The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  Without thinking, Urs reached for her hand. “Can I see you again?”

  “You can usually find me in the philosophy faculty library.” And she was gone.

  Why did she tell him where she could be found? Better stay away from there the next few days if you don’t want to see this guy again soon.

  Maybe she wouldn’t mind seeing him again. In any case, it would be hard to steer clear of the philosophy library. Even the glare of the other students, all men, could not keep her out. She enjoyed their looks of discomfort when they found a woman opposite them at the table reading Kant or Plato. It wasn’t so different from the looks of the law school bullyboys when she sat down among the men in the ghetto benches.

  All too often, sitting there under the lamps breaking the gloom of the reading room, she’d lose the thread of what she was reading and begin to ask herself for the thousandth time the questions Urs had asked. What exactly are you doing here, Rita? What did you really come for? It wasn’t the law, not really.

  She wanted a life. She wanted what any twenty-year-old did who knew she was very smart, almost beautiful, willing to take a chance, put her optimism to the test. She wasn’t going to find those tests in her father’s town or anywhere near it. Sometimes Rita wondered whether it was emancipation she yearned for or apostasy. At fourteen she had forced her parents to send her to the only girl’s gymnasium in town, operated by the Dominican sisters. By that time, in a school uniform, Rita was already tall, angular, looking out of place in her mother’s kitchen.

  The required Catholic catechism class quickly confirmed her as an unbeliever. And atheism made it easy to reject her own culture’s patriarchy. But wasn’t it really just an excuse for doing something she wanted to do anyway: go her own way in life, not the one prescribed for her? Was it apostasy just to want to be yourself?

  Be yourself? Who exactly was she, anyway? Who is it, really, peering out at the world from inside my body, and why did it turn out to be me? She had felt she needed to answer this question as far back as she could remember. She wasn’t going to in a small town in Silesia.

  So she had announced an attachment to the law and come to Krakow.

  Three days after their first meeting, there was Urs, at the bottom of the marble staircase of the fac’, waiting for the end of civil procedure. “I’ve been looking for you in the philosophy faculty library the last couple of days. That’s where you said you’d be.”

  Rita was not really surprised. “I was indisposed. Studied in my rooms.” Rooms? As if I have more than one, she laughed to herself.

  “May I take you out for supper?”

  Why not, was her first thought, but she replied, “It’s a bit early . . .”

  “I’ll come for you at seven o’clock. Just give me your address.”

  “No. I’ll meet you. Tell me where.” She was not about to reveal where she lived. That would be much too forward, and the address was not nearly chic enough. For Rita, lodgings were a fifth-floor walk-up bedsit across the Vistula, in the only tenements poorer students could afford. The wallpaper was peeling, and the threadbare stair carpet covered treads that had been sagging since the nineteenth century. They groaned, even under her light step. Her room was no worse than most. A bed, a deal table and chair, a standing cupboard, a bureau on which sat a chipped but serviceable ewer and bowl, all illuminated by a bare electric bulb hanging from where a gas lamp used to shed a dimmer light. Plumbing had been installed on the floors below Rita’s, but the remains of an outhouse could still be seen at the back of what passed for a garden. Under the bed there was a chamber pot, nothing even the better-off weren’t used to. There was a gas ring for warming meals. The only real problem was the cold. Rita was always cold. Staying warm—enough coal in the grate—was dearer than life, and Rita could never afford it.

  “How about Wierzynek?” he suggested. It was the best restaurant in Krakow, and it was warm.

  Rita was in Market Square by six thirty, walking slowly along the arcades. She watched the town hall clock tower’s angle change as she moved along the vast quadrangle. It had rained briefly, and the paving stones still glistened, reflecting the streetlights up onto the Bohemian spires of St. Mary’s Basilica, looming in shafts of moonlight that broke through the clouds.

  She should have declined this invitation. Urs seemed too serious. But when would she get another chance to dine in near splendor, at a table covered by starched linen, set with heavy silver, laden with china and crystal, beneath the mullioned windows and heavy beams of a formal dining room?

  Rita stopped under a portico from where she could watch the restaurant’s entry door. Let Urs get there first. What if he didn’t come? Wouldn’t she look the fool, asking the maître d’ for his table? And if he did come, well, let him be seated and wait, stewing awhile before she made an entrance.

  It was 6:55 when she saw him walking across the square. Rita was getting cold. She waited only a brief moment and caught up with him at the entry. “Shall we go in?” she said brightly. He smiled, relief spreading across his face. Evidently each had had doubts about whether the other would turn up.

  She took his arm as they strode past the heavy velvet door curtains. Urs gave his name, and they were led to a table.

  Men preferred talking to listening, Rita reflected. “So, tell me about yourself.”

  He was from Karpatyn, a large town five hundred kilometers southeast of Krakow, beyond Lvov, on the Dnieper, just north of the Romanian border. A few Poles, but mainly Ukrainians and Jews. “My father is a doctor. I’ll go back to join his practice next year.” He fell silent.

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m not interested in much besides medicine. And you . . .?”

  “I’m from a little town in Silesia you never heard of, Gorlice.” It was one hundred kilometers south of Krakow, near the Czechoslovak border. “My grandfather is in lumber, sawmills in Nowy Sacz. He’s the one paying for me to be here.” Urs nodded in recognition of the name. “But there were too many children—twins run in on my grandmother’s side—so he sent one son to start a lumberyard in Gorlice. That’s my father. No head for business. He and my mother never had twins. Just me. I don’t look forward to going back.”

  A silence descended between them.

  Urs broke it. “So, what are you going to do?” There was that question again. Rita had no more of an answer than the first time he’d asked. A grave look came over his face. Rita turned to the menu.

  Urs’s thoughts were indeed solemn. Rita was the first woman that had ever seriously interested him. In three days he had become very serious about her. He needed an answer to his question. Everyone always said Urs Guildenstern was too serious. He was certainly cautious, methodical. Not exactly calculating, but he weighed things up carefully before acting. It went along with the anxiety that drove him. There was always something to worry about. Now he took on Rita’s problem.

  Finally Rita replied, “What am I going to do? I think I’ll order.”

  She couldn’t know it then, but that evening was the beginning of the end of the law faculty for Rita. By the spring she was already planning her life as a doctor’s wife. At Easter they visited his family. In the summer they married at her grandfather’s home in Nowy Sacz. At the end of September, after a wedding trip to Warsaw and the Baltic, Rita and Urs made the long journey three hundred kilometers east to Lvov, and then another two hundred south to Karpatyn.

  Months later, sitting alone in her warm flat, she asked herself how it had happened. Had she grown tired of always being cold and mostly alone in the Krakow bedsit? Had she been too easily daunted by the likelihood of a bleak future with a useless law degree? Worn down by the boredom of contracts and torts? Or had she simply surrendered to her family’s insistence that nothing could come of her studies?

  Why had she given in and stopped swimming against the tide? The answer that felt most convincing was a calculation that the world would not let her have the outward life she sought. Marrying Urs, being comfortab
le, would at least allow her the inner life she really wanted. She’d be able to scratch the itch of the questions that had driven her into the philosophy library; Urs had happily bought her book after book that first spring together. Then there was the unspoken anticipation of sex.

  Rita had looked forward to the intimacy of marriage. Her brushes with sex had been pleasurable enough. Twice she had found herself with a fellow student in the last row of a Krakow cinema, kissing instead of watching, tasting each other’s tongues. Both times, when they turned back to the screen, Rita would begin to feel the boy’s arm moving across her back. The hand would casually drape itself down her shoulder, then the fingers would slowly crawl along her breast till they were moving over the nipple beneath her blouse and camisole. The pleasurable warmth and moistness it produced told her she could gladly anticipate the carnal dimension of marriage. But she stopped the boy whenever he tried to move his hand toward her lap. In bed alone, she didn’t stop herself, enjoying the driving throb that would finally crest into . . . what did the French call it? La petite mort. Now she hoped making love with her husband might be all the love she would need.

  In Krakow, spending time with Urs had been easy. Once he began to pay court, she didn’t need to stint on the small things—a coffee, a pair of gloves, a nicer fountain pen, all those philosophy books. First, she became accustomed to little indulgences, and then to expect them. But she knew well enough that it wasn’t love that had seduced her.

  She had declined Urs’s first few proposals. She tried to convince him that his feelings were not enough to build a marriage on. But instead she concluded that not feeling much of anything was not an insurmountable obstacle. There was enough of everything else: they were of the same religion, and he was of the right class. Neither of them was going to do any better. Eventually, with a little help from her parents, she accepted the match as fated. When he raised marriage for the third time, she accepted.

  Well after they arrived in Karpatyn, Pan Doctor Guildenstern, Urs’s father, remained formal. The Polish Pan had all the hoary honorific overtones of its German equivalent, Herr—not just Monsieur or Mr., but something that put the taste of obsequiousness in your mouth. The whole family was a bit wooden, even with each other, and the more so with this exotic girl who spoke “Warsaw” Polish and carried herself like a Krakow university student.

  Even after months the slight but persistent chill remained in her in-laws’ very correct demeanor. A trace of formality would cling to Urs when he came back to the flat from the office he shared with his father, often stopping halfway at his parents’ house. An only child, Urs was right to be attentive to his mother. But did he need to carry his respectful demeanor home every night?

  Really, though, Rita had nothing to complain of but a certain ennui, lassitude, routine. She was warm now, always. There was plenty to eat, and as much coffee as she wanted. She had declined a maid to begin with and learned housework by trial and error. Cooking came naturally, and it gave her a reason to do the marketing, to get out of the flat, to explore the town.

  Rita’s first impressions of Karpatyn had not been so bad. It was a town of forty thousand rising up on the flat Galician plain. That first time, most of the way from Lvov, the train had rattled alongside country lanes rutted by a fresh rain, under looming clouds. The rutted lanes between the fields began to broaden. They turned into hard-packed roads, flat and broad enough for the farm wagons that trundled into town behind large workhorses. The first houses she saw were attached to barns, rough-hewn, with plaster between the logs. Closer in, the buildings were mainly brick. Some with smokestacks had to be factories. Now the streets crossing the tracks began to be paved, lined by wispy plain trees with whitewashed trunks, but too spindly to be pruned in the French manner. Nearer the town square, the houses were stuccoed and painted white and pastel colors. A few were dressed in stone.

  The train finally came to a halt beside a vast railway station, a pile built in Viennese style to assert Austro-Hungarian imperial authority. Through the entrance hall, Rita and Urs emerged onto the main square.

  Rita looked around and smiled. She could live here. The trapezoidal square enclosed a stand of mature trees and was lined with shops, cafés, even a cinema. And there were what looked like streetcar tracks leading away from the square. Was this town large enough for a tramway? Down the track there were some multistory buildings that would not have looked out of place in Warsaw. A motorbus was moving slowly down this broad street toward the square. Yes, she could live here.

  The flat Urs had found them was in one of the newer buildings, close enough to the main square to see the warm glow of electric lights, which had only recently replaced the gas lamps.

  Thursdays there was a farmers’ market in the square. Twice a week elderly men and flat-faced women in kerchiefs presided over root vegetables in winter, orchard fruit in the summer, and big-bulbed green onions, long leeks, and potatoes all round the year. There were scrawny, half-plucked chickens, sows’ knuckles, and too frequently for Rita, a baby pig’s ear. Sometimes when one of the older men made change and handed it to her, she thought she could detect a suppressed tug at the forelock, as though the rituals of serfdom had not yet been entirely shed.

  Rita persisted in shopping at the open market, though her mother-in-law frowned on the practice. It was a sore point Pani Doctor picked at whenever she stopped at Rita’s flat, and she did not disappoint on this day, well into Rita’s new, married life in Karpatyn.

  “Give your trade to the Jewish shops, not those anti-Semites.”

  “The produce is fresher, and the prices are lower. Besides, they are perfectly nice to me.”

  “Nice to your money. Or maybe nice to your blonde hair. Besides, what if you get something that isn’t kosher?”

  Rita blurted out, “I’m not keeping particularly kosher.”

  “Not keeping particularly kosher?” Her mockery turned to anger. “Why don’t you get slightly pregnant while you’re not keeping particularly kosher?” With that, Mother Guildenstern strode out the door.

  Willing herself to be unperturbed, Rita sat down again. She picked up the book she had hidden under a cushion when her mother-in-law had turned up. It was Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, an easy read in the original German. The aroma of a cigarette, the slight sting in her nostrils as smoke emerged in two dissipating clouds, might help transport her back to her bedsit in Krakow. Putting down the book, she lit one.

  After a few minutes, she realized it wasn’t going to work this time. Pani Doctor’s words kept intruding. But it wasn’t Rita’s fault. Urs seemed to have little more interest in sex after they married than before. That last year in Krakow, she had been ready enough to fend him off when he brought her back to the bedsit or collected her for a walk, a film, or dinner, but it hadn’t been necessary. He never advanced beyond holding her hand in the movies, a chaste kiss on the cheek when they met, and squeezing her when she had agreed to marry him. He wasn’t anything like the students who argued politics and advocated free love.

  She thought it was just his strict upbringing—saving himself. He was certainly no prude. Once they decided to marry, Urs demonstrated a thorough (if clinical) enough understanding of sex. He owned a Marriage Manual translated from the French that advocated foreplay to ensure the woman was prepared and satisfied. Urs put it at her disposal a few weeks before the ceremony with no evident sign of discomfort. She made a point of returning it dog-eared at the page on the subject of the woman’s pleasure.

  On their wedding night, both parties’ homework with the Marriage Manual had paid off, at least to the extent of provoking no embarrassment. But thereafter Urs was not inclined to importune his new wife for sex. He seemed satisfied with no more of it than once a week, typically Friday evenings. On other nights Rita sent out signals that she would not repel advances—parading through the flat in nightgowns of low décolletage—yet Urs rarely even loosened a tie much before bedtime.

  He was prepared to leave pre
gnancy to the coincidence between Friday nights and the peak of her cycle of fertility. But now it had been almost a year since their marriage.

  Beyond the farmers’ market lay the other main attraction of Karpatyn, Jastrob’s bookstore. Rita was there at least twice a week, once to change her book at the lending library Jastrob’s operated, and again to look at the latest magazines and newspapers from Warsaw and Krakow that were available nowhere else in town. Mr. Jastrob was nowhere to be seen, but Mrs. Jastrob didn’t seem to mind her browsing.

  One afternoon in June 1937, almost a year after her arrival in town, Rita was just leaving the bookshop when her glance directed at the magazine rack. Distracted, she ran right into a rather short, dapper young man. His smile raised a pencil mustache above his upper lip. It was black, like his pomaded hair, and he was rather fashionably dressed for a Polish market town on a weekday afternoon: two-tone Italian summer shoes, a houndstooth coat over tan trousers, and no tie and the shirt collar spreading over the jacket lapels, like the American crooners you could see in the movies. Or maybe he looked like one of those French film stars—Pierre Fresnay? A thinner Marcel Dalio?

  “Excuse me.” He grinned. But he didn’t move on.

  “My fault. I was not looking where I was going.” She smiled back.

  “Where were you going?”

  Rather forward, she thought. “Out. Good-bye.” She was already a few meters down the footpath when he caught up with her. This was really rather cheeky. “I am a married woman.” She waved her left hand at him.

  “My interests are literary, not romantic. I just noticed you were carrying my favorite novel out of the shop.”

  “What’s that?

  He looked down at the book in her hand. “It’s Remarque, Three Comrades.”