by Ann Charney
PART SIX
I
We came to a section of Warsaw near the foreign embassies. My mother felt this would give us a better chance of obtaining an exit visa. We didn’t expect to be in Warsaw for any great length of time, and so we moved into a hotel. As it turned out, we remained there for a whole year.
The Hotel Bristol in 1949 was a world in itself. Outside, the city of Warsaw seemed vague and menacing. I was constantly warned not to venture from the hotel alone. From the window of my room I could see streets still in ruins, like those we had left behind in Dobryd. Here there was, in addition, the danger of unexploded bombs. The newspapers carried frequent stories and warnings about the threats to safety still lurking in the city.
At first I was made to go along with my family to the various waiting rooms where they spent their days. I found the confinement and boredom of these rooms sheer torture, and ended up making such a nuisance of myself that they agreed to leave me behind in the care of one of the hotel chambermaids.
My mother, my aunt and my uncle went off each morning as if to work, carrying envelopes stuffed with documents and testimonials contrived to prove our desirability as immigrants. Each would head for a different embassy to spend the rest of the day waiting, often not daring to leave to eat for fear of missing a turn.
In the waiting rooms and in the hotel rooms the conversation of the hopeful emigrants always returned to the same theme—how to obtain proper documents. Most people were in the same position. All their legal records had been lost or destroyed during the war. Yet without these documents, life in the post-war world was impossible. One couldn’t do anything or go anywhere without them. Each day government officials insisted on demanding papers they knew no longer existed, and so the only recourse was to turn to forgers and false witnesses. It was an endless process. In our family, for example, we were asked almost every day to produce yet another kind of record without which, it was explained, our case could not be considered. In the evening, someone would be found who, at a price, would supply us with the papers we needed. Forging papers was certainly the most flourishing industry of the time in Warsaw.
My family spent their days in the waiting rooms of embassies, and in the evenings, like so many others, they sought out the intricate paths of the shadow bureaucracy. Every government official had his illicit counterpart somewhere in Warsaw—a person who earned his living by fulfilling the demands that the government official set. Everyone involved—the official, the forger, the emigrant—played his part, aware of one another’s existence, yet publicly maintaining the charade that this symbiotic network did not exist.
The emigrants themselves, trapped in the web of the parasites who lived off them, developed their own information network. The veterans of the waiting rooms instructed the newly-arrived on the particular whims or preferences of each official, and on how these were best dealt with. They knew where to obtain a birth certificate, or a letter from a non-existent brother, living in the country of one’s choice, who would guarantee one’s maintenance there. They were acquainted with people who specialized in being witnesses and who were equipped for this work by a talent for disguise and an ability to testify with persuasive sincerity to whatever was required.
Yet the waiting period was not all bleak for the people involved. Almost everyone we met shared a similar mood of elation. We were intoxicated with the promise of our future. The Hotel Bristol had a constant air of excitement and festivity about it. The public rooms were crowded late into the night. Conversations, discussions and arguments went on all around us, and strangely enough, I discovered they were not based on the past. For most of its inhabitants the hotel was a way station, and their attention was focused on the journey that was about to resume.
The noises and activity of the hotel seemed to me wonderfully exciting. I was soon free to explore it as I wished. Since we might be called upon to leave any day, there seemed to be no point in making long-term arrangements for me. I no longer went to school. Instead, my family and other people took turns giving me some sort of instruction.
My mother took it upon herself to teach me English, a language she had studied in school and perfected through travel. The only English book she could find was a copy of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, probably left behind by some pre-war visitor. It became the text for our study of the English language. Unfortunately, the world inhabited by Lord and Lady Windermere, the things they talked about and the idiom they preferred, had very little attraction for me at this age. I sat bored and restless as my mother read passages from the play, translated them for me, and then tried to have me repeat simple phrases. The lessons were mostly wasted on me, and their only noticeable result was a growing dislike on my part for the sound of this odd language my mother insisted I learn. It sounded ludicrous compared with the “normal” sounds of the languages I already spoke. In spite of my mother’s warnings, it seemed inconceivable to me that I would soon live in a place where no one spoke any Polish or Russian.
My uncle Zygmund, it was decided, was to teach me arithmetic. He had an unusual ability to retain in his mind long series of numbers and to perform with them, mentally, complicated calculations. In order to develop my capacities along similar lines, he insisted we must not use paper or pencil in our lessons. All the figures we worked with had to be memorized. In this way he hoped both to teach me arithmetic and to improve my memory.
When our lesson began he would give me several digits to add, subtract or whatever. If, as often happened, I became discouraged with my inability to remember the numbers, my uncle would try to revive my interest in the lesson by giving me a demonstration of the dazzling feats his own memory could perform. In a matter of seconds he would produce an answer to lengthy and complicated arithmetic problems, whose manoeuvres he would work out aloud for my benefit.
Another of his favourite methods was to use playing cards. His attachment to cards, I learned, was a holdover from the past, one of the few reminders left of his previous life. Before the war he had been something of a disgrace to his family. While his younger brothers studied or worked, he preferred to spend his time in the various fashionable spas of Eastern and Central Europe. His visits abroad had started on the pretext of ill health, which his mother ascribed to him as a result of a premature birth and a delicate childhood. Soon, however, he was indulging his taste for hotels and resorts beyond the demands of health, and even his mother could no longer justify them. Finally, his father, in order to give his son’s activities some semblance of respectability, let it be known that he was profiting from his travels by furthering the family’s business interests. The skills he acquired in his travels, a knowledge of the latest dances and a talent for cards, were not appreciated by his family, and as a result he spent less and less time at home.
The war had put an end to all that forever. He had survived by making his way to Russia. There he had been forced to join the army. For most of the war he was stationed in the Ural Mountains, where he was in charge of a supply depot. When the war ended, he had made his way back to Dobryd, only to discover that he was the sole survivor of his family. He had adapted to his new life with a facility that amazed all those who knew him before the war.
Somewhere in the hotel he had found a deck of cards. He could not resist incorporating them into our lessons. Whatever his original purpose in using them had been, it was forgotten. With great patience he taught me to play all the games to which he had been addicted in his youth, the games which had brought about constant friction with his parents. Once I learned to play them I enjoyed cards almost as much as he did. At times, when other men joined my uncle in playing, I was allowed to remain with them and watch. I felt very honoured.
I was also given piano lessons by a woman who, like us, was waiting for a visa. The only piano in the hotel was in the bar, and it was there that the lessons took place, usually in the morning when the room was closed to guests. The lessons themselves I found dull and endless, since they consisted of practising the same scales
over and over. Nevertheless, I didn’t mind. The room in which they took place compensated for the tedium of the lessons themselves.
While my fingers stumbled over the black and white keys, my eyes lingered with pleasure on the display of colour and form just beyond the piano. The arrangement of bottles in the hotel bar seemed to me one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. Whenever I could get close enough, I was content to gaze for a long time at the labels. Their rich colour and their names spoke to me of exotic places and strange adventures. The image of beauty conveyed to me by the sight of the bar was far greater than that promised by the instrument over which I laboured.
The bar room also intrigued me because of the sounds that came from it when it was occupied by its regular clientele. At the time we were there, the bar of the Hotel Bristol was the centre of Warsaw’s social life. People gathered there for all sorts of reasons. Anyone passing through the town sooner or later made his way to the Bristol bar. It was always crowded and noisy.
The sounds of the bar diffused throughout the hotel from the afternoon until late into the night. During our entire stay in the hotel I never tired of listening to these sounds. The laughter and excitement they conveyed were intoxicating to me. Occasionally there was music. One song, an American one introduced to us by a U.S. soldier, became very popular. Someone played it every night. The song was “Give Me Five Minutes More”, and I learned its lyrics without understanding what the words meant.
The song, and the noise and laughter that formed its background, excited my imagination. Just as someone might decide to learn a language simply because she liked its rhythm and cadence, I studied the sounds of adult pastimes reaching me from the bar. At night I lay in my room and listened to them as they filtered towards me, and it seemed that they held the promise of a new world, one to which I would soon go. The life I was about to leave behind was already becoming less and less real.
II
The freedom of being alone in a large hotel delighted me. I never yearned to go outside. The interior of the building presented me with endless possibilities. In the beginning I wandered about by myself, trying to keep out of other people’s way. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse through a half-open door of the rooms beyond and the people inside them.
These fragmentary visions of other people’s lives and the settings in which they lived them fascinated me. Had I been bolder or more resourceful I would have been happy to spend all my time watching other people, even if they were only doing the same things I saw in my own family every day. As it was, I had to be content with partially observed sequences, and the missing parts intrigued my imagination to the point where I often simply made them up. When my family returned in the evening, I would recount what I had seen, and my stories after a while grew so improbable that even when I told the truth it was impossible for anyone to believe me.
Very early in my wanderings around the hotel I came across other children. I got to know the ones who, like myself, were there more or less permanently, and we became friends. My new friends were a mixed group: children of the hotel staff, children of embassy officials and the children of guests. Housing in Warsaw was so scarce that the hotel was, in fact, an apartment house of one-room dwellings, with a communal dining room.
The children of the hotel used its corridors as other children use the city’s sidewalks. The private rooms were too crowded for active play, and the public rooms were reserved for adults, so we were forced to take our games into the corridors. Language wasn’t a problem. Some of the children went to school and others didn’t, yet when we played together there were few allusions to the outside world. To my great delight, I discovered that my friends were as fond of roaming and observing as I was. Most of them, in fact, were more skilful at this pastime than I and they initiated me into their favourite look-outs. We were all incorrigible voyeurs, yet at the same time we were such innocents we hardly knew what to make of all we saw.
Soon, we developed our own sequence of events for the day. The mornings, for example, were best for visiting other rooms. At that time the chambermaids were busy making beds, and sweeping, and many of the doors remained open. Getting into these rooms, but keeping out of the chambermaids’ way, became our special version of hide and seek. We had learned very quickly that certain hidden corners were never touched. There we would hide, breathing in dust, discovering bits of belongings from former guests, suppressing our laughter as the maids, unaware of being observed, behaved with a total lack of self-consciousness. It didn’t matter what these women did, most of their gestures were exactly the same as those we saw in other adults. We stalked them with the same fascination that I once recognized in the faces of some other children observing a family of chimpanzees who ignored their presence.
In the afternoons we spied on some of the guests. We had our favourites amongst them and we made our rounds of their rooms with the same devotion that I felt a few years later for my favourite television heroes. Yet, as it sometimes happened, if they spoke to us in passing, we became uncomfortable and rushed to escape. In some ways we knew our idols very well—few of their belongs had escaped our examination—still, somehow it was essential to our game that they keep both their distance and their mystery.
Most of us were a serious blend of cynicism and ignorance. Because of the conditions of our lives we knew all about bribery, forgery and the constant necessity to dissimulate and lie. Yet we were strangely innocent when it came to sexual matters. I remember once telling my new friends how babies were made and born. I had learned this from my cousin as I was leafing through her medical texts. My friends, many of them older than I, listened to my explanation with expressions that told me they were hearing it for the first time. After that I was often asked to repeat my fabulous tale. Apart from the most elementary facts, we knew very little, and much of what we saw remained incomprehensible to us.
Just when I had totally accepted the life we led in Warsaw, my mother announced to me that our visas had been granted and that we would soon leave. The news completely upset me. Perhaps it was the idea of new farewells coming so close after the painful one with Yuri. Perhaps it was fear of where we were going. I was miserable and no one could comfort me. As the time of our departure drew closer, my unhappiness increased. The year in the hotel had seemed to me the happiest of my life. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my friends, never to see them again.
On our last day in the hotel my picture was taken with my friends. I still have that photograph. It is the earliest one of me that exists. It shows a group of children, some smiling, others distracted by something beyond the camera. We are lined up in front of the hotel entrance; I am in the centre of the group and the two children on either side of me have their arms about my shoulders. I look happy and proud. There is nothing here of the special circumstances in which we found one another and which were reflected in our activities together. The picture looks very much like any school photograph.
III
Our visa, when it was finally granted, was not what we had hoped for. Instead of an immigrant visa we received permission to visit the United States as tourists for a period of three months.
Tourist visas, ridiculous as they might seem under the circumstances, were not rare. The government used them as a way of preventing immigrants from taking their belongings with them. Everyone knew, of course, that once out of Poland these “tourists” would never return, but in the meantime the authorities had a pretext for keeping people’s belongings until their safe return.
Our case was treated in the same way. We were informed of the sum of money we could take out of the country and we were instructed to deposit our few possessions with the police. There was no great financial loss, but there were attachments painful to break. My mother and my aunt had recovered a few objects from their parents’ home and these they considered their last tangible link with the past. When they were forced to cut it, something in them changed forever. From then on they were unable to care where or how they
lived. When they had the choice, they preferred anonymous, simple rooms, bare except for such items as were absolutely essential.
Some years later we were living in Montreal and I was old enough to notice the difference between our home and the homes of my friends. My family by this time could have afforded to live as they chose, but our rooms remained as bare as when we’d first arrived. When I reproached them with their indifference to the things I had suddenly discovered as important, they would look at me with an expression of pity that drove me to excesses of rage.
“My poor child,” my aunt would begin, “if only you had known your grandfather’s house, then you would see how ugly, how ridiculous, the houses of your friends are. Surely you don’t expect us to imitate them.”
Then, as if to compensate me for my loss, my aunt or my mother would search through their memories and come up with a few precious details: the hand-carved furniture my grandfather bought on his wedding trip to Italy; the richly coloured oriental rugs centred on lustrous floors; the huge marble bathtub, also Italian, where my mother and her sisters would have their bath, and the special rack that kept their towels warm for them.
“You cannot imagine,” they would say to me, “what a feeling of beauty and elegance one had in those rooms. Every object was chosen for its own value and for its harmony with the rest of the house. We children took it all for granted, of course, but imagine how startled the Germans were when they burst into the house. They could never have imagined they would find anything like it in a small provincial Polish town.”
Their reminiscences overshadowed every place we lived in. I was never able to persuade them to take any interest in acquiring objects I considered essential at that time, or to show any enthusiasm for my desperate efforts at embellishing our successive dwellings.
We left Warsaw by train for Gdynia, where we would take a boat for New York. The new friends we were leaving behind entrusted us with messages and pleas to their relatives in the new world. We said good-bye with mixed feelings of hope and regret.
