13 Stradomska Street

by Andrew Potok

  Instead, she hoisted herself up onto a sturdy desktop strewn with tubes of paint. “My name is Loie,” she said. “I’m volunteering up at the group home to help take care of a bunch of troubled boys.” Her fingers were drumming on the bureau top, their sound and her loveliness enthralling. “I went to Pratt,” she told me, “until a filthy professor refused to give me a passing grade unless I slept with him.”

  “They can still pull that shit?”

  “So I quit,” Loie said.

  “You left art school? So now what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe babies.” I sat down on a stool facing her and bared my Slavic soul to her—both Slavic and Jewish, the perfect combination of gallantry and erudition. And what is the difference anyway between fiction and non-fiction as long as there’s art in it? So I told her how, at times, I couldn’t paint because I was so aroused, breathing hard, needing to splash cold water on my body. I told her that putting brush to canvas was, at times, a life and death situation. I told her of the darkness in my soul. And then we both confessed that we were married, each of us a short time ago, my second, her first. But the air remained heavy with desire, expectation. We looked directly into each other’s eyes, hers large and beautiful. We each backed off a little, but only a little. A few weeks later, she and her husband left for California and I settled back down with my wife, Charlotte. Loie and I did not see or hear from each other for twenty-five years. She stayed on her coast and I stayed on mine.

  2.

  Now we drive to a walking path in Stowe. Gabriel is a good puller. We walk briskly, which I enjoy, but I realize that we should probably leave him at home for our week or so in Krakow. The last time I was in Poland, twenty-five years ago, Dash, my first Seeing Eye dog, traveled with us, a mistake partly because I had enough eyesight then to walk comfortably on my son’s or Charlotte’s arm, partly because we spent a lot of time driving in our hired taxi. Guide dogs were not a common sight, and though many Poles owned dogs, they were not allowed in hotels or restaurants, making for unpleasant squabbles wherever we went. When, after Poland, we flew with my son to Madrid where he and his wife were living, Dash jumped out of a car window on the road to Cuenca. Once he was settled back in and we had safely arrived in town, we left Dash in the car so we could cross the Puente de San Pablo, a very narrow bridge forty meters above a dramatic gorge. Pissed off, Dash destroyed the seats of Mark’s Toyota. Some dogs are not great car travelers and Gabriel belongs to that tribe, not enraged like Dash but miserable in a car.

  On the Stowe path, bicycles zoom past us, the nice Vermont riders yelling, “Coming on your left.” We sit down on a bench near a running brook and let Gabriel stomp around in the water.

  I’ve always loved the Sam Gross cartoon of the blind guy, a cup in his outstretched hand, a placard hanging from his neck with the words, “I am blind and my dog is dead,” the dog lying beside him, all four paws pointed at the sky.

  For me, there has been nothing harder to bear than the deaths of my guide dogs, innocent creatures who serve and love. Topper had an inoperable sublingual tumor that caused him great pain. The morning of his last day, Topper and I played in my back yard. He ran as effortlessly as always, fetched the stick and brought it back, dropped it at my feet and stared at it like he did when he was a puppy, but now each time he dropped it, zeal in his eyes, tail wagging, I wished I could die in his place. At the vet’s, my arms were around him when his body let go, dropped like a stone, stopped living. His ashes are under a blooming apple tree in our back yard. Tobias, my next dog partner, now lies under a flowering crabapple next to Topper’s. The indescribable pain I experienced at each of their deaths strongly suggests that I should seek the alternative, using a white cane instead.

  Even though my choices regarding dog guides will never stop the horror of the shortness of canine lives—not until my demise precedes one of theirs—I have wondered about the morality of training dogs to serve humans. Serious dog trainers consider that the rigorous training of the Seeing Eye dog privileges the dog by stretching his capabilities. My gut agrees with this, but my reservation is not the foolish argument hinting at dog enslavement, but my fear that imposing human will upon a dog is based on the biblical, fundamentalist idiocy that preaches man’s dominance over all of nature. Once, in New York, I was followed and then chased by a woman yelling, “Free that dog. He is a prisoner, a slave.” My belly told me to confront that lunatic, grab her by the throat, but it occurred to me that she might be wielding a knife, not to slit throats but to cut Tobias’s harness. The smarter option was to dodge heavy traffic as we flew across Fifty-Seventh Street and ran into the park, the insane lady on our heels.

  Separating treacly sentimentality from honoring all life has been a gripping issue. My first wife, Joan, and I followed the bullfights all over Spain. My first time at a village bullring, I threw up. My stomach settled after a few corridas, and eventually my “oles” joined the chorus of thousands. Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon guided our bullfight enthusiasms. The medieval pageantry took precedence over my disgust and skepticism about the theatrical metaphors of human domination, allowing me to stomach the maiming and killing of horses and bulls.

  In Adam’s Task and Animal Happiness, the trainer, poet, and philosopher Vicki Hearne writes that animals should not be defined by behaviorists’ dictates, that in their individuality dogs and horses have the capacity to be in reciprocal relationships with humans both emotionally and morally. To get a better grip on this sacred man-dog relationship, and to be a good partner to a working dog, Hearne insists on the strictest discipline. There are times when I lack the spirit or will to assume the dominance necessary to do my job properly, but if I fail to correct Gabriel properly for a distraction, perhaps a sniff of a dropped crust of pizza or a passing dog’s butt, he is smart enough to know that he can get away with it next time, which might be in the middle of a street crossing where it could be a matter of life and death. Stupid, sentimental anthropomorphisms stand between my mawkish tendencies and my obvious needs as a blind man.

  The argument favoring the cane over a dog is reasonable. “A cane you can lean against the wall,” one of my blind friends told me. “It stays where you put it, no feeding, no fleas, no playtime, no worries.”

  Rare but terrible things can happen with either cane or dog. A man was walking merrily along a sidewalk with his cane, which did not detect a trailer truck parked across the sidewalk, the steel monster five feet above the street just at the level of his face, which was crushed. Inside the Thirty-Fourth Street subway platform, a woman’s dog was suddenly freaked by a noise and jumped up, plunging them both to the tracks. But you don’t need to be blind to face the unexpected or to make disastrous mistakes. Nevertheless, how can anyone claim that blindness is a gift, allowing you to experience life in a more profound way? Give me a break. Even worse, my karma-bound friends think that blindness is a payment for past life infringements and an opportunity to look deeper, to think better, to mend one’s evil ways. Oy.

  3.

  A few weeks later, Artur Bobrowski, now our Polish lawyer, flies to New York, rents a car, and drives the four or five hours it takes to get to my house in Vermont. We sit across from each other in the living room, where Gabriel greets our visitor with serious licking. Artur giggles in discomfort and embarrassment, then reaches into his briefcase, finds the proper sheaf of papers, and reads from his printed genealogy, beginning with Joachim David Potok who, born in 1830, married the first of his three wives, with whom he sired eight children; he sired eight more with the second wife, and no one seems to know how many with the third. My line of descent and that of the few surviving Potoks in Australia and England stem from Joachim’s first wife, while a distant cousin Anna, who lives in Sweden, is descended from the second.

  None of my surviving family talked about the past. I remember my grandmother and my grandfather, my father’s parents, but I don’t remember most of the many aunts and uncles and cousins. My heart beats faster
as Artur, stuttering, reads me name after unknown, unfamiliar name. “B-b-before the war, the property was owned by two brothers, Szewah and Abbe, the last one your great-grandfather,” he says. “Szewah’s daughter, Rosa Saphier, sold half of the property after the war to a Polish family.” I know what he means: Polish as opposed to Jewish, an unbridgeable abyss between the two. “After your great-grandfather’s death, still before the war, the other half went to your great-grandmother Sina Prokocimer, born Potok. She died in 1940 in Krakow and her estate was inherited by her children, among them your grandmother Paulina and her brother Wolf.” It is almost as if I am listening to a recitation of English kings. Szewa? Abbe? Sina? Wolf? My family? I had never heard names like these before.

  I hear Loie turning into our driveway, the car radio blaring. The car door slams, the dog’s tail wags, and in she comes. “I will make tea,” she says and skips into the kitchen.

  “Krakow is a beautiful city,” Artur tells Loie as she lays out oatmeal cookies and a pot of Earl Grey with bergamot.

  “My father came from Czestochowa,” she tells him.

  “Yes? Not too far from Krakow. I can arrange a car to take you.”

  “He came to America in 1920 when he was a little boy, the family driven out by pogrom after pogrom.”

  “Krakow is on the river Wisla, Vistula to you,” Artur says, “a very beautiful river.”

  “And Andy’s family’s property?” Loie asks.

  “It is not grand,” he says, “but well located. We recover it and sell it.”

  When Artur leaves, we go out hand in hand to the garden Loie has planted in the back of our house. She weeds around the peonies. I stretch out in the hammock, surrounded by the most aromatic flowers—heliotrope, honeysuckle, jasmine—planted here for my benefit. She comes over and describes Artur to me. “He’s rather nice looking,” she says, “but young, very young.”

  “This is not a good sign. I would have preferred someone who was old enough to remember the war.” I turn to one side to face her. “Also, I hope he’s Jewish.”

  “He could be,” Loie says. “But why does that matter?”

  “Don’t you think that a Jew would really want to stick it to the Poles?”

  “Andy,” she says, “didn’t you listen to the man? You’re not going after Poles. Not Poles, not Germans. It’s someone in your own family.”

  2

  THE FREDERIC CHOPIN AIRPORT

  1.

  Mid-March, Loie and I fly to Poland, my third visit since the war, this time not to stimulate memories but to recover property. What does a lefty like me know about property? Once I even believed that property was theft. Still not too sure about that, I’m on my way to claim an apartment house in the name of democracy or justic.

  The first and only time I experienced the joy of owning property, it was in the middle of a hundred acres of land, American land, and the house a decrepit Vermont farmhouse, which I enriched over many years with repairs and gifts. Knowing about Jewish property in Poland reverting to Polish Catholics, its “rightful owners,” in my gut I suspected that this pristine American hundred acres was only temporarily mine and would find its way back to the pilgrim Christian farmers to whom it truly belonged. In fact, after thirty years of ownership, my house, fields, and forests were lost in divorce, then sold to strangers. My trees, fences, barns, and soil, my American soil, I replaced nearly twenty years ago with the turn-of-the-last-century Dutch Colonial house that Loie and I live in on Richardson Street in Montpelier, with its old dark paneling, its carpeted staircase, the landing with the bay windows, even the sunlight I no longer see, which floods the rooms facing south.

  This return to Poland is my first with not a shred of eyesight. When I was there in the late 1980s, the Warsaw airport looked like a converted cow barn, filthy and smelly. The immigration processing had been as dependent on the mood of the little functionaries whose power was exercised by their willingness to use that life-or-death rubber stamp, probably the same one they used at the Lithuanian border in 1939. A new airport, named after Frederic Chopin, has been built since my last visit, just before the end of the Communist occupation. Loie describes it as a run-of-the-mill modern building, a grade or two above the Stalinist architecture I had described to her before our arrival. Inside Frederic Chopin, we stand with hundreds of others in a long line, awaiting the stamping of our passports. Our flight to Krakow is scheduled to take off in an hour.

  “They slammed the door shut up ahead and our line is not moving at all,” Loie says and pulls me into another line. But we’re in jolly Poland where apparatchiks have been empowered by generations of ineptitude and the freedom to call untimely coffee breaks. Behind us, nervous mumbles begin. Inching forward minute by painful minute, we are herded toward security. It is now fifteen minutes until our Krakow connection. We don’t have the cell phone number of Artur’s representative, Basia, who awaits us at Pope John Paul II, Krakow’s main airport. “The next plane after ours,” Loie reads from the flight directory on a wall, “is in five hours,” making me sweat and breathe faster. I want to push my way to the front of the line to yell at the security guy.

  “If I could see I’d kill the son of a bitch,” I spit out from my clenched teeth.

  “No you wouldn’t,” she says.

  “Find him for me.” She says nothing. I think: “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I turn back toward the people behind us, colleagues in oppression. If I were an orchestra conductor—a career I once considered—I would bring them to a crashing crescendo, a nightmarish roar. The mumbling rises in pitch. I begin to shake. “Krakow, Krakow,” I yell, pronouncing it in English, then Polish. My body is out of control. I’m an eight-year-old again, about to cross a different border, this time coming into Poland instead of racing to get out. I’m in full panic attack mode. The beating of my heart shakes my chest, numbs my hands.

  “Stop it, Andy,” Loie warns. “You’re going to have a heart attack.”

  Suddenly someone yanks my white cane from my hands. What comes out of my mouth is dog-like, a growl. “That’s my leather coat,” I yell, “My backpack.” Someone—the security asshole or Loie—grabs them from me and the people in line behind us are silenced.

  Loie pulls me toward her. “They are not thrilled with your drama,” she whispers. “If you don’t stop, they’re going to put you away.”

  “It’s the same fucking Poles,” I growl into her ear.

  “No, it’s not,” Loie says quietly. “Different Poles. Very different.” She puts an arm around me.

  “These fuckers control my life.” I open my mouth to scream but I can’t. I hate myself for not screaming. I hate myself for wanting to scream. Memories and messages abound in my sub-cortical, subliminal mind, some from my mother’s world of propriety and clean underpants, some from a more heroic time in my life, from a large canvas of reds and blacks and yellows, some from the huge sculptures in a green summer meadow. Loie helps me on with my coat, and the apparatchik fuckhead shoves my cane back into my hands. Loie and I run for the Krakow connection.

  2.

  Of the 732 Jewish boys approximately my age whom Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert interviewed for his book The Boys, none came from a background like mine: privileged, urban, cosmopolitan, free of religion. Amazingly, they all survived the abuse of the Poles and the German death camps and were able to recall their unspeakable experiences with composure and intelligence. Their pre-war existence, whether rural or urban, took place among other Jewish children, all of them subjected to strict religious studies. Christian boys beat on them every chance they had. “Soon after the capitulation of Warsaw,” one man wrote from England fifty years later, “the Germans set up field kitchens to serve the population, who were starved as a result of the siege which had lasted a few weeks. As the queue formed for the soup, the soldiers started shouting ‘Juden raus.’ But often, they could not tell who was Jewish and found help from the Polish youngsters who went round pointing out the Jews.” Would anyone have pointed me out? I
didn’t even know I was Jewish. Did everyone else know? “What hurt most,” the man continued, “was the fact that the boy who pointed at me was the same boy with whom I had worked a few weeks ago building barricades at the top of our street. And my father and uncle were still in the Polish army.”

  Compared with The Boys, my scars of war are minor, though they didn’t seem minor at the time. In July of 1939, I spent my eighth birthday walking in a beautiful field of wild flowers with my grandmother Paulina. Late in the afternoon, the sky turned crimson and my grandmother squeezed my hand and whispered that this was a sign that war was coming.

  A month later, the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, and the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, signed a non-aggression pact. A week after that, a little before dawn of September 1, I was racing, flying, on the new English bicycle, black and sleek, that my Uncle Max had brought from London. I was laughing like a crazy boy. The speed was exhilarating, the air rushing through my hair, through my whole body. I yelped and threw my head back as I floated over the bumps and stones on the field across from Max’s newly built summerhouse, some sixteen kilometers north of Warsaw. I removed my hands from the handlebars and laughed, screaming with joy, as loud as I could, then closed my eyes for moments at a time. I flew in the sky like a bird. My whole body trembled with joy, a whooping, crazy, total joy. And then, three airplanes appeared just over the treetops, the red and white checkerboard Polish insignia painted on their wings, so low that I could see the pilots’ faces in their hoods and masks. I knew that they were flying to bomb Hitler. So much happiness. My heart beat faster. Their wings shone silver as the sun began to lighten the dark sky. What a morning it was. I dropped the bicycle at my feet, puffed out my chest, and saluted. But the Polish insignia was a lie, and the German Junker planes began to dive, their Jericho trumpets screaming, a horrible howling sound, and bombs slipped out from each of them, exploding all over the field. The stones and clods of earth and fire that hit me on my chest and back and legs abolished one world, my childhood, and introduced me to the rest of my life. Trees exploded and the field I knew so well was sucked dry of air. The planes droned on as if nothing had happened, but I couldn’t stop screaming. The me of eight years of life was blown out of existence.