Dobryd

by Ann Charney

  “Your mother’s friend Halka lived right over there. It was one of the grandest houses in Dobryd. That stone lion is all that’s left. I remember there were two of them. They stood like sentries on either side of the door that led into the inner courtyard.

  “Halka was your mother’s closest friend. When you were born, it was already war time, but Halka managed to make her way from Paris to Dobryd to see your mother and have a look at you. It was a mad thing to do, since there was a good chance that she would never make it back to Paris. She was wild and strong-willed and very courageous.

  “Your mother and she became friends in secondary school. But we all knew of her long before your mother brought her home. Her father was the town’s richest citizen as well as its meanest. He was a widower with four children, of whom Halka was the youngest. It was said in the town that the children might as well have been total orphans for all the attention their father gave them. When he remarried he chose a woman who shared his passion for money. Halka, like her sisters and brothers, grew up neglected, but of all the children she was treated most harshly because of her rebellious spirit.

  “As a child she often ran away from home, and her capture would always be followed by a humiliating walk through the streets of the town with her father holding her by her collar. Everyone in the town pitied her but since they all feared her father, no one intervened. After she became friends with your mother, our parents, knowing her situation at home, practically adopted her. She was constantly with us, and for your mother she became more of a sister than either I or Celia ever were. They were the same age and had many ideas in common. They often closed themselves off from the rest of us in that secret world they shared.

  “Sometime during one of those long conversations of theirs, Halka must have told your mother of a discovery she had made and what she planned to do with it.

  “Since childhood she had heard the stories everyone in the town told of her father’s enormous wealth. She herself had never seen any of it, nor did she ever benefit from it. When it came to money her father regarded his children with the same suspicion as his servants, convinced that everyone was conspiring to rob him. He was really quite mad.

  “Halka began spying on him. At first she did it without any special motive, simply for spite. When the tenants came to pay their rents she would watch them and her father from some hidden corner. The house which she hated and from which she had always fled at every opportunity now began to fascinate her. She was convinced that the secret she sought to discover was to be found within its walls.

  “I learned all this many years later. In those long nights in the loft, when we could not sleep because of cold and hunger, your mother and I became closer than we had ever been before the war. It was during these sleepless nights that she talked to me of Halka.

  “I had only once been inside Halka’s home, but it was the sort of place I would never forget. It was immense, silent and secret, the kind of house that figured in the mystery stories I loved as a young girl. I had no trouble fitting Halka’s story against this background.

  “She haunted the house like the ghosts the peasants claimed they saw emerging from it on moonlit nights. Eventually her persistence paid off. She discovered that the large trunks in which the household linen and eiderdown were stored were lined with false bottoms and double sides. Inside these, her father kept his money. Each room of the large house contained several of these trunks lined in gold coin. They were always locked and the keys belonged to her father, but in a brief interval when her father lay unconscious in bed because of an illness, she managed to secure the keys and have them copied.

  My aunt stops for a minute to catch her breath. I’m spellbound by her words and I can’t wait.

  “Go on. What happened? What happened then?”

  But she has a natural bent for the storyteller’s tyranny. Her pauses, like her digressions, are part of the master plan. My eagerness is kindled, and then momentarily denied, so that the ultimate pleasure may be the most potent possible.

  “All right. Well, as I said, after so many weeks of watching and waiting, Halka was now in possession of the information that had become her sole preoccupation. But what was she to do with it? This was something that had not occurred to her before. For some time she did nothing at all, satisfied with the mere knowledge of the powerful weapon she now possessed against her father.

  “After a while, an idea of what to do with the money crystallized itself and she was propelled out of her passive contentment into a new round of activity.

  “Halka belonged to a secret communist youth group, made up of other students from the gymnasium which she and your mother attended. The group was directed by one of their teachers. Most of the other students belonged to the group because of the usual adolescent taste for secret societies, special languages and codes which separated them from the adult world. But Halka and a few other students were serious revolutionaries. They considered discussions an indulgence of intellectuals. They scorned the usual occupations of their class, as well as all work which did not require manual labour. In preparation for the new life they were to lead one day, they were learning the trades and skills they thought they would need.

  “I remember, it was about this time that your mother, who had so far frustrated all your grandmother’s attempts to introduce her to the processes involved in running a household, suddenly began to show the keenest interest in the very activities that she had always scorned. Your grandmother was pleased because she had always hoped your rebellious mother would one day find the same contentments as other women of her class. She would still not go near an embroidery needle or participate in your grandmother’s afternoon teas, but it was sufficiently miraculous to all of us that she even ventured into the kitchen. She kept her distance from the rest of us, but she began to follow the servants while they went about their work. She was so persistent and serious that after first laughing at her, the servants began to complain that she made them uneasy.

  “What none of us knew, of course, was that your mother was learning about the “real” world, as she had been instructed to do. The ultimate goal of all this mysterious activity was a settlement that had been founded a few years back in the Palestinian desert by a previous cell from the gymnasium. Here the sons and daughters of the middle class, destined for the occupations of their fathers and mothers, lived communally, working as shepherds, farmers, bricklayers, striving to make themselves self-sufficient under incredibly difficult conditions. At the same time they were carrying on a fight against British rule and local landowners. It was an existence that combined their dual ideals of revitalizing the land and organizing the Arabs and immigrants to fight the “bosses”.

  “I was never a part of this group and I can’t tell you much about it. Perhaps your mother will when you are older.

  “Well, Halka had always intended to join the settlement. The discovery of her father’s money precipitated her date of departure. Now she had not only herself to give to the cause, but also her father’s treasure. She would deliver the money from its idleness and force it to serve people who needed it. It had to serve a greater purpose than merely to satisfy her father’s madness and greed. At the same time, of course, she would also inflict the cruelest punishment possible on her father for his treatment of her.

  “Your mother was taken into Halka’s confidence. Together they worked out the details of removing the money gradually and hiding it in your mother’s bedroom. When Halka left in the spring of 1935, your mother was the only person in the town who knew that she was on a train heading to Romania, en route to Palestine.

  “Her escape was entirely successful but it did not bring about the ruin of the father Halka hated. The loss of a few bags of gold coins hardly made a dent in his fortune. Nor did he seem to suffer from his daughter’s betrayal. In fact, he prospered more than ever. It took the Germans to finish him off. Before they killed him, he became as humble and as trembling as those who had lived in fear of him. But even
Halka would have found little satisfaction in that.

  “What happened to her? We don’t know. As I’ve told you, she returned only once—when you were born. She stayed for two hours, and then disappeared as mysteriously as she came. If she is alive, she will find us again. I’m certain of that. In fact, I’m almost sure she is alive. Who can tell, one day you may even come to know her.”

  My aunt’s last words launch me into a daydream about the past and the present. In it, Dobryd, my great-uncle Louis, Grisha, Halka, my young mother, I, my aunt, the marketplace among the ruins, the Café Imperiale, Yuri and his friends, all coexist without contradiction. My characters circle each other like figures in a dance, grace in their movements. I watch over them. Their emotions and my own flow through me, while I control their gestures by transposing my own longings and desires into their existence.

  VII

  Many years later, after I thought I had forgotten the stories that my aunt had told, as one forgets childhood pastimes, I continued to come in contact with events and people who revived these stories and added new or final chapters to them. They insisted on being remembered, and eventually the threads of these stories became entangled with those of my own life.

  A year or so after the war, we learned that my great-uncle Louis, my grandfather’s brother, had died in Louisiana without seeing Germany defeated. Even in those dark years he could not believe that the war would mean the end of Dobryd or its people. But his anger at their blind stubbornness in the face of his warnings affected his feelings towards the place. In his will he specified that his estate was to be used to help the survivors of Dobryd make new lives for themselves elsewhere. Nothing was to go to those who chose to remain in Poland.

  My mother and my aunt, at the time when they needed his help most, must often have regretted my uncle’s wishes. In the end, however, it turned out as he had foreseen. Life in that haunted landscape became too painful for them to endure any longer and they decided to leave Poland. It was then that my uncle’s legacy finally helped them as he had anticipated all along.

  At about the same time as we learned of my great-uncle’s death, Grisha reappeared in Dobryd, just as my aunt had predicted he would. One day as my aunt and I returned from the marketplace we were surprised to see my mother deep in conversation with a strange man. He wore an army uniform, but it was not anyone I had ever seen before. My aunt did not recognize him, even when he came towards her and embraced her with great feeling. My mother pronounced the name, and my aunt and I both stood lost in amazement. My aunt, I suppose, because she could not find any trace of the quiet, frail adolescent she had known in this robust soldier, while I was overwhelmed by the implications that Grisha’s presence had for me: it became apparent, for the first time, that the world of my aunt’s stories might have indeed existed once.

  Grisha, on his way west with his regiment, had stopped off in Dobryd to learn the fate of his parents. My mother had already told him of their death, and this news reawakened in him some long-buried nostalgia for the world he had rejected. My mother and he talked late into the night. Several times when I woke up, I heard their voices. In the morning he was gone.

  My mother and Grisha corresponded from then on, and they even met once again some years later. It happened while my mother was visiting Halka in Paris. Grisha was there as a delegate to some international congress. My mother, when she returned, told us the meeting had not been a very happy one. For one thing there was a great political schism between them now. My mother had left Poland, disillusioned, to live in a capitalist country. Grisha would not accept her reasons for this move, and in the end they separated estranged. After this meeting their correspondence was reduced to a few cards, and eventually it ceased altogether. Just recently I came across his name in a list of imprisoned Soviet citizens of Jewish origin published in a local newspaper. The list had been handed to the Russian ambassador to Canada by a group of concerned Canadian citizens.

  Halka reappeared in our lives after we had already left Poland. We were living in Montreal when Halka’s first letter reached us. It had been travelling a long time and it had followed us to all the places we had passed through since the end of the war. At last it caught up with us in Canada. My mother had made inquiries about Halka but with less success. The last news she had of her was that she had been deported from Palestine with the young French communist whom she had married, and that they now lived somewhere in France. When the war came along, Halka and her husband had been active in the Resistance and that was the last my mother heard of them. She feared the worst.

  She was deeply affected by Halka’s letter. Her solid, stoic manner, so characteristic of her during those early difficult years in Canada, gave way. She became a softer, warmer person. The letter had a significance beyond its content. In finding Halka she had found an eye-witness to what her own life had once been like, and the kind of person she had been. For a short while she recovered her lost self.

  Halka was now living in Paris with her husband and two children. My mother went over to see them. She had many stories to tell when she returned and her dearest wish, she said, was that one day I would come to know her friend.

  Some ten years later I went to Paris as a student. I looked up Halka and her family and liked them all immediately. I began to spend a lot of time with them and they became my special guides to France.

  One day, a rare sunny Sunday, we drove out to Senlis to visit its ancient cathedral. In the afternoon, after a long picnic lunch, we decided to walk along the ramparts that surrounded the town. After a while we stopped to enjoy the sun on a stone bench facing the town. It was then that Halka first spoke of Dobryd to me. In all the months that I had been coming to her house she had never mentioned it, and I had been so preoccupied with my new life in Paris that the thought of Dobryd had been very distant.

  She seemed as surprised as I when she mentioned its name. Her memories of Dobryd, she told me, had never been very pleasant, and with time she had almost forgotten it. Suddenly, perhaps because of my presence, our walk along the ramparts had aroused in her a flood of images that she had not recalled in years.

  Dobryd, like Senlis, had been a walled town. Its ramparts dated from medieval times, but unlike those near us, which had been preserved and treasured, they had been neglected and were crumbling. In Dobryd the ramparts were mostly sought out by young couples who came there for shelter and privacy. In amazing detail Halka described to me and to her husband a place she had not seen in years—the walls, their footpaths, the stone seats, similar to the one we sat on, the abandoned cannon, left over from a forgotten war but now only a prop for children’s games, and all the secret little openings and paths that occurred along the meandering circumference of the walls. As she spoke, those walls of memory seemed to merge with the ramparts we sat on, and the Plain of France could as easily have been the fields of Galicia.

  I never heard Halka speak of Dobryd again and I never thought of her in terms of it. It was only when I returned to Montreal and noticed how alike Halka and my mother were in so many ways, that I realized how much of their resemblance had its source in Dobryd. A small, insignificant town had marked them so indelibly that to me they would always seem set apart from other people.

  Was Dobryd really unique, as it had always seemed to me? Can I trust its portrait rendered in nostalgia? The place no longer exists, not even in name. The Russians renamed it after they annexed and rebuilt it. It seems appropriate to me that like other lost cities, it has left behind it only a mythical legacy that goes beyond fact.

  PART FOUR

  I

  A short time after my mother began working for the Russians as a translator, she received a bonus for her work which made her the envy of our neighbours. The night she brought it home—a small piece of paper with her photograph attached, permitting her to travel anywhere in Poland—she, Yuri and my aunt talked of nothing else. It was hard for me to share their excitement. All I understood from their conversation was that my mother could
now travel as often as she liked and that she would have to be very careful.

  Why should she want to leave Dobryd, I wondered. The prospect of my mother’s travels did not please me at all. I dreaded being separated from her for any length of time. Fear entered my heart. What if something terrible happened to her on one of her journeys and she never returned?

  Later that night, when my mother came into my room, my anxiety spilled over. She smiled and reassured me. She promised she would never be gone very long, not more than a day or so. There was no danger at all. At the end of her trips there would always be a gift for me.

  I trusted her and my fears retreated.

  She soon began going regularly to Lwow, the old university town some ninety kilometres west of Dobryd. At the end of the war it had quickly re-established its claim to being the most important city in the region. The university had been reduced to ruins, but its marketplace, the criterion of civilization in those days, was already renowned. Sitting in my aunt’s booth, I had often heard travellers extol its merits. These descriptions roused my curiosity and reconciled me to my mother’s departures.

  In our family, the trips became the highlight of the week. The rest of the time we either helped my mother prepare for one, or we listened to her tell us what she had seen and heard during her absence. The nights when she was to return from Lwow I insisted on waiting up for her no matter how late it was, and my aunt, for once, thought of something other than my well-being. Together we would wait, for the moment contemporaries, since in contrast to my mother, we were both helpless, weak children.

  I didn’t know why my mother went to Lwow every week, nor how she managed to bring back the things she did. She returned flushed, tired, but always triumphant, her arms full of packages—surprises for me and my aunt. When she talked of her trips I understood only bits and pieces of what she said, yet I loved to listen to her and watch her face as she recreated her day for us.