The Upright Heart

by Julia Ain-Krupa

  In an instant she is on a train moving away from the city into the countryside, two newborn lambs by her side. One of them is crying for its mother, and whenever she tries to offer him comfort, he just cries louder, tears big enough to fill a glass slipping between the wooden slats of the train car’s door, stretching wide before the vast green world, falling into the passing landscape, disappearing down into the forbidden, fertile earth.

  XIII

  Anna had only just arrived in Kraków when the streets were renamed. Even the town square was now called Adolf Hitler Platz. As if the country had been stolen from itself, now hiding until the storm would pass. And what if it never did? Then Polish words would be absorbed deep into the earth, sounds blurred and covered. Murmurs emitted in this language built for secrets. These sounds, they roll off the tongue like an endless whisper.

  The governor-general of occupied Poland had chosen Kraków as his home base, in part due to the city’s Germanic flare. So much beauty here, he said to himself and to his many colleagues. Such opportunity. So, so many Jews. The Jewish population made up roughly a quarter of the city’s population, and so he fantasized about what their removal could do for this otherwise beautiful town. There was a plan set in motion, though it would never be completely fulfilled. Men stood at his altar, and whatever he said, went.

  Niklas might have been the last man you would imagine to be found working under such a high ranking-official, but here he was, sleeping in a room in Wawel Castle, overlooking the Wisła River, which ran through this beautiful city of Kraków, drifting past the ghetto walls, rough within and perfect without.

  Raised in a small German town in the north, he had never left his village until Hitler came to power. He couldn’t even read or write, but it was his skill for sweet-talking, his talent for charming people, that helped him to move quickly through the ranks of the new regime. First a local landowner sent him into the Wehrmacht as a soldier, and, before long, Niklas became a close confidant of the governor-general of occupied Poland. This job suited him better than any other he could have ever imagined. It looked clean and respectable on the outside, but there was still plenty of dirty work involved. Having lived the majority of his life isolated on a farm, Niklas had raised countless herds of cows, honing his skills, learning the best ways to care for and fatten the animals before slaughter. He was made for this work.

  Though he had spent so much of his young life alone with his parents on the farm, Niklas had a way with people that was unmatched. It was as if he could see into them, identify their greatest fears and their greatest desires, and from that point of understanding, anything was possible.

  As a child, he was terrified every time his father prepared the animals for slaughter, but as he grew older and became man of the house, he came to enjoy the contrasts of building life up only to tear it down. There was nothing like the feeling of raising an animal, knowing all along that whenever he wanted, he could simply kill it with a single blow. There was an unknown pleasure that he experienced when encountering another being’s fear. This was power, he long ago realized, an excitement like none other he had ever known.

  It all made perfect sense now, Niklas thought, stretching his tan arms in the early morning sun. A faint haze was rising over the river on this summer morning, just as it often did until the strong afternoon light could penetrate the seemingly ever-present soft pink fog. Then there would be a stunning clarity to the day that would last until early evening, when the miasma would descend across the city once again. Kraków was like a dream.

  His time on the farm, his father’s brutality whenever he made a mistake with the animals or the barn, the thrashings that he took as a child, they all helped him to become the man he was today. And when his father beat his mother, calling her names and forcing her to clean on her hands and knees, Niklas learned to fight his weaknesses and resist the temptations of the heart. He learned quickly that it didn’t pay to feel attached to anyone. He tried to stay close to the cycles of life. It was strangely comforting to accept the fact that death was always on the other side.

  And when his father died, he wept like a baby, hiding inside the linen closet for days. His mother implored him to open the door, take a drink, eat a little bread, but Niklas adamantly refused. When he came out, he was a different man. He made certain that from that point on, nothing would ever make him cry again.

  XIV

  It was too late for Anna to go back once the job had begun. She thought about it more than once, about leaving the whole thing behind, but she could never move herself to do it. She felt she had no choice. At least this way she could help out her father, support her mother and Wojtuś in the countryside, buy real stockings with a seam up the back.

  She had lived in Kraków for only one week when she began working for the Nazi Party. She was hired first as a secretary in town, in part because she was young and pretty, but also because her German was excellent. Here was one advantage of growing up in multicultural Łódź. Now was the time to boast one’s German-language skills and to conceal one’s knowledge of Yiddish. Less than two years later Anna was given a job cleaning in Wawel Castle. She would stay for one year before returning to work in town. It didn’t matter, she told herself one sunny day, while passing a gang of young Polish laborers standing on the street in their Baudienst uniforms. This was just a moment in time, another step on Poland’s road to nowhere. She had become a member of the lost herd, working to survive. Never in her life would she admit to another human being just how grateful she was for the distraction, despite her absolute hatred of the job, the people, the cheap uniform. Why had she gotten the job? Why, out of all of the beautiful and smart and stupid candidates, had she been chosen to have more money—to clean the desks, to make the coffee, to be very still, to listen and to obey? Where was the happiness in luck? In being the chosen one? Why is any witch ever given an advantage over any other? No, sometimes Anna wished she had never, ever begun.

  Every morning she would wake up earlier than she had ever done for school. The strange half-light at this time of day reminded her of important holidays as a child. Those were the days when excitement pulled her body from sleep, and nothing could keep her down. Times were different now.

  There were the long hours spent washing, folding, dusting, and cleaning the floors of marble staircases so grand that they could supply the whole world with heavenly imaginings. There was a grand ball, a room full of dancing couples, in her mind. It was a perfect gathering in which the past was resurrected; only now it would be better. Poles and Jews danced together, served by a German wait staff that wore white gloves to offset the pale marble staircase. They supplied drinks and said “yes” and “thank you” whenever necessary. Jewish women would display their dark, curly hair, and blond Polish dames would flatter them by saying, “Oh, if only my limp hair would do the same.”

  This was a game Anna played whenever she became really angry or bored, for in the world of her imagination she could do whatever she wanted with the German waiters, especially when she was in a particularly witchy mood. She could force them to wear masks that resembled pig snouts, push them to their knees, even use the most preciously designed riding crop normally reserved for the local nobleman’s horse to whip them on their wild pony behinds while they served drinks.

  As pretty as this ball may have been, as many exquisite dresses as may have been present, constructed like live replica confectionary delights—women as cream puffs and such—and as many lovely waltzes and handsome men may have offered her their perfect, most masculine hands, pulling her out onto the dance floor for “one last turn,” Anna’s imaginings were neither delicate nor kind. But they did help pass the time.

  Days went like this: First she received orders from the Polish head housekeeper. Then she cleaned the hallways or the first floor with three young women and took a break for lunch. Finally the group split up to clean various parts of the castle. Although the governor-general and his family had a trusted staff of German servants
(with exception of their house twenty kilometers outside of town, which was cared for mostly by Polish housekeepers), Anna and her friend Maryna—who, like her, spoke excellent German and was fifteen-years-old passing for seventeen—were chosen to clean for Niklas, the governor-general’s close subordinate, as he lived on the Wisła River side of the estate, in a building away from the governor-general’s home. This was the most interesting part of Anna’s shift, because Niklas was almost never around, and the girls had some freedom to drift through the rooms and let their minds wander. Sometimes Anna played another game with herself, spying on him or snooping through his things. You could learn about people by searching through their possessions. Like how the boss folded the cuffs of his shirtsleeves just so, as if always preparing for perfection, as if life did not provide him with enough time to crease his shirt cuff in anticipation of … what? In the privacy of his castle, this monster became more like a man.

  There were so many ways to see into a person’s soul. Invisibility was the key to knowing another man’s heart. Here, for the first time in her life (and never, ever to be repeated), Anna learned as best she could how to hide in the shadows. It took effort, but she found ways to achieve it. She pinned back her shiny black hair, slumped her shoulders (a habit that proved difficult to emerge from), wore no makeup, and donned the hausfrau uniform worn by all the other housekeepers. Hers was always at least one size too big.

  Some days she worked on the boss’s rooms, shining his shoes and lining up his white shirts so that there was not more than one centimeter’s space left between each hanger. She had heard that Niklas’s quirks were nothing compared to the governor-general’s. He sometimes made his housekeepers rewash his one hundred uniforms in just one day. She also heard that he had a habit of obsessively cleaning his nails. Once he actually whipped his son for bringing a caterpillar into the bedroom. Yes, the governor-general’s wife and children lived in the castle as well. They enjoyed lavish banquets prepared by an Austrian chef who had been imported from Vienna just for them. They spent weekends in a villa outside Kraków, where from the top of a hill they could see the rolling fields of Małopolska running away from them. The children played in forests and in streams. For them, life was beautiful.

  Working at Wawel Castle at this time made Anna feel like a cloistered witness to the end of a world. It had ended already, in the destruction of her family home, in the door that had been closed on Łódź, in the train ride with her father from the countryside to Kraków, in the faces of her mother and Wojtuś as the family divided and went their separate ways. It ended in the crease that formed so early between her brows. But here in Wawel Castle, proud heritage sight for the Polish people, where the dragon’s lair still rested beside the Wisła, the old world died. You could walk twenty minutes and see people being cordoned off, you could share a sandwich with Maryna, laugh with her or cry, you could tell her a secret, and tomorrow she could be gone.

  Maryna’s real name was Miriam. With her stunning green eyes and electric smile, day-by-day she lived a secret life. She had acquired documents stating that she was a Pole, and she lived with a Catholic family in town. When she changed her name, she learned Catholic prayers and did what she could to erase Jewish life from her memory. But you can’t obliterate who you are. While she scrubbed the marble steps, her mother and sisters moved into the ghetto. On days when Maryna was dismissed early from work, she would visit her family using documents that endorsed her as a Polish nurse in the Apteka, one of the few places of gentile presence in the ghetto. She was able to keep this up until the first deportation, at which point access to the ghetto became more restricted, and the core group of nurses identifiable. But until the gates were closed she smuggled bread, medicine, and news.

  There may have been a few other Jewish women cleaning at Wawel Castle, sweeping the walkways or scrubbing the façade. If there were, nobody really knew. Did they have work papers and live in the ghetto? Did they slide off their armbands and move from one world safely into the next? Were they, like Maryna, hiding out in town? Who was this woman? Who was the other? Who knows the truth of everyone’s story? Even in an era of great restriction, there were always exceptions to every rule. And so many secrets. For always there was a Jew hiding in the light of day.

  During this period of time, when she was new to Wawel and Maryna was often by her side, Anna vomited at least once a day. She would just go about her business, working, and then suddenly she would run to the toilet to retch. Luckily this only lasted for a few months and nobody ever knew about it, not even Maryna. Anna would have been ashamed for her to know. Maryna never complained about her circumstances, and the only possible evidence of her suffering came once a month when she experienced terrible period pain. Anna would always know that it was coming, because suddenly Maryna’s face would take on the palest pallor and she would begin dropping things left and right. Once it was so bad that she fainted on the boss’s bedroom floor. Anna dragged Maryna’s body to the bathroom so she could pour cold water onto her face, but Maryna still bled heavily onto her uniform and onto the pale-yellow-carpeted floor. The two risked getting into trouble by spending an extra hour cleaning. Finally Anna tied a white apron backward around Maryna’s uniform.

  Their boss, Niklas, was not a good man by anyone’s standards, but he was good at what he did. He once thrashed a dog to death on Wawel Square just for begging him for food. This event interrupted Niklas’s address to a group of young soldiers. He said that the murder was meant to teach them all a lesson in obedience. Anna watched the whole thing from a courtyard window. She could see the excitement in his eyes.

  Anna saw it all begin. It started when they were cleaning his sleeping quarters on a summer’s day. The morning had been sunny and beautiful, but now that it was afternoon the sky was overcome with darkness and it began to storm. The head housekeeper came rushing into the room, hair wet and matted, apron undone, and told them to move on quickly. Niklas was on his way, and would want to enter his room in peace. So the girls, who had never even met him, quickly straightened the bed sheet corners.

  They had just shut the massive bay windows (it took two girls to open or close just one) and began drying the floors when the door was thrown open and Niklas came rushing in. He had blood on his right hand and on his rain-soaked white shirt (he never wore a uniform), and he screamed for the girls to get out, while he marched into the bathroom and slammed the door. From their perch at the top of the stairs, they heard curses and the sound of glass breaking. They didn’t know what to do or where to go, so they just sat there attentively. At first they were both trembling, but after a few minutes of silence they began to relax, Anna braiding Maryna’s thick, chestnut hair. Minutes passed before Niklas stormed out of the room and down the stairs past them, marching wildly, his whole body tense and jumping as he walked, frightening the girls so much that Anna dropped the hairpin and watched it fall down the central spiral of the marble stairs. No one could hear that pin drop in the cacophony of sounds. There was the wild thunder barreling down on the city, which almost totally drowned out the sound of Niklas shouting at several SS guards, who were standing outside in the rain.

  When Niklas came back upstairs, he was relaxed. He walked slowly up the stairs and even dared to smile, asking the girls if one of them could bring him some fresh soap and a towel. Anna ran to an adjacent building to get the things he requested, discreetly picking the hairpin off the floor as she went. It took her some time to find the kind of soap he liked, one that had no fragrance and was clear and brown, like the simple kind used for washing clothes. It must have been at least five minutes before Anna came back upstairs, because by this point Maryna was no longer sitting there.

  The door to Niklas’s room was ajar, but there was no one inside. The air was heavy, but Anna assumed it was a result of the dampness left over from the rain. The door to the bathroom was also slightly open, and in his dresser mirror Anna could see a reflection of the bathroom mirror. She was surprised by her own quiet respons
e as she watched Maryna sit calmly on the edge of the tub. She did not breathe more quickly as she witnessed Maryna clean the wound on Niklas’s hand and then bandage it with a strip of cloth that she must have ripped off of his shirt. She did not drop her things—the towel and the brown soap, as she watched him bow his head, as if in submission, and lean over to kiss Maryna on the lips. She did not quiver when she saw Maryna smile sweetly, or when Niklas turned to close the door, catching sight of Anna watching. She wondered if Maryna knew that there were tears in his eyes.

  *

  There is only one way to make pastry dough so that it is light and fluffy enough to bake. First you beat the eggs clockwise and then counterclockwise, and that way the result will be the most delicate and delightful cloud puffs you have ever eaten. This is Bolesław’s role in the household on Saturday evenings, when he and Elżbieta bake a cake. He whips the eggs. He kneads the dough. Sometimes they make szarlotka (apple cake), and at other times, a chocolate torte, such as for birthdays or holidays. The rest of the time they make apple cake, or else Elżbieta’s special cookies filled with rose-petal jam, which taste like a piece of heaven.

  Elżbieta hums a tune remembered from her piano-playing days. It might be Chopin. On her face is the same secret smile that is always there. It is the smile evident in her eyebrows and in her lips, in the way that her cheeks turn upward, toward rosy thoughts and better days.