Her Mother's Daughter Read online

  As it turned out, I didn’t need it. Anna was met at the terminal by all her friends—Keren, Marie, Krystyna, and Marie’s husband Stanislaw, who brought his car—and they gathered me up along with her and took me to her house. Stanislaw was yelling, arguing, but the women ignored him. They took me to Anna’s nicely furnished two-room apartment; I was black from the soot of the journey: they undressed me, and drew a bath. They took my clothes and put them in a little hand-run washing machine, and hung them up neatly to dry. Stanislaw was still yelling, but when I was clean and dressed, I opened a liter of scotch and put it on the table. His roaring settled down to an amiable growl, and the women and he and I all sat around Anna’s table drinking—none of us able to communicate easily in any language whatever.

  I stayed with Anna for two weeks. I saw her many scars, and heard about her operations. We spoke with a combination of sign language and a French-Polish dictionary. She took me around Warsaw and she and her friends told me about the tragedies of their lives—and all had, indeed, been tragic. Then I went off on a train to Kraków, with their anxiety hovering around me. They had managed, by pulling strings, to get me a hotel in Kraków, but only for two nights. What would happen to me then? They insisted that I write, but how? I said I would write “Je suis bien,” and they could look up the words in the French-Polish dictionary. But on the train I met another instant friend, a beautiful, elegant young man named Adam, who took me home to his parents’ house. They were conveniently away on a trip. Then Adam and his friends set about trying to find the particular Zmegrud of my grandmothers. There are many Zmegruds in Poland, but I knew this one was near Kraków.

  After some days, they found a map that showed it. We spent a day standing in line to buy railroad tickets for Zmegrud, and another standing in line at a bank, so I could buy money. Then we went, early in the morning, six o’clock, by trolley, trolley, and a train. Zmegrud is less than a hundred miles from Kraków, but it took nearly four hours, standing all the way, to reach it. We had a coffee in the train station, a filthy place with little to eat—like other shops in Poland—and wandered around the town. There were a couple of nearly empty shops and a church. We tried to find the priest, but the church was locked and no one answered at the parish house door. Adam asked around for the road to Zmegrud, and we set off.

  It was a beautiful August day, the pale land flat and green around us, few houses and no people in sight. We walked along a broad dirt road at an easy pace, conversing in the stilted way people do when one of them has learned a language from textbooks and language classes. Adam spoke English but I was never sure he understood what I said. Still, I jabbered, happy to be able to speak after my long near-silence. We were lovers, at my initiation, and happy.

  Then, from a side road hidden by high wheat fields, a man emerged. I was old enough to realize that he was very young, probably only in his early twenties. But I paused when I saw him, and he stopped dead and his mouth opened as he stared at me. He was very tan and as wrinkled as newly washed linen. He had few teeth. His eyes were pale blue and empty. And he looked at me as if I were of another species, the way we might look at a six-foot-five Sikh in Manhattan, complete with red fitted jacket, white sash, scimitar and turban. I was forty-five, and the best-looking I’d ever been; I was thin, too. I was wearing a pale blue soft safari suit that I often took on hard journeys, a cheap straw hat with a stylish brim, and sunglasses, and I carried my heavy bag of camera equipment over my shoulder. But his expression suggested I was a goddess offering him a visitation.

  And I thought: so that is what a peasant is. Or anyway, what peasant meant to my grandmother. Subhuman. The man may have been intelligent enough—he certainly knew crops and weather, and animal husbandry—things I didn’t know. But intelligence didn’t appear on his gaping face; I could not imagine him speaking. He was a creature immured in blue sky, the wind, wheat fields, shaky wood-fenced yards full of dung. Circumscribed within nature, and benighted, benighted. I was shocked by him. I was shocked that the word subhuman crossed my mind. So this is what they meant, the old ones, when they talked of peasants.

  The moment passed. He crossed the road and we walked on ahead of him. We didn’t look back. We arrived at Zmegrud and wandered its two streets, looked at the few houses, the one closed shop, the church, also locked. But by asking, Adam discovered a man who claimed Dafna Pasek was his mother’s mother’s cousin. He took us home, where his wife and sons welcomed us like visiting royalty. They gave us a meal I could barely eat because the parents stayed in the kitchen, and I knew Adam and I were eating their portion. The sons—four of them—had been educated under the socialist government and were all professional men. Only three were there: the fourth, the pride of his mother, was a papal functionary stationed in Rome. The centerpiece of her room was a gift from him, a small model of the Vatican that could be plugged into a wall socket, and lighted up. They listened to my tale, through Adam.

  They told us we were not really in Zmegrud. The old Zmegrud had been several miles down the road. But we had no way to get there and there was no reason to go there, they said, for there was nothing there. Zmegrud had been a Jewish town. I don’t know if it was a Jewish town when my grandmothers lived there, or if it was mixed then, or if it became a Jewish town in the decades after they left. But it was a Jewish town when the Nazis came. The Nazis collected all the people of Zmegrud from their houses and marched them to a valley deep in the mountains. Standing behind the two hundred or so people—children, women, men—the Nazis forced them to dig a hole. Then they shot them so they fell into the hole. It is said that some were not dead when the low-ranking Nazi soldiers filled up the hole with dirt and poured lime over it—lime speeds decomposition. But no one knows for sure.

  What everyone knows and still remembers is the explosion that occurred a few days later. The lime, they said: there was too much, or it bubbled too much. The explosion blew up the burial pit, sending bits of limbs across the countryside for miles around. Children wandering in the mountains would come across a hand or a bit of leg. One found half a head, with an ear. Pieces of human bodies littered the mountains and the villages. The old folks had returned to the main room, where we are eating, to tell this story. Their faces are white and drawn, even now, thirty years later. Their voices have the tense hush of people who speak the unspeakable.

  I hold myself in restraint, knowing the continuing anti-Semitism of Poles. But the horror in the faces of the old folks is not moderated by relief at the fact that the feet and hands were Jewish feet and hands. The old folks are probably not much older than I, although they would not believe that. They were only children when the Nazis came. But their parents may not have opposed the Nazi plan to solve finally the problem presented to Christians by the existence of Jews. Still, a foot hurled miles, landing at your front door, with one toe missing, and the heel bashed in from the impact of landing at such velocity—well, that would be a joke if you did not have to think about the people who arranged the situation that caused this joke. The breathlessness, the pale drawn faces, the hushed voices arose from remembering that this thing was done by people, by humans. Of the same race as oneself: the human race.

  The Nazis killed one-third of the population of Poland and 99 percent of its livestock; they burned Warsaw to the ground, and destroyed other cities before they left. All that is left of them now is the prison they used to interrogate and hold people in the center of Warsaw. It has been left as it was: the Poles understand monuments. The Jewish ghetto has been covered over with grass and concrete, and holds a park in which parents wheel their infants in carriages, and children play. They are not Jewish children.

  4

  THE PEOPLE OF ZMEGRUD were annihilated in the fall of 1943; in May of that year, my grandmother died. So it makes no sense to talk about survival. The others were dead long before that: Dafna Pasek in 1937; her husband, my father’s father Stefan Dabrowski, in 1939, the year Hitler set out on his triumphal project designed to ensure the supremacy of the Third
Reich for a thousand years. Michael Brez intended to return to Poland in 1914 and settle down to be a gentleman—his true profession. Unfortunately, he died the year before. Or perhaps that wasn’t unfortunate, given what happened in 1914.

  The only photograph of Frances as a young woman is her wedding picture. She has a round placid face; my own resembles it a little, except the placidity got lost over the generations. She is small and delicate and beautifully dressed, but she seems stiff beside her taller, thinner, arrogant young husband. He has something fierce in his aspect that reminds me of myself. And he loved to drink and laugh, to enjoy himself, something I also identify with.

  But the next photograph is shocking. They are older: three of their children appear in it with them, so it must have been taken about 1907, perhaps just after Frances lost her fourth child, which was born dead. Wally looks to be near two. And that arrogant man has become pure tyrant: his chin and mouth are set and thick, his eyes glare outward as if what he saw before him day by day was outrageously unworthy of his glance. And Frances! How can it be I never saw this before? She is a little thicker, a little older, but only about twenty-six, after all. It is a side of my grandmother I never saw or imagined. For there are lines of anxiety in her forehead and her mouth has a hard set. She looks enraged, fixed in anger.

  Still, I guess there are worse things than anger, because the next pictures I have of her show her old, worn, defeated. She is only in her forties and fifties, but her body has become shapeless, her hair thin and grey and pulled back in a little bun at the nape of her neck. She wears cheap cotton housedresses and she smiles, but there is no life in her face. Whatever spirit she had is gone.

  Not my mother’s though. It is in the pictures of her as a child that defeat and terror dominate. Her old face is disappointed and angry, but not defeated, and in between, well, there she is, a young flapper, hamming it up for the camera, posed coyly with one well-shod foot on the running board of my father’s first car, an Olds V-8 or, hair streaming, arm in arm with Miss Poland of 1927, in a bathing suit.

  Perhaps it is in my genes, the way I feel now. My grandmother was a fucking saint, and I’m turning into one too. Renunciation: it’s not a fate I admire. But it is inevitable when there is nothing you can have that can ease your pain, you stop wanting anything. For my mother, for my grandmother, the moment when wanting stopped was the same: May 26, 1913. On that day, my grandmother was widowed, and she and my mother began their sojourn in hell. My mother says, “My father died when I was nine years old,” as if she had not told me that hundreds of times before. She utters the statement with a tragic import—like someone saying a loved one was living in Hiroshima in the summer of 1945—as if she is saying the world ended then. As hers did.

  III

  1

  WHEN THE KIDS AND I first moved into Pani Nowak’s house on Powell Avenue, my mother came to help me move in. She unwrapped dishes from newspaper and washed them, dried them, piled them on the counters until I had papered the shelves where they would stand; she hung clothes in closets. She was sponging off my few china knickknacks while Arden and I unpacked our bathroom supplies and tried to squeeze them in the medicine chest. Arden spotted a thing hanging from a hook beside the bathroom door.

  “What’s that, Mommy?”

  I peered. It was leather, a strap of some sort, about two inches wide and fourteen or so inches long. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a razor strop. The former tenants must have left it behind. We can throw it out,” I suggested.

  “Oh, no! It’s beautiful!” Arden breathed. It was the carving she liked. The entire surface had been decorated.

  “Oh,” I said absently, and forgot it.

  It was hours later when my mother came staggering down the hall (I could hear she was upset by her walk) into the kitchen, where I was lining the shelves, sitting on a counter, contorted around a cabinet, trying to get the damned paper to fit.

  “Anastasia!” she cried, and I turned and saw her white face. “What is that thing in the bathroom?”

  I stared at her. Then understood. “It’s a razor strop, I think, Mom.”

  “Why do you have it!”

  I shrugged. “It was here. Left behind. Arden likes it. She thinks it’s pretty.”

  She stared at me, incredulous, angry, but said nothing. I imagined her refusing to use the bathroom, and considered throwing the thing away. But Arden liked it, and Arden had to come first for me, even though I understood.

  Business was going well for Michael Brez and in the fall of 1910, soon after Isabella entered first grade, he moved his family a few blocks, to Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. The new apartment was also a railroad flat, but the living room was a little bigger and they had a kitchen all to themselves. There were some new pieces of furniture in the living room, carved wood with mother-of-pearl inlays. Bella would tiptoe into the room when the servant girl wasn’t looking and run her fingers over the smooth cool nacre, tracing the patterns of its colors. There were new lace curtains at the window, but Bella rarely stood inside their comforting obscurity. She was a big girl now, she went to school.

  She went every day, and dutifully copied what the other children were doing, but when she left, she tried to push the thought of school out of her mind. She never did homework; she didn’t know such a thing existed. But she did know that she was stupid, and that the teacher and the children knew she was stupid, and sometimes she thought they made fun of her. The thing was they didn’t know how stupid she was, for she was able to copy them. They didn’t know she had no understanding at all of what she was copying. She longed for a friend, and whenever Momma gave her a penny, she would buy candy and take it to school with her to share it with some girl or other, just so they would talk to her. Then they did, but only as long as the candy lasted. They didn’t like her because she was stupid.

  She wasn’t good at anything. She couldn’t even cry. Whenever one of the children cried, Poppa would laugh and hoot at them: “Louder! Louder! Cry louder! What about the rest of you? Whoever cries the loudest will get a nickel.” And all the children would yell and screech, and Bella would too, but she only won once. Only one thing could she do, and that was get to the couch before the others, and nestle in her corner. There wasn’t room for all four of them, and the one who got there last had to sit on the floor. Usually Eddie was the one left out, but he didn’t care. And he was hardly ever home anyway. After school, Eddie and Wally would go out and play, every day. Eddie went to the playground, and Wally played ball against the wall of the corner stationery store. She was glad they had moved, because the new stationery store was Pani Kowalski’s and she had a boy of four, just like Wally, and she let them play there. Sometimes Bella could find a little girl to jump rope with, but most days, she just went home. The servant girl was always snapping at her for hanging around the kitchen, so Bella would go to her room and sit on the floor staring out the window at the sooty brick buildings, the fire escapes and laundry lines that faced it. She would think about Anastasia and where she was and what she was doing. She wondered what Anastasia got for Christmas, which Momma said was coming soon. Bella liked Christmas. There were always lots of people around, and they put a tree right in the living room, with little candles flickering on it. Momma would light the gas lamps and they would all sit in the living room and look at it. Last Christmas, Bella had received a present, no, three presents: a blue dress that Momma made, with a beautiful dark blue satin sash; and hair ribbons to match it; and a new set of underwear. She wondered what she would get this Christmas.

  It was nice when people came. Then Momma smiled, and laughed, and talked, going around to everyone with plates of hard-boiled eggs and chruściki and sliced kielbasa with beets and horseradish, and everyone smiled at Momma and told her how good she was and what a fine cook. And Poppa was happy, he was laughing and talking, Poppa was always talking. He talked about things Bella didn’t understand, about President Taft and Theodore Roosevelt and Boss Murphy, who lived in Tammany Hall. She tried to p
icture what kind of house that must be, to be called a hall—could you have a long narrow house? And Poppa explained to his ignorant friends all about the Right Brothers, and something called radio. Bella wondered dimly how Poppa knew so much. Momma didn’t know about these things. Bella gazed at her father in awe.

  Sometimes the grown-ups would sit at the big round table under the fringed gas lamp playing cards, pinochle, late into the night, and drinking and talking and laughing. And sometimes, when Poppa began to talk about the things he knew about, he would pound the table with his fist so hard the glasses trembled. Then she trembled too, remembering something she had forgotten, but she knew the others knew it, because they would all nod their heads at Poppa and say, “Yes, Michał, you are right, certainly. That is true.” Just the way Momma used to. Momma didn’t do that anymore. Poppa was a big man, but Bella didn’t like to think about him.

  Momma didn’t speak much, but she didn’t care if they were in the room. Many times she would pick up little Euga and sit her on her lap and say my dear, “Moja kochana” and kiss her. And if Bella slipped onto the couch when there was company, and Poppa didn’t notice, Momma would pretend she didn’t see her either. And when she was walking around serving people, she would sometimes slip Bella a chruściki or a piece of strudel behind her back so Poppa wouldn’t see. Sometimes, when Poppa wasn’t around and Momma was baking and cooking, she would mutter to herself about his peasant friends.

  Momma baked and cooked all the time even when they didn’t have company, late into the night. When they didn’t have company, Poppa didn’t come home. Momma said he was bowling, and Bella’s mind darted to a bowl she wanted to forget. She pushed away the pictures that invaded her mind, of Poppa hurling bowls of food at walls. She didn’t understand why he wanted to do that. But she knew she was stupid. When Poppa didn’t come home, Bella would sit in the kitchen watching Momma bake great roasts of meat, or stir a huge pot of soup. It smelled so good she wanted some, but Momma always said she had to wait until tomorrow. Sometimes Bella would wake in the night and smell the delicious aroma of babka or pie, and would hop up and creep down the hall to make sure Poppa wasn’t there, and then run into the kitchen. Momma would give her a chruściki as soon as they were cool; or let her lick the custard left in the bowl after she’d made a lemon meringue pie.