Sometime in the thirties, my grandfather had built with his own hands the house we would later visit, one story, made of wood, near the station. Even though he earned a good living, he must have put money aside for years. He chose all the wood personally, measured, ordered, and seasoned the timber himself. His first grandson, my father, sat on his lap, playing with ticket punchers and an old-fashioned pocket watch with a fob and a long chain, big enough to count the minutes remaining before the arrival or departure of all the trains. Years later, my great-grandfather used to sit for hours on a little bench in front of the house, in his polished boots and official cap with its visor and its gold braid, as if he were still a conductor. He wrote long columns of numbers in a little notebook, with a fountain pen, grumbling all the while. I was his first great-granddaughter. He used to let me pull on his gray mustache and wrinkle his freshly ironed uniform.

  His wife, Rόzia, survived him, a woman with a thin gray braid and a dry face, wrinkled and darkened by the sun and by hours and hours in the forest. She showed me where to find mushrooms. For her, mushroom season was a holiday that never lost its appeal, and I’m sure that the pleasure of watching and waiting for the perfect rainy autumn appreciably prolonged her life. She lived past ninety.

  Her daughter, Grandma Mania, lived for others. Her enormous family, with its dozens of cousins and distant relations, relied on her. She knew their troubles, their diets, their problems with their children, and their financial situations. She dried their tears, pampered them, and catered to them in every way. Grandma was always on my side, even if that meant contradicting my father, her favorite son. But he was the one who could do no wrong.

  She made miles of noodles, thousands of steamed meatballs and plum dumplings, and mushrooms of every variety, fresh, marinated, and dried. When nobody came to see her, she wept. She embroidered wonderfully, with colored silk threads, little animals and birds and our initials on schoolbags. She wove carpets with a pattern of autumn leaves. She had blue eyes and would take me away into the fields beyond the roads. Sometimes, on Sundays, I went to Mass with her. And after church, to street fairs, where she bought me cotton candy and rings the color of rubies or sapphires. She refused me nothing.

  On Perłowa Street, they lived in a world that was as plain and simple as a kitchen floor scrubbed once a week by hand, as a front hall lined with buckets of water and rubber boots, mousetraps and milk cans. The milk came straight from the cows, the vegetables out of the garden. We picked apples off the trees or listened to the rain. We looked for meaning in nature, not in books. Nothing was concealed in the lining of daily life there.

  My father was away on business more and more. And everything was noticeably different when he was gone.

  My mother took me to Kazimierz, on the banks of the Vistula, a quaint little village in a valley where time had stopped. The marketplace, an open square surrounded by Renaissance buildings, with an ancient wooden well in the center, looked like a painting. Visible nearby were a parish church and a convent, the mysterious ruins of the old castle, and the Mount of Three Crosses. When we were there, I used to play with other children who were on vacation like me, in the woods on a hill far from the roads. There, among the ferns, in beds of pine needles, or moss, on the paths and in the bushes, we sometimes came across broken bits of stone. We used to piece them together, trying to reassemble a bas-relief of hands, birds, books. With handfuls of leaves, we wiped off remnants of writing in a strange, incomprehensible language. Someone said there used to be a Jewish cemetery here.

  I didn’t know any Jews.

  It seems that the movie house with the vaulted wooden ceiling in the same town on the Vistula, where I went to children’s matinees, had been their church. They spoke of it as “the synagogue.” I had trouble remembering the word. Paintings and watercolors that artists sold in the marketplace were full of silhouettes of men dressed in black. They all had beards and hats, and their faces were framed by little round curls. I saw nostalgic longing in their eyes.

  At home I rarely heard the word “Jew.” Only from my father, and then, always in a mocking tone of voice. To him, Jews were the reason, vague but ubiquitous, for everything that didn’t go as it was supposed to. He thought they ran everything and deprived others of the goods and privileges that were their due. He held them responsible for every unpopular law, for whatever probl
ems he currently had at work, for the scarcity of new tires for his automobile. Sometimes he pointed with his index finger at certain people on TV, as if he knew how to pick them out from the others. Them. The others. It was unthinkable that any of them might be found frequenting not only our house but our friends.

  I did not understand what any of that meant. I had never met a Jew.

  My parents separated when I was seven. I didn’t know why my father left us. For a long time, I put his slippers out for him, by the front door, certain he would come back.

  In front of my friends, I was too ashamed to admit he did not live with us anymore and pretended he had just gone away for a little while. The fact that he was so well known and everyone admired him so much made the situation more delicate. The principal of my school always referred to me as “the broadcaster Tuszyński’s daughter.” This only served to heighten the mystery and shame of his absence. Every word out of his mouth was like a message from an oracle.

  I was jealous of the dresses that other little girls got to wear for their First Communion, with their long white skirts and lace, their pristine white gloves and their wreaths. I was jealous of the procession they walked in, lined by garlands of May flowers, and of the words they got to pronounce as they bowed: “Holy, holy, holy”—genuflect—“Lord God Almighty…” I did not understand why I was being excluded. But I never looked very hard for a reason. As if somehow, deep down, I knew it was no concern of mine. I was very friendly at the time with another little girl who did not go to church either, or to catechism class. One of the games we used to play consisted of burying bits of colored glass in the ground. We also founded a correspondence club by which we communicated daily through secret letters sealed with colored wax and the imprimatur of a genuine seal. We answered the questions ourselves, the first ones and the important ones.

  We loved the parades on May Day. There were several industries in our immediate neighborhood: the factory that made Marcin Kasprzak radios, the one that made Rosa Luxemburg lamps, and Polfa, which manufactured medicine. On the first of May, bands from those factories started playing marches early in the morning, and all the employees, in their Sunday best, lined the streets with flags and banners flying. The mood was solemn yet full of enthusiasm. We assembled in front of the school in our Young Pioneer uniforms with white kneesocks that were always brand-new. They chose the oldest for the color guard, plus four volunteers to carry the huge portrait of Maxim Gorky, for whom our school was named. “Mankind—It Resounds Proudly.” Later in the day, we marched with all the others in front of the official platform facing the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science, an architectural showpiece shaped like a wedding cake, which the Soviet Union gave to our capital as a gift. We sang the song “Celebrating May”; we shouted “Hooray for the first of May!”; joyfully, we waved our pennants and our big red crepe-paper flowers. Then, with the satisfaction of our duty done, we all ate ice cream, vanilla bambinos.