Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  The fracas about the veil made her so late that by the time she emerged from her house, everyone in Sebastiana Street was standing on the pavement to gawk at the bride. Lunia tried to put the hideous veil out of her mind and gave the onlookers a wan smile and regal wave as she stepped into a landau lined with white satin and drawn by four white horses. Just like the brides of her dreams, except for the veil which irritated her throughout the reception because whenever someone came to kiss her cheek or invite her to dance, it kept sliding off her head.

  Lieba also spent a great deal of time planning her outfit for her daughter’s wedding, but whereas Lunia always knew exactly what she wanted and thought that she looked magnificent in her clothes, her mother rarely felt right in hers. Lunia was horrified when her mother returned the diamond bracelet which Daniel had bought for her. Even though they owned several buildings in Krakow and Vienna and had a big income, Lieba thought it was too extravagant. She had always been modest, and didn’t feel comfortable accepting expensive gifts, almost as though she didn’t feel she deserved them.

  There was an element of self-interest in Lunia’s dismay. She felt that her dowry of 50 000 zlotys had been inadequate, and figured that if Mamuncia had kept the bracelet, she would have been able to provide a better dowry. Lunia had no qualms about letting her parents know that she was disappointed because 50 000 zlotys wasn’t enough to buy an apartment.

  Seventy years later, in the nursing home in Tel-Aviv, she still resents the fact that her parents didn’t buy her a house when she got married. She thinks it’s because she wasn’t selfish enough, because she didn’t push hard enough for what she wanted. ‘I can see now that I was a fool all my life. I wasn’t down to earth,’ she sighs. She glances at Krysia. ‘Not like her mother Andzia…’ The rivalry that’s lasted almost as long as this century rises to the surface like scum on bathwater. ‘Andzia was always smart. She demanded things regardless of whether our parents could afford them or not. She had to have a three-room flat on an elegant street, she had to have furniture, she had to have everything.’

  Krysia, who rarely defends her mother, is now caught between the tough old aunt who has exploited her, and the mother who has flagellated her with words all her life. On this occasion, bitterness towards her aunt prevails. ‘But she didn’t get a dowry like you of 50 000 zlotys, which gave you half a house and an income for life!’ she snaps.

  Lunia doesn’t budge. ‘All I know is that at the time your mother got married, nine years after me, our parents were badly off, but she still insisted that they buy her a home. For me, they just rented an upstairs room at the Gonskis.’

  Krysia is shaking her head with disbelief. ‘But you ended up with a half share in your house!’

  Lunia passes a weary hand over her face. ‘I can’t remember every detail, and some things I don’t want to say. But Andzia was very clever and very envious, and remains so to this day.’ The look which my cousin Krysia gives her could dissolve steel.

  The most popular holiday resort for the Jews of Krakow was the little spa town of Krynica, and that’s where Lunia and Berus spent their honeymoon. Each day Lunia promenaded in a different outfit, her fashionably long tight skirts worn with matching shoes and head-hugging hats. Her favourite outfit was a slinky black crepe dress worn with a white fox fur and a delicious little hat shaped like a miniature Austrian officer’s shako. As she didn’t want her feet to look big, she always wore shoes that were a size too small, which made her walk as though she were treading on eggshells. Taking her husband by the arm, she checked that his new overcoat was neatly belted at the back and that his brown homburg was tilted at just the right angle. As they strolled arm in arm through the rose gardens of Krynica, everyone turned to look at this elegant couple. At least that’s what Lunia thought.

  After four passionate weeks which exceeded all of Lunia’s romantic fantasies, they returned to Krakow and the hated second-floor room which her parents rented for them. Lunia hated living on the second floor. Clinging to her new husband’s arm with one hand and to the balcony railing with the other, she acted as though she was living on top of the Eiffel Tower. Whenever she ventured out on the balcony, she shivered and clutched the door as if her legs were about to give way. ‘My parents have always lived on the ground floor, so I’m not used to being so high up,’ she used to complain.

  Living in someone else’s house was also embarrassing. Demurely attired for bed, Lunia wore a frilled mob cap, silken nightdress and satin dressing gown with contrasting piping on the lapels, but at night a less demure aspect of her nature emerged. Her wedded bliss was inhibited by the fact that the landlady could hear the creaking of the bed, the rhythmic banging against the bedhead, the murmuring, giggling and ecstatic moaning. In the nursing home at Petah Tikva, Aunty Lunia leans towards me and lowers her voice. ‘It’s not nice to talk about these things, but sex is one of the greatest pleasures in life.’

  Daniel and Lieba adored Berus, a sincere, considerate young man who wasn’t demanding like their daughter who took every opportunity to make some dig about her flat. ‘Really, Mamunciu, the flat is fine, it’s just that those people are not my type. They’re not cultured. And that balcony terrifies me, I always feel as if I’m going to fall over the edge. You don’t know how it feels, you’ve never had to live in an upstairs flat,’ she would add pointedly. Finally Daniel and Lieba agreed to put in another 50 000 zlotys and bought a house jointly with Lunia on Panska Street. This kept her happy, but it was to cause her parents a great deal of heartache later when their situation deteriorated and their daughter’s selfishness became more blatant.

  Berus didn’t have a job, so when Lunia found out that Avner had become a partner in Hela’s family company which imported sausage casings, she seized the opportunity. ‘Why don’t you take Berus into the business? That way you’ll have a bookkeeper you can trust,’ she suggested. It was a brilliant move for both parties and, later, when the business grew, they expanded to Vienna and Berus became a partner. Lunia was finally able to start turning her apartment into the palatial home she’d always dreamed about.

  Two years after their marriage, in 1921, Tusiek was born after a long and difficult labour which lasted for three days. When Lunia was completely exhausted and no longer cared whether she gave birth or not, it became obvious that there was a serious problem, so the midwife called a doctor. When the baby was finally delivered, Lunia’s first reaction on seeing her son was utter dismay. He was bright yellow. Such an embarrassment. She cringed whenever relatives came to see the baby, mortified about his appearance. Later, whenever she was wheeling the pram in the park and saw someone she knew, she would duck behind a tree until they’d passed.

  While Lunia was still recovering from childbirth, the Russo-Polish war broke out, and Berus fled to Vienna to avoid conscription. Aunty Lunia can recall the day he left as clearly as if it were yesterday. ‘I remember when I got up from my childbed my mother-in-law was with me—I’m embarrassed to tell you this—Uncle Berus knelt beside my bed and kissed my breasts. My mother-in-law looked at me in horror, she was scandalised. I sprang out of bed when Berus went to leave the room, I clung to his legs, I kissed his knees, I can’t tell you how miserable I was that he was going away. And my mother-in-law could only say, with pity in her eyes, “Luniu, what are you doing, what are you thinking of? Get back into bed, don’t, you mustn’t…”’

  As soon as she could manage it, Lunia followed Berus to Vienna. Lieba came to say goodbye to her daughter before she left. ‘Lunia, take care that you don’t have another child straightaway,’ she cautioned. She was speaking, as Lunia well knew, from bitter experience.

  Aunty Lunia is reminiscing about her son. ‘When Tusiek got over the jaundice, he was so gorgeous, so beautiful, he had such a lovely round face, such bright blue eyes,’ she says. ‘When he started walking, whenever we tried to stop him falling, he’d go “Na na na na!”’ Meaning no. Then she frowns. ‘Later he wasn’t so lovely,’ she says coolly. ‘Later his nose grew to
o big.’

  While Lunia was discovering the pangs and pleasures of motherhood, and Poland was rediscovering the joys of nationhood, Daniel’s fortunes began to decline. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered and Galicia became part of the newly independent nation of Poland, his lucrative railway contracts came to an end. Daniel and Lieba still had apartment houses in Krakow and Vienna, but misfortunes rarely come singly.

  In the postwar inflation, money lost value rapidly and the income from their houses was worth less day by day. They’d bought the houses on Kopernika and Zielona Streets in Krakow on a mortgage, aiming to sell them for a capital gain, but in the deteriorating economy it was impossible to keep up the payments and equally impossible to sell for a profit.

  Daniel’s inner serenity and absolute trust in God prevented him from worrying about their financial situation, but Lieba, who had been apprehensive even in the good times, always worried about the future, even though by now the household was smaller and the children were less dependent financially. Avner and Lunia were married, Jerzy and Janek were apprenticed to furriers, Izio had begun manufacturing prams with his father, and my father Hesiu had left school without matriculating and was working as a dental technician.

  Rozia was still living at home, as was Karola who was doing well at high school. From an exceptionally beautiful child, she had grown into a willowy, attractive teenager and was the only one of the eleven children who finished high school and matriculated. Andzia, who was very shrewd and resourceful, had never done well at school, but she had inherited Lieba’s efficiency and flair for cooking, and helped her mother run the household. Matus was, in his own words, growing up neglected as a weed, while little Fridzia kept smiling and wound everyone around her podgy little finger.

  From an early age Fridzia had learned how to manipulate her parents. With an innocent expression, she used to say to Daniel, ‘Mummy said to give me ten cents.’ After he’d placed the coin into her plump litle hand, she would sidle over to her mother. ‘Daddy said to give me ten cents.’ She didn’t get away with it for very long. Daniel would look up from the exercise book where he and Lieba kept detailed accounts of every cent they spent, and say, ‘You asked me to give Fridzia ten cents, but I can see that you gave her ten cents yourself.’ Lieba was astonished. ‘But she told me that you said to give her ten cents!’

  Fridzia must have quaked in her little shoes when her father called her over to explain, but she had nothing to fear. ‘My father never smacked me,’ she says in that hushed, reverent tone she uses whenever she speaks about him. ‘He was always very gentle.’ In his firm, quiet way, Daniel admonished his daughter. ‘Fridziu, it’s wrong to tell lies. If you need ten cents, don’t make up stories, just come and ask.’ The trouble was, she didn’t usually get the money when she asked for it.

  So little Fridzia kept scheming. In spite of her delinquencies, she was often sent on errands, like fetching two litres of creamy milk from the dairy in a big metal container with a long spout. On Thursdays she was sent to Korn’s grocery shop around the corner, in Ditla Street, to buy flour, sugar, salt, whatever was needed for the Sabbath. Up three broken steps and she was inside the dark shop that smelled of wax, cloves and herrings. Jars, bottles, boxes and sacks were heaped on the wooden floor and shelves, but on the counter Mrs Korn displayed something Fridzia couldn’t resist—coconut candies called Kokoski. Although she wasn’t allowed to buy anything for herself, she had a terribly sweet tooth, and it killed her not to have five cents to buy one. Since everything was bought on credit, she just added the Delta chocolate biscuits or the coconut Kokoski sticks to the list and ate them, but when at the end of the month Lieba checked the bill, she would ask with a frown, ‘What are these Kokoski doing here?’ Rather than own up, Fridzia invented stories. ‘There was a family called Baumger in there, so Mrs Korn must have mixed us up.’

  By now Daniel had started a new business. Whenever Lunia arrived with the baby, she complained that it was impossible to buy a nice pram. The best prams were made by Opel in Vienna, but the falling value of the zloty had made the Austrian prams prohibitively expensive, while the Polish factory in Czestochowa couldn’t keep up with the demand.

  Lieba, who had inherited her parents’ business instincts, was quick to see the opportunity. ‘Why don’t we make prams?’ she suggested to Daniel one evening after Lunia had gone. ‘You’re a good organiser, and you still have all your workmen,’ she pointed out. ‘They could make prams and then I could sell them.’ She’d always wanted a shop of her own and this seemed the perfect opportunity. Daniel was in his late sixties, but his energy hadn’t flagged and he enjoyed working with his hands. He set up his pram workshop in a shed at the back of their yard in Sebastiana Street.

  At the beginning the pram factory went well, and the dolls’ pram which little Fridzia pushed up the stairs to show off to her friends upstairs came from Daniel’s workshop. My cousin Wanda still remembers the big, fancy English-style prams our grandfather used to produce. But Avner, who always had big ideas, talked his father into expanding the business to premises in Przegozala Street.

  A bad move according to Uncle Izio who helped Daniel make the prams. ‘My father used to say that everything you do has its cost, and that in the learning process you have to pay your dues, but he didn’t pay his dues when he started making prams. That factory was a disaster because he knew nothing about making prams, and he was competing with the automotive firm Opel which also manufactured baby carriages. Father should have employed an expert, but he insisted on us doing everything ourselves. And then times changed, and more modern styles were needed, and he couldn’t compete with the prams they made in Czestochowa.’

  The retail outlet for Daniel’s prams was a shop called Syrena which Lieba opened on Szpitalna Street. Shops were in her blood, and after Daniel closed down the pram business, she and Izio kept the shop going.

  According to Lieba’s niece Rozia Johannes, Izio was Lieba’s favourite son. I had no idea that my father had a cousin called Rozia Johannes or that she was living in Tel-Aviv until Aunty Andzia mentioned her in passing. The following morning a proud old lady of eighty-seven with wiry grey hair twisted into a French roll walked slowly up the path to Krysia’s place, leaning on a cane. The daughter of Lieba’s brother Judah, Rozia had lived in the same apartment block as my grandparents in Miodowa Street. Luckily for me, Rozia had a mind as sharp as a laserbeam and, addressing me formally in the third person in the old-world Polish manner, she proceeded to regale me with fascinating stories about her Aunty Lieba, Uncle Daniel and the eleven cousins.

  ‘Izio and his mother were a mutual admiration society,’ Rozia recalls. ‘Whenever he came home, she delighted in making delicacies for him, and whatever she placed in front of him, he praised to the skies. “Mama, that’s the best soup I ever tasted, no-one makes apple slice like you,” he’d say, and ask for another helping.’ But when I ask Uncle Izio about his mother, he sounds upset and doesn’t want to talk. Much later I understand why talking about her is so painful for him.

  After finishing elementary school, Fridzia longed to go to the academic high school like Karola where the girls wore pleated navy skirts, but her parents couldn’t afford to send her there. It was Lunia who paid for Fridzia’s secondary education at the commercial school where she learned bookkeeping and stenography.

  But Aunty Fridzia has no warm feelings for her eldest sister. ‘If I wanted to visit her in her home on Szlak Street, I had to take the number three tram. But when I asked her for twenty cents for the tram, she’d shoo me away, saying “Off you go, you little beggar!” She wouldn’t give me twenty cents!’

  The only one of her siblings whom she remembers with love is her older brother Jerzy who was caring and affectionate. Fridzia’s eyes grow misty when she thinks about him. ‘Jerzy had one ear curled over like a flower,’ she says with great affection. ‘He had a pet name for me—Fioradelko. My little Fioradelko he used to call me. I loved Jerzy. Even though times were tough, he al
ways managed to find a few cents for me. Always. Poor Jerzy.’

  During the mid-1920s, while his youngest sister was still at school, my father stopped working as a dental technician. He wanted to study medicine but because of the small quota of Jewish students admitted to Polish universities at the time, he wasn’t admitted, and enrolled in dentistry instead. But as he hadn’t matriculated, he had to pass his school leaving certificate first, which was very rare for an adult at the time.

  Poland was in the grip of devaluation so severe that people had to lug wheelbarrows full of banknotes just to make the simplest purchases. To make my father’s life more difficult, he had to move away from home because Warsaw University was the only one which offered a dentistry degree. Although Daniel helped him financially, it wasn’t enough to cover basic expenses but knowing his father’s straitened circumstances, he refused to ask for more money. Throughout his studies my father lived in the cheapest lodgings he could find in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, where frost encrusted patterns on cracked windowpanes, and ill-fitting doors rattled and banged. He blew on his reddened fingers and shivered in the damp room he shared with two equally impoverished students.

  Hesiu wore shoes with gaping holes, walked to save tram fares, bought the discarded books of older students, and ate meagre meals. He used to tell me that on the rare occasions when he could afford a piece of herring, he used to slide it towards the back of his black bread to make it last longer. With fingers so stiff with cold that they could hardly hold a needle, he mended his threadbare clothes. But bad experiences often produce good stories. In later years my father’s mime depicting the painstaking efforts of a man trying to sew a button onto his shirt and sewing it onto his finger instead, became his popular party piece.