by Ramona Koval
She’d been told that I was a serious Australian journalist. ‘I don’t like serious journalism,’ she said.
We talked about her lonely childhood before her mother gave her up to the first Polish family, and afterwards. She came to a story about a time when she and her mother were stopped in the street by a Polish policeman. Her mother was blond and blue-eyed (a ‘good look’—that’s what everyone still called the combination), yet Krall was dark-haired and brown-eyed.
The policeman asked Krall’s mother to recite a well-known Catholic prayer, and she faltered; then he asked Hanna, aged seven, who repeated it perfectly.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘A woman who doesn’t look Jewish but doesn’t know the prayer, and a child who looks Jewish but does know it. Who is the Jew here and who is the Pole? You decide between you and I’ll come and take the Jew in the morning.’
Hanna said that she and her mother, who was then thirty-seven, talked all night. Her mother said she’d already lived her life and Hanna should be the Pole. Hanna said she was too young to survive on her own, and that her grandmother and uncles and others depended on her mother, too.
Finally they arrived at a solution. They would both be Jews and they would both die. They were happy with the decision.
When the policeman came, the Polish family they were living with covered for them and talked him out of thinking that either one of them was Jewish. Hanna said that she thought it was Mary, mother of Jesus, who saved them, as when she had recited the prayer in the street in front of the policeman she had really meant it.
There in the Hotel Europejski foyer she started to falter and then to weep, and couldn’t go on. I reached out to hold her hand and she removed it. I must have looked alarmed.
She saw this and made a gesture with her eyes, opening them wider and staring at me with frozen rage, as if to say: What are you looking at me like that for? She reminded me of Mama with her aggressive sadness, and I started to weep, too.
We both blew our noses on paper serviettes and she said: ‘Quickly, ask me about my husband again. Ask me if I’ve decided to leave him for good. Then we won’t cry.’
We laughed. Then we talked some more.
And later, when I was walking her out of the hotel, she said, ‘Well, what do you think, shall I leave my husband?’
‘I’m not going to give you advice,’ I said. ‘You’re old enough to make up your own mind.’
I asked again if there really wasn’t anyone else.
She told me about a doctor who practised near her dacha in the country and was very handsome. He attended her for some trouble with her leg. He put a drain tube into it and needed to check on her day after day. Then the tube disappeared into her leg and she went to see him, full of alarm.
‘What a pity it wasn’t a needle,’ he said. ‘I’m great at getting needles out, I was for years in Africa doing this.’
She said she got angry with him, and realised that he’d never read any of her books and that she couldn’t tolerate a man like this, who probably would never read them.
Did her husband read her works?
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He’s a very intelligent, learned man.’
As she left she said: ‘Write to me about what you think of my work. But don’t write, “Have you left your husband yet?” I’m talking to you because you are like a stranger on a train.’
I know, I said, exactly like a stranger on a train.
I did read her book of two distinct parts, The Subtenant and To Outwit God. The Subtenant is a strange and complex autobiographical novella in which the narrator has an imagined conversation over forty years with the child who survived the war in the apartment of the narrator’s Polish family.
The child was sometimes taken for a walk by her Polish protectors, but she had dark Jewish eyes, so the mother of the household had her walk with her eyes downcast so that no one would look into them. She suggested that the child kick a stone as she walked, to keep her eyes looking down and avoid suspicion. Later her lowered eyes are likened to those of Pliny’s wild beast Catoblepas, who kept them lowered as his head was so heavy—which was fortunate, because anyone who looked into them died.
‘Do you see the striking analogy?’ the narrator says. ‘The eyes of Catoblepas killed others, yours could kill you.’
Was that a death stare that Hanna Krall had given me in the foyer of the Hotel Europejski?
And now that I look at the book again I see her inscription: For Ramona, with whom we talk about the same world, with whom we cry…Her name, and then: Warsaw, 10/7/1996. It looked as though I had cut through the sharpness of her personality—at the least she was recognising the moment that we cried together.
After I returned home from that trip I sent Krall a handwritten note, telling her that I’d read her book and that her story reminded me of my mother’s. And that she was like my mother in many respects. She never replied.
Some of Mama’s behaviours must have come from her experience of growing up alone. I felt watched over and restricted by her when I was a teenager. But it was different when I was younger. On my first day at a new school after we’d moved suburbs, she walked me there. I was in Grade One. Before we left, she told me to watch how we got there (up our street, across the big road at the lights, down the next street, across the small road), but I was so thrilled and happy and scared to be going to a new school that I didn’t take it in. Leaving me at school, she said that she’d wait at home for me and I could get back myself. Because I have shown you what to do. I nodded and kissed her goodbye.
It was a big day of play lunch and lunch and afternoon playtime and new people and a new room and a new desk and a new teacher, so by home time I was muddled. I didn’t reverse the order of the morning’s walk and thought that there was a big road first. I looked up and down for a place to cross with lights but I couldn’t find it. Eventually I went back to the school, and all the kids were gone and the mothers, too. I wandered into our classroom block and found the headmistress in her office. She asked where my mother was and I told her I was supposed to find my own way home. She looked up her records and put me in her car.
At the front door I could tell she was angry with Mama. I had the impression that the headmistress regarded her as a bad mother, and looked down on her accent. She explained that I was too young to be expected to find my way home on the first day.
I remember my mother’s almost haughty expression. I imagine she was thinking that this headmistress had no idea of what was possible in the world, what was dangerous, what was a risk.
Now I suspect that, perhaps unconsciously, Mama was trying to future-proof me, preparing me for a time when I might have to survive on my own. Expecting a five-year-old to navigate backwards a simple ten-minute walk from home to school? Other five-year-old children she’d seen had to survive a war zone, hunger, cold, loneliness and the predations of strangers.
My sister’s husband tells an anecdote about his mother, who’d been in a concentration camp, putting him on a bus to kindergarten. He had no idea how to get off, where to get off or what to do when he got there. These stories are not cause for pity, but rather a means for us to try to understand the mindset of survivors.
I turned six later that year and had settled in at the new school when Mama told me that the children who went to school with her—the Polish kids in that tiny village in the countryside, at the intersection of two dirt roads—gave her away when the Germans marched in and asked for the Jews to stand up. She moved into the ghetto with all the others.
I wonder why she told me that story then. It was a new school: did she want to give me the rundown on all the possibilities? Surely this wasn’t a story to make me feel confident. Had I asked her what the new school would be like, what her school was like in Poland? She must have said something about her survival method and her change of identity to me, or maybe I overheard it.
At school, when the teacher asked us to put up our hands if we were Jewish, I knew what
I had to do. My right hand stayed firmly under the desk, clamped there by the left one.
I watched as two or three other children stuck their hands into the air. They were asked to stand and come to the front of the class. This was it, I thought. And, because I was the new girl, I didn’t know any of them and couldn’t warn them. So I sat very still. They filed out of the room.
A nice woman came into the class to teach us for one lesson a week. She was a religious-instruction volunteer from the local Presbyterian Church.
I learned the Lord’s Prayer. Our father who art in heaven, please don’t let them find out I’m Jewish. I was good at remembering the stories and the songs, and my hand shot up when the woman asked us a question. I was a model Christian. I felt a pang of regret as the other Jewish kids filed out each week for a session with the rabbi, but it was too late to own up.
I liked the tales about Jesus, especially the miracles. I was impressed with the loaves and fishes, and the walking on water. No wonder that when it came to choosing a responsible child to be Mary, they looked no further than me.
I came home one day in early December and asked Mama if I could take a tea towel to school.
‘Are you going to cook something, Ramona?’
‘No, it’s for a play.’
‘What kind of a play?’
‘It’s just a play about a lady with a baby and she wears a tea towel around her head. It’s nothing, really.’
‘So what does this lady with the baby and the tea towel on her head actually do?’
‘She just sits in a chair, in a zoo.’
‘You mean there are animals with this baby?’
‘A few.’
‘Would this be a Christmas play, by any chance?’
‘Yeah, maybe that’s what it is.’
‘Do they know you are Jewish, Ramona?’
Why was I surprised that you knew so much about nativity plays, Mama?
I told her about the safety aspects of religious-instruction classes and that, as she had survived by pretending to be Christian, I’d thought that learning to be one was a good idea.
She took me to school the next morning, to the headmaster’s office, and blew my cover. He was aghast. Where were they going to find a replacement Mary at this late stage? They didn’t have an understudy.
‘Don’t forget, sir, that Mary was one of us!’ Mama said.
The headmaster was relieved.
And on the morning of the play, the local reverend patted my head as I walked by him with the tea towel on and the doll in my arms, and Mama stood in the audience with a distant look on her face, and I suspect that only I could see the tears in her eyes.
Despite the mysteries and confusions, I knew my mother loved me. She let my sister and me come into her bed in the mornings, and held us while we cuddled her and fought for our territory, which was marked by an imaginary line between her breasts and down her body. She told us that education was important. She let us do our homework without making us do too much around the house. She thought we should have ballet lessons and piano lessons. She started to teach me how to cook only when she realised she was dying.
She’d been tired for a long time, and for a while she went to her GP and then to skin specialists about a rash. At her annual check-up her gynaecologist, the doctor who had delivered my sister and me, suggested she have a blood test.
When she went back for the result—and I am only guessing here—the doctor told her that she had chronic myeloid leukaemia and that it was fatal. I wonder what she said. I wonder why she asked the doctor to ring me.
But there I was, in my second year of university, at nineteen, home with my sister, who was fifteen, and a telephone call in the afternoon from the doctor announces that my mother is very sick, she has leukaemia, she is going to die and she is coming home now on the tram. And I am not to tell my little sister about it.
Feeling numb, I placed the phone in its cradle. The afternoon sun shone into the lounge room, turning everything a sickly gold. After a while I heard Mama climbing the steps. She came in and asked if the doctor had called me, and said she was going to start taking some pills. I read the label on the bottle but it held no meaning for me. She began making dinner. She didn’t talk about what the prognosis was, about how long she thought she was going to live, or what would happen to us when she died. She had her closed face on, eyes deep and blue and giving nothing way. I knew better than to ask anything.
In the following days she began to retreat under her blanket on the couch, reading and dozing. I went to university; my sister went to school. I learned the lessons she had to teach me: to show nothing on my face, not to cry, not to ask questions, not to cause my sister any anxiety, not to make waves.
We listened to Charles Aznavour, whose chansons she liked. She told me she’d heard a song on the radio that she wanted me to buy for her. She said it was called ‘Time in a Bottle’. I found out that it was by Jim Croce, and when I brought it home she would listen to it over and over.
We didn’t talk about that either. We didn’t really have to. The song’s lyrics were her way of saying that she was sad to be leaving us. But she couldn’t find it in herself to tell us directly. Her disguise lasted all the way, through more than thirty years from the war’s end, to the moment she took her last breath.
19
A citizen of the earth
MY sister saw an announcement in the paper that Dad’s wife had died. I was surprised not to have heard already, as I would have liked to have gone to her funeral, to pay my respects. I rang her daughter and left a message, but she never returned the call.
Some months later I noticed her as I stood in the queue at Target. She seemed to be crouching behind a dress rack. Was she trying to avoid me? I sought her out and expressed my sympathies for her mother’s death. She mumbled a little, and I said I would’ve liked to go to the funeral but no one had told my sister or me about it. She mumbled again and said she wasn’t yet able to talk about her mother. She was upset and weirdly evasive. Weirdly? Maybe I had become so used to my mother being dead—it had been nearly four decades by this time—that I didn’t regard the loss of a parent as tragic when the parent was old.
Dad’s wife had inherited his estate and had then, I assumed, left everything to her daughter. It happens all the time, of course. I never thought I had any rights to him as my father, or any claim on his belongings.
I looked up the details of her death online. She was eighty-five when she died and had been cremated at a different cemetery to the one where Dad’s grave is. Long ago, he had bought a plot for himself at the Orthodox Jewish cemetery next to one for a card-playing friend of his. He couldn’t buy one for her, as she wasn’t Jewish. It was an odd thing for him to do, but it was not the first odd thing.
So I was surprised to see on the burial record that her religion was stated as Jewish. She was cremated, which is not allowed in Jewish Orthodoxy, and her ashes were at the necropolis next door to the Orthodox cemetery. I saw that she was a couple of years older than Mama would have been, had Mama had lived beyond forty-nine. She had died on 9 March and been cremated three days later. You’re supposed to be buried quickly, and three days is unusual, unless the body needs to be repatriated or close relatives have to fly in from overseas. If she was properly converted, why wasn’t she buried near Dad?
Then I saw that Temple Beth Israel, the liberal Jewish congregation which held the Sunday school classes I had attended, had a notice of her death. Why was I picking over the ashes of this woman who’d looked after Dad until his awful death? Why was I questioning her right to be interred in the way that she and her family saw fit?
I found the records for Mama and Dad. As in life, when they could hardly stand to be in the same room together, in death they were far removed, too. Her 1977 death placed her in Row 3, plot B8, while his 2008 death had him in Row 20, plot D12. But he was more removed by distance from his second wife. Her ashes are interred a way down the road.
I looked up
the records for Max. He’d died on 13 January 1989. He was buried somewhere between Mama and Dad, Row 18, grave S5. Was the placement fitting? He hardly needed to come between them in death, as so much else came between them in life.
I remembered the first phone call from Bern after she’d met Max at the auction and he’d asked after me, asked if I was happy. It was in my first years of full-time broadcasting, which started in 1988. He may well have known by then that he was dying. He might have been thinking about his life and putting some things to rest. But then, why would he have been at an auction? Maybe he was always going to auctions; maybe they were a hobby for him.
Like Dad, Max didn’t leave me anything. I was tempted to get sentimental about him, but he had plenty of chances to contact me after that day he’d been reminded of me by seeing Bern. And if she hadn’t been looking for a house, they would never have met and he would never have asked about me.
I checked on Max’s brother Joe, the one who couldn’t be told about my existence because of the shame. He’d died, too. His younger son had told me that Max and his father often fought about their business. Joe was the tailor and Max was the businessman; Max wasn’t a fine tailor like Joe. Of course Max was the businessman, I thought. He had learned everything about how to do business, how to organise, in his years at Auschwitz.
One night the following year I was watching a television documentary about the caves under Easter Island when the phone rang. It was Joe’s younger son’s wife. She told me that Alan had died, aged sixty-three. He’d had pneumonia, after serious lung disease, and had continued smoking. He’d still ridden his horse each day around Kuranda, and someone at his funeral recalled him wearing a Zorro costume. His kids were now young teenagers. His mother was still alive: eighty-eight years old and in a retirement home.
He’d been in Melbourne with his daughter some months before his death and hadn’t called or visited me. I wasn’t surprised, but I felt left out. He was possibly my half-brother, and I only met him that one time. He’d died some weeks ago. His poor mother, outliving her only child.
