Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

Lusia nodded.

  ‘And your son? Where is he?’

  She shrugged. Stefan often stayed out all hours with his friends, despite the curfew. She had often argued with him about his reckless behaviour, but now, although she longed to have him with her at home, she was relieved he’d stayed out.

  The men strode around the apartment, knocking over chairs, pulling out drawers and throwing things out of cupboards and wardrobes as they searched every room. Elzunia and Lusia looked at each other white-faced. The men were obviously not searching for valuables. What could they possibly be looking for?

  Search over, the officers returned to the lounge room. ‘Come with us. Now!’ the sour one said.

  ‘But why? What have we done?’ Lusia asked.

  ‘You’re Jews pretending to be Aryans.’

  Elzunia couldn’t contain herself. ‘That’s a rotten lie. We’re Catholic. Ask Father Skowronski; he’ll tell you.’

  She ran into her room and came back with a photograph of herself in a white dress with frills and flounces and a veil attached to the garland of flowers on her head. ‘That was my first communion, see?’ She thrust the picture into the face of the younger man. ‘We go to Mass every Sunday. You’ve mixed us up with someone else.’

  The other officer was expressionless as he removed a letter from the inside pocket of his long coat and jabbed his finger at it.

  ‘It says here you were born a Jew, Leah Bronsztajn, and in 1921 you converted to Catholicism at St Aleksander’s Church in the Square of the Three Crosses,’ he told Lusia.

  Elzunia stared at her mother whose face was ghostly white.

  ‘Quick, tell them it’s a pack of lies,’ she shouted, but her mother’s legs had buckled under her and she had sunk into a chair, unable to speak. She watched while the younger officer tamped his cigarette on a gilt-edged Dresden plate.

  ‘Enough talking!’ he shouted. ‘You have thirty minutes to pack.’

  ‘But where are you taking us?’ Elzunia cried out.

  ‘All Jews must live in the Seuchensperrgebiet, the special area we’ve set aside for them so they don’t spread typhus.’

  Elzunia clamped her hands over her ears. ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘This has nothing to do with me. I’m Catholic. You can’t make me go and live in an area meant for Jews.’

  He gave a cruel laugh. ‘The children of Jews are Jews, Fraülein.’

  She coughed as he blew cigarette smoke into her face.

  ‘And I warn you to be polite.’ He blew another ring of smoke in her direction and, with a pointed glance at his watch, flopped into her father’s armchair.

  Elzunia’s mind lurched from one crazy thought to another. None of this made any sense. Her mother a Jew? It was an outrageous idea, concocted by a sick mind. Jews didn’t even believe in Christ or the Blessed Virgin. If only her father was here, he’d explain that they’d made a terrible mistake. Then she realised the futility of that idea: her father had been unable to prevent his own arrest. Her scalp prickled. No one could help them. They would have to struggle alone.

  ‘Please listen to us!’ she burst out. ‘You’re making a big mistake, and when your superior finds out that you’ve taken away innocent people, you’ll be in big trouble.’

  ‘Ach so?’ The sour one stepped closer and struck her face with the flat of his powerful hand. Her hand sprang to her stinging cheek and suddenly the room was swaying, the Dresden ballerinas were spinning on their pedestals and the walls were closing in.

  Lusia hissed, ‘Don’t ever argue with them!’ and the other Gestapo agent bellowed ‘Schnell!’

  A key turned in the lock and four pairs of eyes swivelled towards the door. Stefan’s hair was dishevelled, his collar was loose and his tie was twisted but the sight of the peaked caps with the death’s-head insignia sobered him up immediately.

  With a cry, Lusia rushed over to embrace her son but one of the SS men pushed her away.

  ‘Stefan Orlowski? Hands up! Now!’

  He raised his arms and looked at his mother questioningly. The SS officer pulled a blunt-nosed pistol from his coat and waved it at him.

  ‘You. Get ready. Now! You have twenty minutes.’

  Stefan was staring at his mother. ‘What’s going on?’

  Lusia looked at him with such love and sorrow in her face that Elzunia felt a stab of resentment. Her mother was distraught that her beloved Stefan would have to share their fate. She doubted whether her mother was equally distressed on her account.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Lusia whispered.

  Elzunia saw her mother’s eyes sweep helplessly around the room. Paralysed with anxiety for her children and herself, Lusia was stuck between panic and indecision as she tried to decide what to take and, even harder, what to leave behind from a household filled with objects acquired over an indulgent lifetime.

  ‘Elzunia, quick, get your things together and come and help me,’ she said, still not moving. What would they need and what could they carry? With a huge effort, she began making an inventory in her head. Valuables that could be offered as bribes or sold for cash. Clothes, but which ones? Something warm.

  What if she failed to pack something essential? Bedding was essential but it was bulky and they could only take what they could carry.

  She ran from room to room, pulling clothes from their hangers, then discarding them in favour of others. She grabbed silver candlesticks and ornaments from the sideboard and threw them on her eiderdown, ready to roll up, then changed her mind and replaced them with other ornaments. When she was ready to bundle it all up, the ends of the eiderdown didn’t meet, so she had to tip everything out onto a sheet. For the hundredth time, she checked her watch. Not much time left and there was still so much to sort through. Photographs. How could she leave without photographs of her wedding, of the children, and of their holidays in the country?

  Panic-stricken, she wanted to sink into the centre of the eiderdown and surrender to despair. Throughout her life, the need for security and comfort had guided all the decisions she had made, and now she felt like the French aristocrats who invoked God and government to come to their aid as they mounted the guillotine. She was being flung from her safe, cocooned existence into a frightening world of persecuted outcasts. If only she had gone to their country house and stayed there.

  Through Stefan’s open door, she could see her son emptying drawers, and throwing shirts, trousers, shoes and books on the floor, swearing loudly as he did so.

  Heart pounding, she glanced at her Tissot wristwatch again and her legs seemed to dissolve, unable to hold her up. Only ten minutes left. The piles of belongings had grown, but how was she to sort them and how could they carry it all? Her mind raced in all directions. She tried not to contemplate what awaited her and her children.

  In her room, Elzunia rubbed her aching jaw as she looked at the floral curtains and the white dressing table with the heart-shaped mirror and the row of dolls on the top shelf as if seeing them for the first time. Her room had never looked so cosy, and her bed had never felt so soft. As she stuffed clothes, the Red Cross box and her favourite books into her rucksack, her mind was roiling. Why had someone written such vicious lies about her mother? How long would it take to prove it was false? What if no one believed them? And what if Gosia and Lydia heard that she was in the Ghetto with all the Jews? She could see their disgusted expressions and hoped they’d never find out. None of this could be real; surely it was a nightmare from which she would soon wake. But the two Germans pacing impatiently in the lounge room and littering her mother’s precious ornaments with their cigarette butts were all too real. When her rucksack was bulging so much that she could hardly fasten the buckles, she ran back to the bookshelf and squeezed Gone With the Wind into the side pocket beside a pair of her father’s trousers that she had grabbed on impulse from her parents’ room. She closed her hand over her father’s cigarette case in her pocket and, taking one last look at her room, walked back into the lounge room.

  In her parents’
bedroom, she found her mother sitting on the floor, staring into space. Her fragility made the ground tremble beneath Elzunia’s feet. She helped her mother up and they tied the ends of the sheet together. As they fastened the unwieldy bundle, Elzunia looked closely at her mother.

  ‘What’s this rubbish about you being Jewish?’

  Without looking up, Lusia gave the ends one more tug and started throwing suede pouches into her leather handbag. ‘We have to hurry,’ she said dully. ‘This isn’t the time to discuss it.’

  ‘Mama, I have to know,’ Elzunia insisted.

  Lusia swung the hold-all over her shoulder and dragged the bundle along the floor. ‘Just get your coat,’ she said.

  As the three of them walked out of the apartment prodded by the SS men, Stefan supported his mother while Elzunia followed. She felt alone. Suddenly an image of the dead boy leapt into her mind. His open eyes were fixed on her and his reproachful look seemed to be saying, You were glad it was me and not you. It was true. She had been relieved that she wasn’t a Jew. God has punished me, she thought.

  Seven

  The wall cut the courtyard in two, leaving half inside the Ghetto and the other half outside it. It was about three metres high and topped with barbed wire and broken glass. When Elzunia looked out of the window, she saw that the boy in the house opposite was watching her as usual. She pulled a face at him and he wagged a reproving finger, laughed, then disappeared inside. He looked about seventeen and she hated him. Hated the way his yellow hair stuck out all over his head as though he’d jumped out of a haystack, hated the carefree freckles across his nose, but most of all she hated the fact that he was free to live in his own home on the other side of the wall while she had been forced to live in this loathsome place for the past two months. If only they would release her father so that he could get them out. He was never far from her thoughts and the longing to run into his arms always filled her eyes with tears.

  The wall divided more than just courtyards and streets. It split the world in two. On the boy’s side of the wall, people didn’t have to struggle to find a corner to sleep in, but on hers the streets were so crowded that you couldn’t walk without being pushed or jostled. The summer of 1940 was coming to an end, but the heat seemed to rise from the pavements and walking on them was like trying to fight your way through treacle. The Ghetto was already bursting at the seams but refugees kept pouring in from the towns, sztetls and villages that the Germans were clearing of Jews. Streams of newcomers trudged in every day, lugging as much as they could carry on their backs, or pushing barrows heaped with bedding, clothes, pots and pans and anything else they could carry. Elzunia knew what they were thinking as they looked around with pale, worried faces. Would they be able to find a place to live, and would they manage to survive in a place where they knew no one and had no way of earning a living? With haunted expressions they told of entire sztetls being rounded up and their residents clubbed, shot, set on fire or deported God only knew where. They camped wherever they could, in the corner of a hall, on stairways or in corridors with their silent children. Elzunia’s heart twisted when she saw their despairing faces as they begged passersby for a piece of bread or a glass of water.

  The restless activity in the street reminded Elzunia of the ants’ nest she had observed while sitting beside a stream at their country estate the summer before the war. An endless line of insects, lugging blades of grass like an army of soldiers bearing jade-green pennants struggled to and from their nest in an activity imposed on them by forces beyond their control.

  Standing at the window beside her daughter, Lusia shook her head. ‘How many more people are they going to push in here? What’s to become of us all?’ she asked for the hundredth time. She looked forlornly at the cramped, shabby room on the first floor that they’d occupied for the past two months.

  The three of them slept and ate in that room, tripping over each other as they moved around. She and Elzunia shared the only bed while Stefan slept on a battered sofa with broken springs. They hadn’t been able to bring any furniture with them and had to make do with what was already there.

  ‘To think I had to leave my beautiful apartment for this slum,’ Lusia lamented yet again, looking at the broken plaster on the wall. The former Christian tenants, who had been evicted by the Germans and ordered to live in the Aryan part of the city, had torn out the sink and taken it with them.

  Elzunia looked at her mother resentfully. ‘At least we’ve got somewhere to live,’ she pointed out, irritated by her mother’s constant complaints. She missed her father’s cheerful nature and equanimity more and more. If only they had some news of him.

  Each time Elzunia had broached the subject of the letter that had been sent to the Gestapo, her mother had refused to discuss it. She was always too exhausted, too busy or too distraught to talk about it. She even became angry with Stefan when he raised the subject. Concerned about their mother’s fragility, they had desisted, but this time Elzunia decided she wasn’t going to be fobbed off any longer.

  ‘Mama, I have a right to know the truth.’

  Her mother looked down. She couldn’t meet her daughter’s unflinching gaze.

  Elzunia took a deep breath. ‘I’m sick of your excuses. This is my business too. You have to tell me,’ she insisted, amazed at her own daring.

  There was a tense pause. Finally Lusia whispered, ‘It’s true. I was born a Jew.’

  A dark pit opened in Elzunia’s stomach. Her mother a Jew! The priest had called Jews Christ-killers, and the nuns had said they were devils, destined to fry in hell.

  She tried to speak but her tongue didn’t move.

  Finally she gasped, ‘It can’t be true! How come you never told me? How could you hide something like that?’

  Lusia seemed to be speaking through broken glass. ‘There was no need to tell you. I didn’t see the point.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Elzunia was trying not to shout. Did Father know? When did you convert?’

  Lusia opened her mouth then closed it. There was no way of explaining why she had turned her back on her heritage. Past emotions were impossible to recapture, let alone to convey. How could Elzunia possibly understand how embarrassed and insecure she had felt belonging to a despised group? All her life she had felt that hatred like a miasma that hung over every aspect of her existence. The school friends who whispered that Jews drank the blood of Catholic babies, the college students who moved away from her as though she had the plague, the hooligans who threw rocks through her father’s tailoring workshop or scrawled insulting slogans on the walls. Jews weren’t considered to be true Poles, and she had yearned to belong, to be the same as everyone else. She gravitated towards Catholic friends and came to look at her fellow Jews with the critical eyes of their detractors.

  Her favourite escape had been skating. Gliding around the skating rink, she felt carefree. Dressed in the long fur-trimmed coat and arctic-fox hat that her father had stitched for her, and her hands snuggled into her white fur muff, she skated around the rink to Strauss waltzes or Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca and felt no different from anyone else. In between brackets, the skaters gathered at the buffet table at the side of the rink, where she tasted food that would never have passed her parents’ lips. Smoked ham canapés, crumbed pork, and smoky country sausage spiced with garlic.

  She was relishing these forbidden delicacies when a tall cavalry officer with a moustache that almost brushed his ears stood before her and bowed with a flourish. As his gaze slid from her blonde hair and delicately moulded features to her fur-trimmed coat, he kissed her hand and said, ‘You must be a Romanov princess who escaped from the Tsar’s palace and galloped over the steppes in your troika.’

  She laughed and, as the band struck up the Gold and Silver Waltz, he stretched out his hand. ‘Would you like to take a turn around the rink with me?’

  As they glided arm in arm, Edward Orlowski told her that he’d recently been fighting the Bolsheviks in the east of Poland. Lusia was cer
tain she was the envy of all the women at the ice rink because her striking partner looked like a hero straight out of a Sienkiewicz novel. Soon she was meeting him secretly in Lazienki Park, hoping that her parents wouldn’t find out.

  Six weeks later, when he proposed, she was so besotted that she didn’t hesitate to accept, even though she knew her parents would never consent to her marrying out. Although she didn’t want to admit it to herself, his proposal offered an entry into a world that had always been closed to her. His parents belonged to the szlachta, Poland’s aristocracy, and although he avoided discussing their reaction to his marrying a Jewish girl, she sensed their disapproval. All he said was that they insisted on a church wedding.

  When she told her parents that she had decided to marry Edward and convert, her mother wept while her father’s face turned white with anger. ‘I never thought my own daughter would turn her back on us,’ he said.

  Tears welled in her eyes. ‘Tateh, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I have a right to be happy. You know religion has never mattered to me.’

  ‘Religion!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s not a matter of religion. It’s a matter of heritage, of identity. Just because a bird nests in a stable, it doesn’t become a horse. To them, you’ll always be a Jew.’

  ‘I love Edward and I can’t live without him,’ she insisted.

  Her mother gave her a penetrating look. ‘And how much does this Edward love you? He’ll only marry you if you change your religion. Your great love affair sounds very one-sided to me.’

  At that moment, Lusia hated her mother so much that she was too choked up to reply coherently.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ she shouted through her sobs. ‘He’s the most noble, unselfish person.’

  Unable to change her mother’s mind about Edward’s character, Lusia burst out, ‘Anyway, I’m entitled to live my own life.’

  ‘So go live your life,’ her father said, ‘but for us you are dead.’ And with that he walked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.