I meet Jan at the Journalists’ Ball, which journalism students are permitted to attend. I know him by reputation, of course: one of the finest journalists in Poland, solidly of the left, a brilliant writer. I think he is the most handsome, most charming man I have ever met. When he starts talking, a sort of enchantment overcomes me and I hope he will never stop. I look at his face as he speaks, without the least embarrassment, on the verge of lifting my hand and caressing his cheek. He is talking of politics – well, of course – but if he were reciting the Warsaw telephone directory I still would have remained spellbound. Jan’s good looks are of the sort that match perfectly the quality of a man’s mind; his thought, so perfectly developed, has moulded his face.
It is not always this way, in fact, hardly ever; it is quite possible for a man of the most brilliant and daring intellectual accomplishment to offer the world the face of a camel, or, in the case of Sartre, of an ancient turtle. And the same might be said of a woman. Nothing so attracts me to a man as intellect – and this is the same for so many women, those, at least, who value intellect – but once attracted, it can all be over in a week unless the man’s intellect is complemented in important ways.
Jan is kind, and his kindness shines in his eyes. Kindness in a man has a different quality than kindness in a woman; it is braced in a particular way, no hint of the maternal, more as if it were a conscious choice, a willed emphasis. Jan’s political convictions are themselves an expression of kindness; his belief in a foundational equality, such as you find in the Scottish poet Robert Burns’ poem ‘A man’s a man, for a’ that’.
Do you know the lines at the end of the poem? – ‘It’s comin’ yet, for a’ that, That man to man the world o’er, Shall brothers be, for a’ that.’ That is what Jan believes. Personal liberty means everything to him, not only in the big things, like politics, but in relationships. But I have to tell you that although Jan is very Burns in some things, he is not at all Burns in others. You’ll recall that Burns had a famous appetite for lassies, whether from the highlands or lowlands, and wrote a great many poems celebrating sexual intercourse. Jan, on the other hand, has no interest in sex and it never becomes part of our communication. I don’t care, or maybe I do, but it is not an impediment. I adore him anyway.
He says to me in the Karmeralna nightclub where we are drinking – me, a glass or two; Jan, four, five, six glasses of vodka, brandy – ‘You are Vera, good, you are beautiful, good, but the important thing is that you are clever. Isn’t that right?’
I say, ‘I am Vera, I am gorgeous, I am clever.’ I answer him satirically, but I am glad of the praise – glad that he can see something that other people miss when I act up and make jokes and slip into the mood for mockery. What hope is there for you if you make a point of showing that you’re clever? People have to see it without any help.
Jan says, ‘Listen to me. I want you to ask me a question. I want you to say, “Jan, my dear, what do you love? A woman who is clever? Is that what you love?”’
I ask him the question. And he says, ‘Of course. This woman, this Vera, very clever, I love her.’
We sit at the bar, smiling at each other, and everyone knows that we are together forever. Some say, ‘Werunia, do you know what you’re doing?’ And they say, ‘Can Vera live happily in a domestic situation with Jan? Vera? With her appetites?’
Another journalist, a man of fabulous intellect, tells me an instructive tale of those who can fly. He says, ‘Do you see? Someone whose thoughts give him wings, he soars past the clouds, like Icarus, except that his wings have no wax and nothing melts. And the words he must write? They are written against the blue sky.’
Is he talking about Jan, maybe? And is he saying that Jan and I will thrive? I choose to believe that he has Jan in mind when he talks of those who can soar.
Jan lives with his mother in a two-bedroom apartment, and shortly after we meet and fall in love, I move in with him, together, of course, with Marek, who at this time, 1955, is two years old. They are crazy about each other immediately, Marek and Jan, and this warmth between them is Marek’s consolation for having such a lousy mother.
What can I say? I am no good at it. I love Marek like a madwoman, but somehow all the bits and pieces that go with being a mother are not there. When Marek cries, I say, ‘Jan, do something.’ Mealtimes go by without my noticing that he needs food. Nappies – okay, I remember to change him: good for you, Vera. Sometimes I attempt to play with him. ‘This is a truck. What noise does the truck make? It goes rrrrrrr! It goes brrrrrm!’ Marek looks at me sceptically, as if he is thinking: ‘A truck? Do me a favour. What does Mama know about trucks?’
But Jan knows exactly what to do with a toy truck. He is entirely unselfconscious when he plays with Marek. Comforting, nurturing, being a big mama, it comes to him naturally. You know, if you look at a cat being a cat, grooming itself, curling up to sleep, leaping to catch a moth, you think, ‘The cat didn’t make a study of this, it’s just there in its head and its heart.’ That is how being a big gorgeous mama is to Jan. It is in his head and his heart.
But for me, having Marek is the vital thing, turning a deaf ear to all those who counselled me to terminate the pregnancy. That is all about conviction. Another woman in another place – it may be the right thing to terminate. Plenty of times it is the right thing. Plenty. For me at that time, it is the right thing not to terminate. But beyond having the baby – that I know nothing about. It doesn’t cause me any grief. I simply think, Vera, you’re hopeless. Too bad about that.
And I call to my mother, and then to Jan, ‘Do something. He’s hungry or wet or tired. Do something.’
Roman Polanski is here, a man whose genius shines out of him. At the age of twenty-four, twenty-five, he looks like a boy of fourteen. Except for his eyes, which are very grown up. He’s been to the National Film School in Łödź, and he’s made a fabulous short movie, Two Men and a Wardrobe, which has been shown here and there in Poland before its official release. Everyone knows he is going to be famous.
He comes to the bar for the company, the conversation, but not for the liquor. He doesn’t drink.
He is my age, and his experiences during the war in Kraków are almost a mirror image of mine in Lvov: living feral, outwitting the Nazis, passing himself off as a Catholic kid after learning a few prayers. What I saw, he saw. We converse, but we don’t speak of such things, of course not, no more than to confirm a type of kinship in our having emerged from that worst of hells. In Polanski, there is that unfaltering spark of appetite of one who has outlived a plan of extinction that was meant to result in death; that same spark that glows in my chest and in my stomach. It expresses itself often enough in a sort of cockiness, as if I am saying to the world, ‘You wouldn’t try this, of course you wouldn’t, but I would, so watch.’
Back in the nightclub, Polanski’s other special appetite is also pretty evident: his appetite for young girls, much younger than me. Maybe I think, ‘Roman, one day this will make trouble for you.’ Or maybe not.
I have seen his short film. I know he is a genius. You can excuse a great deal for the sake of genius. If he finds trouble, at least it will be trouble he makes for himself.
When I come to Australia, people say, ‘From Poland? Poor Vera! So backward! So tedious! The communists, full of shit! But you escaped.’ It is difficult to make such people understand – and do I even have the patience for it? – that the bars and nightclubs of Warsaw, those that I knew, where the scornful, the disdainful, the happy-go-lucky, the satirical went for consolation – they were places of excitement and spectacle; if dancing on a table-top with a cigarette hanging from your lip, a glass of red wine in your hand, your legs on full display can be considered a spectacle. Maybe the best thing happening anywhere on earth was happening in those bars of Warsaw.
This is the great thing: we had a common enemy, which was the hidebound state and the secret police and the informers and the philistines on the one hand, and the capitalist state (elsewhere,
of course, in America mostly) with its complacent bourgeoisie, its bland consumers and its philistines on the other hand. We scorned all of that, mocked all of that, mocked ourselves, too, but we could listen with a type of reverence whenever someone said something new and clever, or who – like Polanski – threw a bright light out into the world illuminating things we hadn’t thought of before. The people in Australia who say ‘From Poland? Poor Vera!’ are unaware that in one or two streets of the city of Warsaw, more that was lively, more that glittered, more that could enlighten was on display than anywhere else on earth.
1956: In Russia, a tremor; in Poland, an earthquake.
Bolesław Bierut – a turnip – has been in charge in Poland since just after the war. Now he’s dead. He went to Moscow in his role as doormat to the Russians, allowed them to wipe their boots on him, as he’d done many times before, but this time he doesn’t get up.
Gomułka takes over as president, after a few months of hysterical shouting in the Polish United Workers’ Party and the Syet, the parliament.
It’s Gomułka who says, ‘Poles, you are a happy people; Gomułka says you are free.’
What is this? Somebody in the Politburo, somebody in Moscow has had a rush of blood to the head?
In the nightclub, we chatter: ‘Who knows what’s going on?’
Jan knows. ‘After Stalin, whose grave I spit on, we get Nikita Khruschev, a peasant. Nikita never liked Stalin: good for him. Nikita wants a different sort of Soviet Union, not so many people murdered. So when Bierut goes to God, the Russians give the Poles a chance to relax. “Choose your president,” they say. “What do we care? Choose your own president. You want Gomułka, okay, have him.” Gomułka wants more freedom for the Polish people, what’s left of them. Why not? Gomułka always stood up to the Russians; he’s a hero of the Polish people. But here’s what I think. Gomułka has promised the Russians that Poland is an ally of the Bear forever. “Okay, fraternal colleagues from Moscow, a little bit more freedom, not too much. Any trouble, I shoot a few people, throw a few out of a window, everything’s under control again. Trust me, Nikita.” So the Russians have made a gamble. They think they can have Gomułka as a friend, and if he’s not so friendly anymore, off with his head. Look what’s happening in Hungary. The Russians don’t want to be fighting in Budapest and in Warsaw.’
Actually, things have been getting a bit easier in Poland ever since Stalin’s death. Just a little. Not so many Russian ‘advisors’ running every damned thing, but enough. We have a Russian, Konstantin Rokossovsky, as our defence minister, and the security agency, UB (Urząd Bezpie-czeństwa), is an anthill of KGB stooges. Jan has been finding it, in his profession, a little easier to say things critical of the government. But he is wary. And not only of Gomułka’s pact with the Bear; he has noticed a resurgence of Polish anti-Semitism, which is never far below the surface.
Jan says, ‘Two of the Russian minders are Jewish. The Poles hate them. They think, “Ha! The Jews are trying to destroy the glorious, romantic Polish spirit.” Now the Poles want a new Auschwitz.’
When Jan says this, I believe him. He doesn’t use hyperbole. He has a set of eyes that can look at a placid gathering of a thousand and in one minute, pick the change of mood that is coming: the men whispering a message that is telegraphed through the crowd; the man who nods when a brick is to be thrown, when a pistol is to be produced from a pocket.
The two Russian-Jewish big shots do not honour Shabbat; they never go to shule; they never wear tallit; they wouldn’t know tzitzit from the tassels on grandma’s cardigan. But the Poles have identified them as Jews, and as soon as that word, Żydowski, is spoken, it runs like an infection from one to another. Anti-Semitism is a virus that always tends toward epidemic. It rages in the blood of the ignorant and the educated alike. People who have spent years over learned books find themselves surrendering to a fever that has them muttering tales of international conspiracies. Stories appear in newspapers: a Jew murdered in Wrocław, another in Poznań.
I won’t stay here.
I am drinking in the nightclub with Jan. I am enduring a fever of my own.
Friends come and commiserate. ‘Vera, Werunia, we will hide you, we will defend you – you and Marek and Jan – they will never find you, they will never put a gun to your head, a knife to your throat.’
No, no, no: a thousand times no. What, did I live longer than the Nazis only to go into hiding again? Am I to contemplate the idea of Marek living his life in secret compartments?
I won’t stay here.
I sip from my wine glass, and put it back down on the wooden surface of the table. ‘I won’t stay here. We must leave. We will go to Israel.’
‘To Israel?’ says Jan. ‘To do what?’
‘How should I know? To grow oranges. We are going to Israel.’
Jan has certain views about Israel. He thinks that the Zionists constitute a cartel of totalitarian bastards. ‘You want me to go to Israel? You want me to exchange one totalitarian regime for another?’
I say, ‘You are being melodramatic.’
‘Am I? I’m not going to Israel.’
‘Then where? Did you see how many of us stayed here in Poland, in Germany, everywhere – stayed here when Hitler was smashing the faces of Jews into glass windows? His whole career, his fame was built on spitting venom at us. Do you know what people said, what the Jews said about Hitler? “How long will he last? One year, two years.” Some lessons you can never forget. That Hitler shit came all the way to Lvov. Sometimes I slept two hours in a week. I couldn’t breathe.
‘We go. If not to Israel, to the North Pole, the South Pole. Far away.’
Jan’s mother has gone to Australia. She told the passport people, ‘The Olympic Games. In the city of Melbourne. I want to see the Poles running. Also, the javelin, the discus. Our Polish heroes. Jumping. Riding horses. Janusz Sidło. Elżbieta Krzesińska. All our Polish heroes. Give me a visa.’
And they did. But she didn’t come back.
For me and Jan and Marek, why not Australia? Who has even heard of it? Kangaroos, that’s all we know. If not to Israel, better we go to Australia. Already Jews are there, a few. How?
Before Jan’s mother went to the Olympic Games, I had never heard anyone mention Australia. I look it up in the encyclopedia at the library. The encyclopedia is censored, of course it is, but nobody has bothered to censor Australia. Also, the encyclopedia is very Marxist. Australia has a man who dresses himself in plates of steel and attacks the forces of capitalist brutalism. There is a drawing. He looks insane. But there is also a picture of this man without his steel hat. Very handsome. Beautiful eyes. The encyclopedia says the Australians speak English. The whole country used to belong to England. The English sent all their crooks to Australia. What the hell? Now they have all the same things as England. Cars, roads, factories, sheep, more oranges than Israel.
I think, Let’s go.
And we can go; it’s no problem. Gomułka has proclaimed to the Jews of Poland: ‘Our great socialist motherland doesn’t suit you? Fine. Go somewhere else. You will find nowhere else the poetry and romance of the indomitable Polish people, Chopin, for instance, the Warsaw Concerto, where else will you find the Warsaw Concerto? Fine, you want to live without this poetry, without this music, also free health care, free education, you think you will find free health care and free education in America, in Australia, wherever? Ha! Think again!’ We can get one-way passports, thanks to the proclamation to the Jews of Władysław Gomułka.
We leave it to Jan’s mother to take care of all the paperwork – immigration forms, all of that. I have never had any patience for those tedious forms. I think, ‘Someone will do it, not me.’
Jan’s mother writes to us, ‘What will I put under reasons for emigrating?’
I tell Jan, ‘Write this to her: what do you think? The Poles want to kill the Jews. What do you think?’
Marek asks me, ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Australia. On the train. On
the ship. There will be kangaroos. You know kangaroos? Also a man who wears metal on his body and robs the banks. Sunshine. More than Poland.’
‘When?’
‘When? Now.’
Marek is happy about the plan. A train all the way across Poland and Germany to Bremerhaven. A ship that floats on the ocean. Of course he’s happy.
Am I happy? Maybe. Escaping from the Poles when they go crazy about Jews is good – of course it is. But Australia is like another planet.
Jan says, ‘Australia is fine.’ He’s relaxed. Why wouldn’t he be relaxed? He drinks like a fish. People everywhere would be relaxed if they drank as much as Jan.
We have farewell drinks with friends.
My friend Paul says, ‘Damn this country if it frightens away people like you and Jan.’
I say, ‘I will write.’ Will I? Sure!
‘You will write me long, wonderful letters and tell me about the Australians. Who are they? I’ve never heard of them. Write me long, wonderful letters and tell me who these Australians are. Kangaroos. About the kangaroos, tell me everything.’
We pack up all our belongings. My mother will be coming with us, so she has to pack too. There is not so much to pack, really. Family heirlooms? Swallowed up by the great maw of the Nazis. They had an appetite for theft, the Nazis. And if not the Nazis, then the neighbours: ‘The family Geldstein is off to Auschwitz for a permanent stay; what use will they have for a dinner service and a handsome epergne from Dresden?’
It is winter; there is snow in Warsaw. Marek and Jan and my mother are in overcoats as we stand on the platform at the station, and I am in an overcoat myself, and a scarf. The train is waiting, huffing and puffing.
Jan and my mother take Marek for a walk along the platform, pointing out one thing and another to him: the iron wheels of the train, the signboard that reads ‘Berlin, Bremerhaven’. I am alone for a few minutes. Dear God, do I know what I am doing? Australia? What? Kangaroos? A man dressed in steel?
Vera Page 11
