Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  They were all sitting around the table waiting for Avner to arrive when the shrill ring of the doorbell shocked everyone into sudden silence. No-one in the Baldinger household would have dared to use the telephone or ring the doorbell on the Sabbath or on holy days. By ringing the small key-shaped bell, which is still attached to the front door of 20 Sebastiana Street to this day, Avner was flouting a religious rule he’d known all his life.

  The family exchanged glances and everyone looked at their father to see what he would say. ‘Why did you ring the doorbell on Shabbes?’ he asked in his quiet, deliberate way.

  Full of bravado in his high-necked grey military uniform with the peaked military cap, Avner thought he was too grown-up and too important to be rebuked. With a sarcastic laugh, he quipped, ‘I must have forgotten that a bell was a bell.’

  Without raising his voice, Daniel looked at him with his even gaze. ‘But surely you haven’t forgotten that a Jew is a Jew?’ he retorted.

  Daniel was realistic enough to know that Avner wouldn’t be able to observe many religious laws while in the army, but he did expect him to obey them at home. ‘Being unable to observe the laws is one thing,’ he pointed out, ‘but choosing not to is a different matter.’

  Lieba changed the subject, but Avner’s chair suddenly felt hard, and his collar chafed his neck. Daniel’s dignity made it difficult to get the better of him, and anyone who tried usually regretted it.

  Although Avner had been keen to join the army, he soon found that it didn’t live up to his expectations so he was very pleased when a misunderstanding enabled him to stay at home for the next eighteen months. This protracted furlough came about because of a mix-up which resembles the plot of a Viennese farce. His name had been mistakenly entered in military records as Waldinger, and it took the Austrian army eighteen months to realise that Waldinger and Baldinger were the same person.

  Meanwhile war was being waged with increased fury. While English, French and German soldiers died hideous deaths in the trenches and Australian troops were sacrificed on the cruel beaches of Gallipoli, Russian and Austrian armies advanced across Poland, turning the country into a battlefield. In the process, the villages of Galicia were torched and trampled, and at one point the Tsar’s Cossacks came perilously close to Krakow.

  When the Austrian army finally discovered its spelling error, Avner was sent to Vienna in the army reserve. The army recruited tradesmen of all kinds and on the day when Avner arrived, they happened to call for plumbers, so he stepped forward along with several others. They were taken to an enormous Garbanz pump where the officer in charge explained that when it rained in the Alps, water poured over the Italian and Austrian armies in the ditches below, so they needed pumps had to siphon out the water and dispose of it. Avner’s group was ordered to build a platform high enough for this powerful pump to push the water up and empty it over the other side of the mountain.

  Perplexed by the intricacies of this Garbanz pump, Avner’s superior officer kept making mistakes and miscalculations, but having already installed these pumps with his father, Avner knew how they worked. As he was the only one in the entire outfit who did, the captain summoned him. Sitting in a makeshift office which was cluttered like a newspaper kiosk, Captain Austerlitzer looked up with bleary eyes when Avner entered, and made a weary gesture with his hand. ‘What do I know about pumps?’ he shrugged. ‘I’m a paper merchant not a plumber! Go ahead and do whatever needs doing.’ And he put Avner in charge of the entire operation.

  Recounting Avner’s adventures eighty years later, his son Adam can’t get over his lucky breaks. ‘My father never saw the front line,’ he says in his stroke-slurred speech. ‘He became a pump consultant, stayed in a hotel and wore fancy uniforms. He was a dreikopf. A smartarse,’ he chuckles. ‘Just listen to how he got out of the army!’

  What happened next was typical of Avner’s life, where nothing ever went in a straight line. When Daniel received a huge contract, he was entitled to employ tradesmen from the military reserves, so he applied for Avner to be detached from the army to work for him. Daniel’s contract was to construct railway tracks in those parts of Poland which were then occupied by the Austrian army, so as the army advanced, his business expanded with it. When Daniel requested that Avner, his employee, be permitted to join his railway team, the application went astray, so it wasn’t approved. Determined to go home anyway, Avner forged a pass, attached his own photograph to it, and travelled home with his falsified document.

  Several months later an official letter bearing the imperial eagle was delivered to his home. The military police were looking for Avner Baldinger. He was ordered to report immediately to his superior officer. While clearing up the files, someone had come across Daniel’s letter and realised that the subject of this application had left the army long before approval had been granted.

  This time Avner was worried. Forging documents, deceiving the army and being absent without leave were serious charges. His stomach churned as he travelled to the appointed place for the interview with the officer who had uncovered his absence, trying to figure out how to extricate himself from this tricky situation. At the officer’s instigation, they met inside an opulent hotel furnished with crimson plush armchairs and crystal chandeliers. Avner noted that the officer arrived with a fawning entourage. He studied the man’s neck, which bulged over his army collar, the features flushed and coarsened by too much food and wine, and the well-buffed fingernails on his smooth white hands.

  Sizing the officer up, Avner took a deep breath. He was about to take an enormous risk. ‘How much will it cost me to go home for good, so that no-one will ever know I was missing?’ he asked. A knowing look crossed the officer’s bloated face. ‘Three hundred crowns,’ he replied, not taking his heavy lidded eyes off Avner’s face. Avner’s audacity paid off. The officer signed his approval into the order of the day, and the army entered it into their records. ‘By order of the Dept of War, private Avner Baldinger has been detached and sent home.’ That was the end of Avner’s army career.

  Seventy-five years later on a damp Manhattan afternoon, Avner is telling his story to his grandson Barry. Avner’s face is now cadaverous, his cheeks are sunken, and the huge blue eyes have a despairing look, but he still marvels at his past. ‘It’s a whole chain,’ he says in wonderment. ‘A whole chain of happenings.’ Barry asks about his childhood but Avner mumbles that he can’t remember. ‘I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,’ he promises. That tomorrow never came.

  While Avner was playing hide and seek with the Austrian army, Daniel and Lieba were far more worried about their second son Jerzy who was interned as an enemy alien in France. Like Avner, Jerzy had refused to become a rabbi. Since he hadn’t matriculated, his options had been limited, and Daniel had decided to apprentice him to a furrier. Jerzy, who had a quiet sense of humour, was amused at the way his father introduced him to his employer. ‘My son doesn’t want to be a mensch, so let him be a furrier!’ he said. Mensch means man, but its Yiddish connotation is that of an honourable, ethical person. Daniel hadn’t intended to insult the furrier but couldn’t hide his disappointment that Jerzy was going to become a furrier when he could have been a rabbi.

  The fur trade had indirectly caused Jerzy’s internment. As Paris was the heart of the fur trade in Europe, he’d travelled there to complete his apprenticeship, but being a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 automatically made him an enemy of the French and he was interned as an enemy alien. He was so badly treated that for many years he couldn’t bring himself to talk about his experiences. Twenty years later, he was to be interned again, but from that internment there was to be no release.

  For the Baldinger girls, however, war made little impact on their lives. Lunia had become a coquettish young woman, handsome rather than pretty, with her fleshy face, long upper lip and thick ankles which she tried to hide by wearing high heels and long skirts. Lunia resembled her mother, but she had a more commanding presence. She was tall, dressed well,
and carried herself with such an air of self-importance that everyone noticed her. ‘If you act as though you are a nobody, people will treat you like a nobody,’ she used to say.

  When Kaiser Franz Josef expired in November 1916, shortly before his empire did, Lunia leapt at the opportunity of travelling to Vienna for his funeral. She was to collect rent from her parents’ apartment block in Herminenstrasse, give some of the rent money to Tatunciu’s impoverished cousins, and stay for the funeral which promised to be the spectacle of a lifetime. The prospect of visiting Vienna was exhilarating. Although Krakow was the cultural and intellectual centre of Galicia, it didn’t compare with Vienna, an effervescent city where life was lived with style, verve and charm. Everyone tapped their feet to Johann Strauss waltzes, hummed melodies from Franz Lehar’s frothy operettas and copied Viennese fashions.

  In normal times Vienna was an easy train journey from Krakow on the Kaiserferdnandnordbahn railway but because of the war, Lunia needed a special permit from the police. At nineteen she was a self-possessed young woman, not easily intimidated. While waiting at the police station for the permit, Lunia noticed a strange wooden contraption about one metre high in the next room. ‘I’d like to know what that is,’ she said.

  The policeman reddened to the roots of his hair and twirled his bushy moustache in embarrassment as he looked at this elegant young woman with her coil of tawny hair, houndstooth travelling suit, and fancy blouse tied at the throat. ‘Now, my dear young lady, it’s…ahem…it’s a chair…a special chair…it’s for examining certain women that we bring here…you wouldn’t know about that, a fine young panienka like you,’ he stuttered, while Lunia, wide-eyed and enjoying his discomfiture, hung on every word. Too embarrassed to continue, the policeman cleared his throat. ‘Here’s your permit for Vienna, Miss Baldinger.’

  Determined to make a good impression in Vienna, Lunia sewed feverishly for weeks before her departure and arrived in her new travelling outfit, a flared navy skirt nipped in at the waist and a jacket with fake chinchilla cuffs. Vienna was a revelation. Like a child let loose in a toy shop, Lunia stared at the fashions in the shop windows and the exquisitely turned-out Viennese women who made the women of Krakow seem like country bumpkins.

  Unable to resist the stylish fashions, she tried on shoes, suits and hunting hats and convinced herself that spending some of Mamuncia’s rent money on clothes was a much better investment than giving the money away to poor relatives. She couldn’t wait to see the faces of her friends turn green with envy as she made a grand entrance in her new finery.

  In 1990, when she can no longer walk without a frame, let alone wear stylish shoes, Aunty Lunia can still recall the pumps she bought in Vienna in 1916. ‘The shoes I bought were high-heeled to make my legs look more shapely, with little straps across the instep, in suede with contrasting toe pieces in patent leather. No-one in Krakow had shoes like that. Only young ladies who’d been to a funeral in Vienna!’

  On the day of the funeral, she stood with the crowds near St Stephen’s Cathedral as the cortege went past. Staring intently to absorb every enthralling detail, she watched the never-ending procession of dignitaries in feathered cockades and flowing capes, the high-trotting Lippizaners caparisoned in white plumes, the gilded carriages and liveried coachmen. She was plunged into the world she’d always dreamed of, a realm of chivalry, beauty and style, and she never wanted to go home.

  When Lunia unpacked her new outfits, Andzia, who always hung on her eldest sister’s words, widened her dark eyes. ‘What will Mamuncia say when she sees that you bought six pairs of shoes?’ she asked, awed and horrified by her sister’s daring. ‘I’ll have to face the music,’ Lunia shrugged. ‘But it’s worth it. After all, she can’t kill me. And I’ll never see suits and shoes like that again!’ Then she proceeded to explain the finer points of haute couture to her younger sister.

  In the midst of these recollections, Aunty Lunia’s eyes harden. ‘I was always very good to Andzia but unfortunately she hasn’t been good to me,’ she sighs. ‘She doesn’t even come to visit me any more.’

  Throughout their lives, these two sisters have been locked in a symbiotic relationship. Living in the same city and knowing each other’s weak points, they always knew how to draw blood. Fierce rivals and intimate friends, they loved and loathed each other, yet could not live without each other.

  Lieba did not share Lunia’s excitement about her new wardrobe. ‘Luniu, how could you be so irresponsible? That money was supposed to go to my cousin. I can’t trust you. That’s the last time I’ll ever send you anywhere on business again!’

  Not long after Lunia’s return, Leo, the son of Daniel’s cousin from Vienna, came to visit them on leave from the army. Lunia thought that this tall young man in his Austrian shako, snappy uniform and sword in its tasselled scabbard was very dashing, but Lieba was more interested in what he had to say. Concern creased her kind face as she heard that his mother, the one to whom Lunia had been instructed to take some of the rent money, was struggling to make ends meet. After Leo had left, Lieba, remembering her eldest daughter’s selfishness, said to Andzia, ‘Let’s go to Vienna and take Aunty some food.’

  For some reason she decided to take eggs to Vienna. After buying two hundred of the biggest eggs she could find, she carefully arranged them in a big flat basket in layers, with tissue paper in between. At the station she handed the basket to the railway porter who placed it on the rack above their seats. While recounting this story, Aunty Andzia shakes with laughter which transforms her discontented expression. ‘He must have put the basket down too roughly because for the whole journey those wretched scrambled eggs kept dripping down onto our heads. We kept wiping the slimy stuff off our foreheads, hoping that no-one noticed! By the time the train pulled into Vienna, we were too embarrassed to own up that the basket was ours, and left the whole sorry mess, basket and all, on the train. On the way to our cousin’s place we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. After all that, poor Mama arrived at her cousin’s empty-handed!’

  Like Lunia, Lieba also had a weakness for clothes, but unlike Lunia, who looked at herself with a kind eye, Lieba rarely liked the way she looked in the clothes she ordered. Often she sent outfits back to the dressmaker, and hats back to the milliner, because she felt that they made her look too fat, too dowdy or too old.

  According to Aunty Andzia, Lieba got her love of dressing up from her own mother, Ryfka Spira. The photograph I have of my great-grandmother bears this out. Taken several years before World War I, it shows her in a long patterned skirt, shiny blouse puffed out at the shoulders, and an exuberantly wide-brimmed hat trimmed with feathers. At the age of eighty-seven, Aunty Andzia herself is a fashion plate. She’s slim and attractive, her hair is fashionably blow-waved, and she wears smartly tailored slacks with an Italian silk shirt.

  When I comment on her clothes, she runs into the bedroom and brings out a new outfit which she has recently bought in Switzerland. Talking about clothes has obviously put her in a good mood, because an hour earlier she refused point-blank to talk about the past, but now she can’t wait to tell me about the time her grandmother Ryfka Spira turned up in Krakow.

  During the first year of the war, Ryfka apparently became restless in Szczakowa. ‘Am I going to sit at the cash register in this department store for the rest of my life?’ she said, and talked her husband into going to Krakow. Lieba was very attached to her mother and immediately gave notice to some tenants so that her parents could live in her house in Sebastiana Street.

  When my great-grandmother Ryfka saw how lively life was in Krakow, she didn’t want to go back to Szczakowa. At first my great-grandfather Abraham enjoyed the novelty of strolling in the Planty Gardens beneath the ancient towers and gates of the city. He liked browsing around Krakow’s Glowny Rynek, the vast cobbled square which resembled an Italian piazza. At the stroke of twelve, he stood beneath the lacy tower of the Mariacki Church and listened to the bugler playing his haunting fanfare, which always stopped mid-no
te. This had been a tradition ever since the Middle Ages, in memory of the ancient bugler who was pierced by a Tartar arrow while warning the people of imminent invasion, and it seemed particularly apt now that the Great War was raging.

  Aunty Lunia also remembers her grandparents’ visit. Sometimes Abraham took his wife shopping. ‘Come, Ryfka,’ he’d say to her affectionately in German, ‘I saw some nice taffeta with flowers printed all over it in a shop on Florianska Street, it will make a nice blouse for you.’ As she recalls this, Aunty Lunia’s wrinkled face creases into a beatific smile. For a moment she forgets that she’s in an old people’s home surrounded by people who are not refined enough for her, abandoned by her sister, feuding with her niece, and trapped in a place with religious fanatics she despises. The years roll away. ‘I can remember it like yesterday,’ she whispers.

  On Saturdays Abraham walked to the Old Synagogue with Daniel, two well-dressed men with neatly trimmed grey beards in their silk top hats strolling through the quiet streets of Kazimierz. Later, he visited his sons and daughters, many of whom had already settled in Krakow. Like Ignacy, who imported Sarotti chocolates and lived in a mansion facing the Planty Gardens on Straszewskiego Street with his wife Pepcia. Ignacy was a distinguished looking man with a stern glance and the bearing of an Austrian officer, and my mother used to tell me that, of all his uncles, my father most resembled this one.

  During World War I, Daniel and Lieba’s house must have been bursting at the seams because in addition to Daniel’s sisters and their children, whom he had brought to Krakow, there were also Lieba’s parents. Then, when Lieba found out that her sister Berta was struggling in Chrzanow because her husband didn’t support his family, she hired a horse and carriage and brought them with their five children to Sebastiana Street as well.