Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  Her parents observed the traditional mourning ritual. For seven days they covered the mirrors in their home, ripped their clothes, donned slippers and sat in low chairs. At night they said the Kaddish prayer, as if she had died. She never saw them again and the ache in her heart never went away.

  Nearly twenty years had passed and now Lusia recalled her father’s words and shivered. It was as though she had been cursed. And she still hadn’t been able to find out what had happened to Edward. With every passing day, she grew more anxious about his safety. If he had been released, she knew he would move heaven and earth to get her and his children out of there. If only she knew where he was.

  Elzunia watched her mother and waited. She longed for an honest answer that would not only explain why they were in this predicament but would also indicate that at last her mother considered her as an adult and not a child whose questions could be dismissed with a flippant wave of the hand.

  But Lusia only said, ‘I fell in love with your father and we couldn’t get married unless I converted.’

  At least she hadn’t brushed the question aside. Elzunia decided to push a little further. ‘Who do you think wrote that letter?’

  Lusia sighed. ‘I’m sure it was that Madame Françoise.’

  Elzunia was frowning. ‘But why would she do that?’

  ‘Envy sometimes eats people up,’ Lusia replied. ‘She finally found a way to pay me back for my success.’

  After musing over this for a while, Elzunia asked, ‘But how come she knew you’d converted?’

  ‘Once she came up to me in the street and told me her cousin was the parish clerk at St Aleksander’s Church. She said it in such an insidious tone that I knew immediately what she meant. I was terrified, and wondered whether she was going to blackmail me. I suppose when the Germans occupied Warsaw she saw her chance to get even with me.’

  The expression on her mother’s face aroused Elzunia’s suspicion. ‘There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? It wasn’t just professional jealousy, was it?’

  Lusia nodded. ‘A friend told me that Madame Françoise had been in love with your father before he and I met. So I was her rival personally as well as professionally.’

  Anger stuck in Elzunia’s throat like a fishbone. If only she could get her hands on the vicious woman who had caused all their misfortune. ‘It’s incredible that someone would do such a horrible thing.’

  ‘You can never tell what people are capable of, for good or evil,’ her mother said.

  ‘I hope one day she’ll pay for what she did to us,’ Elzunia said.

  The front door opened and Stefan swaggered in, looking very pleased with himself. The drastic change in their circumstances seemed less painful for her brother, who didn’t appear to miss his friends as she did. He had found new pals in the Ghetto and spent most of his time with them. Elzunia and her mother rarely saw him during the day.

  Elzunia eyed him curiously. ‘What’s that you’re wearing?’ she asked, and couldn’t resist adding, ‘Is there a fancy-dress party on somewhere?’

  He smoothed down his belted jacket and adjusted his cap, which was too big and slipped down his forehead. ‘You’re looking at the latest recruit in the Jewish police force!’

  Lusia gave him a wan smile. ‘You look very smart in that uniform. How come you joined up?’

  ‘So he can throw his weight around,’ Elzunia muttered.

  ‘In case you haven’t noticed, Miss Smartypants, we can’t survive on the pathetic ration of three hundred calories a day that the Germans dole out. Now I’ve joined up, I’ll get better rations and I might share them with you if you stop needling me,’ he said. ‘Even if we start selling off Mother’s jewellery, how long will that last when a loaf of bread already costs one zloty on the black market? That’s if we’re able to get to the market at all. Once they close the Ghetto, we won’t be able to get out.’

  ‘They said they wouldn’t do that,’ Lusia said in a tremulous voice.

  Stefan shrugged. ‘You can’t believe anything they say. But that’s what they reckon at the Judenrat and they should know.’ He brushed an imaginary speck from his boots and pushed the cap back from his forehead. ‘Anyway, now I’ll be able to protect you.’

  Elzunia eyed her brother’s uniform, from the top of his navy cap with its six-sided oblong metal emblem to the yellow band on his right arm with the word Judenrat on it.

  Lusia knew that the Germans had set up a Jewish Council they called Judenrat, to liaise between them and the Jewish inhabitants. She also knew that many people in the Ghetto were alarmed when the Judenrat appointed Jews to police their own people, but, seeing how pleased her son was with his new job, she kept her doubts to herself.

  ‘I thought you had to be twenty or twenty-one to join up,’ Elzunia said.

  He gave a smug smile. ‘I told a fib about my age and they believed me.’

  ‘Anyway, what are you going to protect us with?’ she asked. ‘Where’s your pistol?’

  ‘We didn’t get pistols. We got truncheons.’

  She looked contemptuously at his wooden baton. ‘The Polish police got pistols. How come you lot didn’t?’

  ‘You’re such a nosy brat!’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you just shut up and mind your own business?’ He stalked off, fuming. His sister always misconstrued his good intentions.

  ‘Oh my God! What if he’s right and they do close the Ghetto? What’ll we do?’ Lusia lamented. ‘And what’s happened to Father? If only we could find out whether they’ve released him.’

  Whenever her father was mentioned, a tight knot twisted in Elzunia’s stomach. With every passing day, her optimism waned. It became increasingly difficult to maintain the conviction that he would soon be released and come to their rescue, but the thought that something terrible had happened to him, that she might never see him again, was unbearable. But if he was safe, surely he would have contacted them. The uncertainty was agonising. But she didn’t voice her suspicions for fear of distressing her already fragile mother. In the past six months, the lines on her doll-like face had deepened and the dark hollows under her eyes gave them a tragic expression.

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t true about them closing the Ghetto,’ she said to comfort her mother. ‘Anyway, as soon as they let Father out, he’ll get us out of here.’

  She spent so much of her time trying to raise her mother’s spirits that she sometimes believed her own optimistic predictions. Despite her anxiety about Lusia’s fragile state of mind, it gave Elzunia a sense of satisfaction to know that for the first time in her life her mother was listening to her.

  Lusia nodded. ‘You’re right. After all, he knows so many influential people.’

  Elzunia knew that these days the influential people themselves were being arrested, deported and killed, but there was no point adding to her mother’s anxiety over her father. Lusia had managed to contact one of their friends and asked him to make some discreet inquiries about Edward but so far he hadn’t been able to find out anything. Elzunia tried to brush aside the sinister thoughts that crept into her mind. Life inside the Ghetto was terrifying enough without anticipating tragedy.

  There was a tap on the door and their neighbour Pani Szpindlerowa was hovering apologetically on the doorstep. She had always lived in the Jewish part of Warsaw with her cobbler husband, she wore a wig and she spoke Polish with a Yiddish accent.

  ‘I have nothing in common with people like that,’ Lusia had often complained to Elzunia. She regarded the orthodox men with their beards and long black coats and the women with their wigs and dowdy ankle-length skirts as clannish and backward. It was the bitter irony of her life that she was now lumped in with them and abandoned by those whose society she had always sought. With an obvious lack of enthusiasm, she invited her neighbour inside.

  Pani Szpindlerowa’s husband, Chaim, had been deported to some camp or other, and hadn’t been heard of since. The woman never tired of regaling her with stories about Chaim’s wisdom and goodness. With
each story, he sounded more saintly than before. Lusia had no patience for these monologues, which usually ended with her neighbour begging the Almighty to intercede on her husband’s behalf.

  ‘I just saw your Stefan in his uniform, kenaine horeh,’ she said, invoking the universe to keep the evil eye away from him. Then she launched into a stream of Yiddish.

  Lusia’s face twisted in distaste. ‘I’m sorry, Pani Szpindlerowa, but, as I’ve told you, I don’t speak Yiddish.’ In fact, she understood every word but pretended she didn’t.

  ‘I keep forgetting,’ the woman said. ‘Didn’t your parents speak Yiddish?’ she asked with a touch of commiseration.

  Lusia didn’t reply.

  ‘Thank God we now have our own police force, Boruch Hashem.’ Her neighbour peppered her conversation with pious thanks to the Almighty. It was a habit Lusia usually found irritating but on this occasion she was mollified by the woman’s admiration of Stefan.

  Pani Szpindlerowa turned to Elzunia. ‘You must be proud of your big brother.’

  Elzunia made a non-committal reply and busied herself in another part of the room. Her stomach was growling. She tried not to think of the crusty kaiser rolls that Tereska used to place on the table every morning, and her mouth watered at the memory of their yeasty smell and crispness. She rummaged through the jars and scoured the cupboard in the hope of coming across a forgotten slice of bread but all she could find on the shelf was a small packet of buckwheat kasza.

  After their neighbour had shuffled back to her own place, Elzunia cooked the buckwheat into a gluggy porridge and stirred some burnt grain into boiled water, and tried to believe it was coffee. As she sipped the bitter liquid, she made a mental inventory of their belongings to figure out what she could sell at the market the next day to buy bread. But when she broached the subject with her mother, the little equilibrium Lusia had gained from contemplating Stefan’s new status immediately evaporated.

  ‘To think I’ve become reduced to selling my own things, Elzunia, like those common women in the markets. Never in my life did I imagine that something like this could happen to me.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘What would Edward say?’

  It seemed to Lusia that she was inhabiting someone else’s skin, living someone else’s life. She could hardly grasp the sequence of events that had smashed her beautifully ordered, comfortable existence in such a short time. One moment she was running Warsaw’s most exclusive beauty salon and entertaining high society, and the next she was an outcast, selling her belongings to buy food. And what had happened to poor Edward?

  Lusia watched as her daughter spooned the porridge as slowly as she could into her mouth to make it last and then scraped the last grains from the edges of the plate. She felt guilty that she had allowed Elzunia to take over the running of their meagre household, but over the past two months the girl had become more capable and energetic while she herself had become increasingly weak. She pushed her own bowl towards Elzunia. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said. ‘Have mine.’

  Elzunia looked away from her mother’s bowl and shook her head. ‘After class tomorrow, I’ll sell something at Kiercelak Market and buy some bread and maybe a pat of cottage cheese.’

  Her mother unpinned her brooch. ‘Sell this,’ she said with a sigh.

  Elzunia was dismayed. ‘Not your amber brooch!’ Of all her mother’s jewellery, this modest piece was the one she loved most, with the insect stuck in the honey-coloured resin. ‘Amber isn’t very valuable,’ she said. ‘It won’t fetch much.’

  Lusia nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll find something else for you to sell.’

  Lying down on her bed in the corner of the room they shared, Elzunia tried to distract herself from the gnawing emptiness in her stomach and memories of mushroom pancakes, bigos stew with sausage and sauerkraut, and chicken kiev. She let her mind wander, as it often did, to the taciturn airman who had saved her life on the highway leading from Warsaw. Recalling the weight of his body lying on hers almost a year before, she felt a guilty rush, as if blood was simmering in her veins.

  Although she didn’t know him at all, not even his name, he had risked his life for her, just like the heroes in the books she read, but she had been too dazed to realise it at the time and hadn’t even thanked him. She replayed the scene on the road once again but this time it ended with him carrying her up a wide staircase like Rhett Butler, and saying in a low voice hoarse with passion, ‘Tonight you won’t lock me out of the bedroom again …’

  The following morning, Elzunia stood in line at one of the gates, waiting for the young German guard on duty to check her permit. Stefan never tired of pointing out that, thanks to his job as a policeman, he had managed to obtain a Red Cross pass for her. Because of that pass, she was able to leave the Ghetto for a short time each morning to train as a nurse at a medical clinic on Marszalkowska Street. The guard studied the words on each pass slowly and deliberately, as though learning them by heart, and occasionally stared at the person before him with such malevolence that Elzunia’s blood froze. With his hard, colourless eyes, he reminded her of a wolf stalking its prey, but she noticed that when he was chatting with the other guards the predatory expression was gone and he looked like any ordinary young man enjoying himself.

  While waiting her turn, she wondered about his family. His mother was probably proud of him and had no idea how cruel he really was. She wondered whether this happened when you took someone out of their familiar surroundings and gave them a uniform and the power to hurt people. Her thoughts turned to people she knew. How would they behave in similar circumstances? She wondered uncomfortably about herself. Some years ago, she had been playing with the girls next door when their mother had gone out, leaving the baby in his cot. When he’d stretched out his arms to be lifted up, his sisters had rocked the cot violently from side to side and giggled while he screamed in terror. Elzunia had looked on but said nothing. He was their little brother and it wasn’t her business. After a time, she had stepped in to stop their game. She knew she should have done it sooner but, in some deep dark place she was ashamed of, she had been stirred up by seeing the child at their mercy.

  Wolfman was taking longer than usual at the gate and the pretty young woman whose pass he was studying made an impatient sound. His eyes glittered dangerously as he set aside the pass, said something to the other guard, and they both looked at the woman and sniggered in a way that made Elzunia feel sick. They grabbed the girl by the arms, pushed her onto the ground and, while she tried to fight them off, pulled off her panties and made her crawl across the yard on her hands and knees, laughing heartily as they fired shots above her head to make her go faster. Their sport over, they returned to their post.

  Elzunia looked at her watch and hoped she wouldn’t miss her class. It took so long to get around the Ghetto these days because the walls blocked off so many exits. Instead of walking around the corner, as she once had been able to do, these days she had to make a huge detour around Nowolipki, Zamenhof and Gesia Streets, which added forty minutes to her journey. In an effort to calm herself down, she thought about her father and his parting words. Never forget who you are. Smile at adversity, laugh at death, and always keep a straight back. But Father had overestimated her courage, just as he’d overestimated his own power to influence events. She felt the guard’s wolflike eyes on her. He snatched the pass from her hand, read it, and waved her through.

  Outside the Ghetto gate, she looked around to make sure no one was watching and slipped off the humiliating white armband with the blue Star of David. She looked enviously at the other people on the street. They could go wherever they pleased without armbands and permits, just as she had done only three months earlier, not realising how brief that freedom would be. Instead of the turgid air in the Ghetto’s sweltering, overcrowded streets, out here there were open spaces, trees and bright flower beds.

  Casting a quick look around, Elzunia flew up the stairs to an unmarked apartment. Although most schools had been closed down, c
landestine classes called komplety had mushroomed all over the city and that’s where she went early every morning before the clinic. Although attending these classes was very risky, she was determined not to allow the Germans to deprive her of her education.

  The nine students who gathered in Professor Kowalski’s tiny flat each morning entered one at a time so they wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and tip-toed inside so as not to alert the neighbours. The professor, a tall thin man with liver spots on his bald head and wrinkled hands, addressed them with exaggerated courtesy, which amused them.

  ‘Miss Elzunia, would you be kind enough to remind us what we learned yesterday about our national hero Kosciuszko?’ he asked, and nodded as she gave an enthusiastic account of the general who led the 1794 uprising against the Russians.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said in his tremulous voice when she had finished, ‘it’s very important for you to learn about the achievements of Polish heroes, especially our scientists and musicians who have left such a rich legacy.

  ‘You are the custodians of our culture for the future, now that the Germans have forbidden us to play the music of Chopin and to read the poems of Mickiewicz and the epics of Sienkiewicz. And today I have some interesting news for you. Our great astronomer Copernicus, whose observations revolutionised mankind’s perception of the universe, has just received a posthumous honour.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘The Nazis have turned him into a German.’

  Elzunia was still bristling with indignation at the way the Germans were trying to stamp out Polish culture when Professor Kowalski placed a glass bowl on the table, took out some stones from his briefcase, and filled it to the top. ‘Is the bowl full?’ he asked.

  The students nodded. Without commenting, he tipped in some pebbles that filled the spaces between the stones. ‘Is it full now?’ he asked.

  This time they were certain it was. Again he said nothing and they craned forward as he emptied some sand into the bowl.

  Finally he poured in a glass of water, which was absorbed by the sand. Turning to them, he said, ‘The bowl is your life. The stones are the values for which you must make room before everything else. The pebbles are your important relationships for which you must always make time. The sand stands for the things you enjoy doing that vanish almost as soon as you’ve experienced them. And the water is your brain, which is capable of absorbing far more than you realise.’