Dobryd

by Ann Charney

  But I had already had a glimpse of my aunt transformed into a strange mad woman. Her hair, which she always kept neat and braided, even when she slept, hung loose and in disarray. Her clothing was torn, and blood trickled from her mouth; I was told later that in her first moments of grief she had knocked out one of her teeth. Hearing her screams, the neighbours had rushed in and held her arms to keep her from injuring herself further. For a long time she could not be left alone.

  I stayed in a neighbour’s apartment. Although everyone tried to hide my aunt’s madness from me, I constructed my own picture from the gossip I overheard and from the screams that occasionally reached me. I was sad about my cousin’s death, but the transformation in my aunt weighed on me much more heavily.

  I had been separated from my cousin Alexander for several months. His physical presence had become distant and vague, so that his death seemed a mere continuation of our separation. In any case, I knew very little about death in general. I had always been kept away from it, deliberately, so that somehow I had lived through the war with less sophistication and morbidity than might have been expected.

  My feelings about my aunt were another matter. The glimpse I had had of her as the neighbours restrained her terrified me. The notion of death seemed pale and harmless compared to my aunt’s grief. Every day I asked to see her, but at the same time I felt relieved when my request was not granted. One evening my mother came for me and told me I could return to the flat. My aunt was better, she said, but she was not well. I would have to be very careful not to upset her. For a start, I must never mention Alexander’s name, nor remind her of him in any way.

  I saw my aunt that night and she looked calm, but very pale and thin. Still, she managed to smile at me. From then on I spent all my time with her. Everyone agreed that she revived only in my presence.

  A strange pact was formed during the days I sat near my aunt’s bed. My mother abdicated her control over me in favour of my aunt, as the price of my aunt’s cure. My aunt, as she recovered, began to use her weakness as a form of blackmail whenever it seemed my mother was about to reclaim me. Years later my mother bitterly regretted this arrangement, but by then it was too late to alter it.

  During my aunt’s convalescence Yuri had finally persuaded my mother to leave Dobryd. My aunt agreed and we left as soon as she could walk.

  On a cold, clear winter morning we boarded a train with hundreds of other Polish families. Most of them, because they had chosen to remain Polish citizens, were being moved by the Russians from eastern territories they had annexed to the new Polish territories seized from Germany. The train thus became a symbol of patriotism and loyalty to most of the people on it. The Russian troops who accompanied the train were jeered and insulted. They kept to themselves.

  The trip took a long time. It seemed to me we were travelling to a very distant place. The train stopped and started constantly. We were crowded together in cars without seats. Noise and confusion characterized the entire journey. There were many children on the train. They ran about constantly and often became lost. Noisy arguments and fights occurred frequently as the trip went on and the people became familiar with one another.

  Yet the general atmosphere seemed cheerful and ebullient. The news of an armistice had reached us on the train and it was greeted with tears and joy. There was much singing. Patriotic songs started out in one car and echoed down the line. Food and drink were passed around as in a family celebration. People on the train shared their supplies in a way that had become unknown during the war. The decision to share instead of to hoard demonstrated their belief in the future of Poland. A new life would begin for all of us in the captured German towns where we would live.

  Our first sight of Bylau was encouraging. It was a real town, untouched by war. Buildings stood intact. Some of the houses had curtains on the windows. Occasionally these framed a bird cage or a plant. A light snow had fallen when our train pulled in, giving the town a special air of neatness and calm.

  When we left the train, we saw that the town was almost deserted. Occasionally, we saw Russian soldiers marching, but no civilians. Most of the Germans had fled some weeks ago with their retreating armies, terrified by rumours that the Russians were avenging themselves on a helpless population. Those who had been unable to flee stayed out of sight. We were to be the town’s new inhabitants.

  We were given the key to the house that was to be our new home. It was small and neat, with a garden. The street was lined with trees. A stone church and a school house framed it at either end. The family who had lived in the house seemed to have left abruptly, as if they had gone away for a weekend and expected to be back shortly. All their belongings remained, and in the kitchen we found pots half-filled with food that had just begun to decay.

  My first quick run through the house impressed me. In contrast to our flat in Dobryd, this house was full of luxuries. We found stacks of linen, dishes, pots, toys, books, furniture—all the essential props of everyday life. It seemed incredible to me that these were now ours. For a long time I expected the rightful owners to come forth momentarily and claim their belongings. But after a while, these objects became as ordinary to me as they must have seemed to their original owners. I felt we had reclaimed them for our own.

  A few days later, Yuri joined us. He looked around our new home, marvelling at our changed surroundings, as pleased as a child with every new discovery. My mother and my aunt watched, amused, as he insisted on looking into every hidden corner and closet in our new home.

  I was as enthusiastic as he was. I followed behind as he made his inspection, my own feelings reflected in his face. When he had seen enough, he picked me up and we went spinning around the room in our special private dance.

  Then he called for a celebration. The table was set and decorated with our new acquisitions. Yuri had brought us a bottle of vodka and a long sausage. Everyone’s glass was filled, even mine, and Yuri’s first toast celebrated the end of the war. Quickly, however, he noticed that my aunt’s eyes had filled with tears and he launched into a long story about some of his recent adventures.

  As much as he tried to amuse my mother and my aunt, the party never became a very happy one for them. They, in turn, tried not to spoil his pleasure, but a mood of sadness gathered over our table. I was only dimly aware of what my mother and my aunt must have felt that night, celebrating the armistice in the midst of a strange German town. Yuri and I sensed the weight of their feeling crushing our joy. Somehow, I resented their past, which always intruded and spoiled the present. This feeling became even more intense in me in later years.

  Later that night, when we had gone to bed, some of Yuri’s friends came to the house and a real party began. There were many toasts; there was music, laughter and singing. I lay in bed in the room that was still strange to me, soothed and comforted by the sounds of the party. I fell asleep, suddenly, in the middle of a Russian song about Moscow, as I tried to memorize its lyrics.

  VI

  We lived in Bylau for four years. During that time I moved further and further away from the past and into the comfortable world of ordinary childhood.

  Our household now included my father’s brother Zygmund, who had returned from Russia at the end of the war to live with us. My mother’s brother’s daughter, Olga, came to Bylau to study medicine, and her weekends away from university were spent with us. We were now a real family. My mother had a well-paid job with the interim Russian government. My uncle managed a food co-operative. We lacked very little.

  The greatest change came when I began to go to school. My mother had sent me to a private school, run by nuns, since she had little respect for the state schools. They were at that time mainly indoctrination centres. The private school was for girls only, and we all dressed alike in sailor uniforms. Here I felt I had finally found a place where I could blend in and become an anonymous part of an identical, happy group.

  Sometimes, when we were all working at the same task, I would see myself in the g
roup and marvel at how well I was playing the role of a happy, conforming little schoolgirl. I felt almost smug about the way I had separated my inner, real life from this playacting. Usually I sensed, however, that such distinctions were dangerous to my well-being and I willed them away, just as I did with night-time demons.

  But my efforts were not always totally successful. Occasionally, in spite of my self-protective tactics, the past would burst into my life, a frightening intruder I was helpless to turn out.

  One day when I was alone in the house after school, the doorbell rang. I opened it and found myself tightly embraced by a small peasant woman who was a stranger to me. She followed me inside, and when she realized I did not recognize her she began to hug me again. All the while she poured out a torrent of words I barely understood, but which I recognized to be Ukrainian.

  My aunt found us like this when she came in a few minutes later. I saw her freeze as she caught sight of our guest. Before my aunt could move, the woman rushed over and fell to her knees before her. She pressed my aunt’s hands to her lips, but my aunt’s face remained unresponsive. The two women went into the kitchen and I was sent out of the house on an errand. I hurried back quickly, my curiosity about our strange visitor now fully aroused.

  It was dark when I returned to the house. The woman was still there. My mother was home now as well. We ate together and I sensed that the adults refrained from talking in my presence. When I was quickly dispatched to bed after dinner, my suspicions were confirmed.

  From my room, I could hear my mother and my aunt talking to the strange woman. Their voices were now very animated. My aunt’s and my mother’s voices sounded hard and cold, while their visitor seemed to be pleading with them. Then a woman’s name caught my ear—Manya. There was something very familiar about it. I knew it, but how?

  I heard my mother’s voice rise in anger. “I owe you nothing. Do you think I’ve forgotten those last months in that awful barn? When my child was so weak she couldn’t stand up, you demanded my wedding ring, the only thing I had left from my husband, before you would give her some milk. There was a time when she cried from hunger every night, and I promised myself I would kill you if I ever had the chance. Be thankful to leave here alive.”

  My mother’s words, and the hatred in her voice frightened me. I heard the woman trying to answer her, but I was no longer listening. That child who had cried in hunger was me. And the strange woman who had once held the power of life and death over us was the same person who now sat in the kitchen weeping.

  Manya! She had terrified me. I had seen her as a brutal force which left the adults around me helpless and cowering. Yet, much as I feared her, I awaited her arrival every night with impatience. If she was very late, the waiting became unbearable. Much as I feared her, I had learned very quickly that Manya also fed us. Without her visits there was no food. The nights she didn’t come seemed worse than the occasional searches which threatened to reveal our hiding place.

  Was she really here now, in our house? For a moment a wave of panic overwhelmed me and I shivered under the warm quilt. Then between my old memory of the cruel Manya and my present perception of her as small and humble, another image inserted itself—the portrait of Manya as a sad, ostracized girl, driven by visions of revenge. My aunt had drawn it for me during the months following our liberation and I had appropriated it with great interest for my own gallery of fantasy figures. In these stories she was somehow distinct from the Manya I had known, cleansed of the evil and terror I had associated with her in the past.

  She had been born out of wedlock to a peasant woman in one of the villages that belonged to my grandfather. Illegitimacy was too common to be a stigma but Manya grew up an outcast for reasons other than the circumstances of her birth. Her mother was poor, awkward and dull, and she was treated with the cruelty that was usually accorded the feebleminded in that region. Manya, although quick and bright, was treated in the same manner, simply for being her mother’s child.

  When she was fourteen years old she came to my grandfather and asked him to help her get away from the village. My grandfather found her a job as a servant in one of the large hotels in Carlsbad, a fashionable resort of the time. He bought her a one-way ticket, gave her some money, and put her on the train, certain that this was the last time he would ever see her.

  Some ten years later, to everyone’s surprise, Manya returned with a small child. Its father had been one of the hotel guests whose rooms Manya had cleaned, and whose boots she had polished. No one knew why Manya had chosen to return to a place where she had been so badly treated. From the start she kept very much to herself. The other peasants left her alone after a while, but whenever she appeared amongst them they laughed at her, for what they considered to be her false airs of superiority acquired in her years of service.

  After her return she supported herself as a seamstress—a skill she had acquired as mysteriously as everything else. She was very good at it and she did not lack for customers. Her work brought her often to Dobryd, where she purchased her supplies and where most of her clients lived. My grandfather, after losing his estates when the Russians occupied Poland in the 1920’s, now lived in Dobryd, and Manya often stopped at his house. She was always received with kindness, and there were usually gifts for her daughter and some sewing for her to do. Whenever there was a forthcoming marriage in the family, Manya would install herself in the house for several weeks to help with the preparations for the bride’s trousseau. Here, as anywhere else, she would remain withdrawn, barely talking, and my grandparents knew as little about her as did her neighbours in the village.

  In spite of her lack of contact with other people, she was extremely alert and observant. She read about the persecution of Jews in Germany and anticipated the same situation in Poland. As a result, she was one of the first to realize how desperate the plight of some of her best customers might soon become. In 1938, before the German invasion into Poland, she foresaw the danger that was about to threaten their lives. She understood how willingly and extravagantly they would soon pay for shelter of any kind.

  At the time she confided her motives to no one. But months later, when her plan was in force and we were at her mercy in the loft, it became her special delight to talk to us about her dreams. Perhaps it was the sight of her captives in agony, for these people had once considered her far beneath them and now their very lives hinged on her whims. Part of her revenge was already realized. The rest would follow.

  Her boasts were always received in silence. She didn’t require any participation or encouragement for her pleasure. Our presence was enough. Nor did it matter how many times she told the story. She always relived it with great intensity. Her face would change from anger to hatred and finally to an expression of joy, as she foretold the triumphs that awaited her and her daughter after the war.

  The hide-out was the beginning. It would lead to reprisals against a society that had always victimized her. By hiding rich Jews, she could earn huge sums of money. There was no reason why, by the time the war was over, she should not have sufficient funds to purchase the very hotel in Carlsbad where she had worked. This was the dream she had nurtured through all those silent hours. As owner of the hotel she would make up for all the misery she had known. Her own daughter would grow up to be as desirable a young lady as those whose white boots she herself had cleaned.

  With the money, the hotel and her daughter’s glorious future, she would have her revenge on everyone—on the stupid peasants who had mocked her since her birth, the guests of the hotel who saw her only as an object of servitude, the men who had abused her and her mother before her, and the rich in Dobryd whose houses she had to enter through the back door and whose cast-off clothes she had to accept gratefully.

  Manya began to make her preparations. Her objective was to create a secret hiding place that would hold as many people as possible. The fact that she lived like a hermit on the fringes of the village, ostracized by the other villagers, became her main ass
et. At about this time the Germans proclaimed that anyone who gave shelter to Jews was subject to the death penalty. This had no effect on Manya’s plans. She was living out her secret dream, happy as never before, and no threat could spoil it.

  The place she chose for her shelter was a barn a few yards behind her house. The barn was unused, and screened by tall trees. After she had bought it for a small sum, she installed a cow in it, and a goat and some chickens, so that it would be no different from other barns in the region. At night she worked in the hayloft, extending the floor to create a false ceiling. The area between this ceiling and the roof was to be the shelter. She padded it entirely with straw for insulation and soundproofing. Next she began to lay in supplies, mainly sacks of potatoes and flour. When all was ready, she carefully drew up a list of those whom she considered likely to be most profitable as potential clients. Then she set about contacting them.

  My grandfather was no longer a wealthy man, but he was approached by Manya in what was to be perhaps her sole gesture of sentiment. The evening she came to see him with her surprising offer she urged him not to hesitate. She already had enough willing and anxious lodgers to permit her to pick and choose. For the others, her selections were made on the basis of their gold supply and how much nourishment they would require. She was willing to make an exception for my grandfather, but he must be quick about it.

  My grandfather, although touched by Manya’s offer, did not accept it for himself. He had simply lost his desire to go on living in a world where everything seemed distasteful to him, and where most of the values he had always cherished were turned to mockery. In any case, he was seriously ill with diabetes, and since he felt that he was going to die soon anyway, he chose to spend his last days in his own home. My grandmother would not go anywhere without him. Of his family, the ones most in danger seemed to be my aunt and her son. Young men Alexander’s age were then the main target of the sporadic raids the Germans made on the local population. It was decided that she, along with Alexander, would accompany Manya to the loft.