Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  It was in Margot’s tiny kitchen, with a benchtop barely big enough for one person, that Avner began experimenting with the recipes which would finally lead to success. Every night, when Margot came home from hospital where she worked as a laboratory technician, there were pots bubbling on the stove, mixtures sizzling in frypans, and dishes piled up on the table. As soon as she walked in the door, Avner and Hela would hold out a spoon for her to taste the latest version of their recipe.

  Margot adored Adam, and when, not long after they were married, she discovered that he was unfaithful, she poured her heart out to her mother-in-law. Hela consoled her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Most men stray from time to time. It doesn’t mean anything.’ Then she flashed her daughter-in-law a mischievous smile. ‘You know, it’s not made of soap, it won’t wear out!’ Margot took Hela’s advice and stayed with Adam for another twenty years, but she realises this was a mistake. ‘Adash should never have married. He was overindulged by his parents, never applied himself to anything and had a foul temper. I loved him and made allowances for him, but basically he was a spoiled little boy who never grew up.’

  When they finally got the pâté recipe right, Avner realised that the mixture would have to be sold in cans. He leased a dialpidated room in a condemned building in the Bronx and Max bought him a second-hand canning machine. Margot still marvels how hard her in-laws worked at their age. For eighteen hours a day Hela cooked in huge vats while Avner put the pâté into cans, using the old-fashioned foot-operated machine. ‘They came home exhausted but never complained. Papa never lost his sense of humour or his optimism,’ she recalls.

  The turning point in their pâté-manufacturing career came when they discovered that it only cost a few cents more per tin to have someone else produce it. Soon their pâté was stocked on the speciality shelves of all the supermarkets and did so well that they were able to move into a nice apartment and hire a maid. ‘Papa bought Mama a diamond ring and a fur coat. It was lovely to see them finally doing well,’ beams Margot, who never resented the fact that she kept her in-laws for eight years. Before long, Kraft wanted to buy Avner’s recipe for $5000, but he refused to sell it. By then, he was close to seventy. Finally, in his old age, he’d found the recipe for success. Baldinger’s Chicken Liver Pâé is manufactured to this day. One tin of it stands on a shelf in my kitchen in Sydney, a tribute to my uncle’s indomitable spirit.

  Hela didn’t live long to enjoy their new affluence. In 1977, while on a draconian diet, she had a massive heart attack. ‘My father was devastated when Mother died,’ Wanda recalls, ‘but it wasn’t long before the widows in his apartment block started visiting.’ At eighty-two, Avner was stooped with osteoporosis but he still had an appreciative eye for a good-looking woman, a ready compliment and a never-ending supply of enthralling stories. Within a short time he formed a relationship with a much younger woman who brightened his last years. ‘But Adam and I always said that if he had died first, Mother would not have gotten over it,’ Wanda remarks.

  It surprised everyone who knew him that, after turning away from religion throughout his life, Avner began studying the Torah again in his old age and joined an orthodox synagogue. When he died in 1985, at the age of ninety, he had an orthodox funeral which would have gladdened his father’s heart.

  Avner’s brothers Marcel and Izio didn’t attend his funeral because they were angry with him over money or whatever emotional issues the money represented. ‘My father had a strange attitude to money,’ says Adam. ‘He was generous in his own way but he didn’t repay loans and that caused a lot of bad feeling.’

  The last time I visit Uncle Izio, he has become disillusioned with his eldest brother, but by then he is sunk in misery about his wife’s debilitated state and disillusioned with the whole world. ‘Avner was the most powerful character in our family and we all idolised him. But much later I realised that he was selfish, ruthless and dishonest. He had a formidable brain and a photographic memory but he took advantage of people, even our parents. I can remember him saying to me one day, “There’s only me, me, me and then, a long long corridor away, there’s you.” That’s how he was.’

  When people realise that they’ve been worshipping a false god, their disappointment with their own judgment makes them turn on the object of their idolatry. Once Izio began to see his brother’s faults, he couldn’t accept that he was a human being with good and bad qualities. ‘Ten years ago I suddenly saw that this is how he’s been all his life, and I couldn’t forgive him,’ he says.

  The only one of Avner’s siblings who was with him when he died was his youngest sister. By a strange coincidence, Slawa had come to visit him in New York for the first time shortly before he became ill. Sitting by her brother’s bedside, Slawa had time to reflect over her life which had diverged from the rest of the family and left her isolated in her native land.

  CHAPTER 34

  By the flickering light of the candle in her dimly-lit room on Urzednicza Street, Slawa picked up each thread of the laddered nylon stocking with her needle. The candlelight made her eyes feel as though they were about to drop out, but she forced herself to continue mending until the whole pile was done. Life was tough and every zloty helped.

  Gusts of wind as sharp as knives still blew over Krakow that April of 1952, and spring seemed far away. Of Daniel Baldinger’s eleven children, only Slawa had remained in Poland, while her seven surviving brothers and sisters were now dispersed all over the globe. Like a handful of sand tossed up in the air and blown about by the wind, they’d settled in Tel-Aviv, Montreal, Sydney, Paris and New York. Although her brother Henek had suggested that she and her husband should migrate to Australia, an offer she’d found tempting, Mietek, who wasn’t Jewish, hadn’t wanted to leave his native land.

  From the top of the walnut sideboard, Aunty Slawa picks up her wedding photograph with a sigh. The bridegroom’s severely handsome face suggests a self-contained man who didn’t waste words. She, on the contrary, beams out of the photograph, her eager face framed by wavy brown hair. That smile hasn’t changed, but her grey hair is now cropped short around her plump face.

  Looking adoringly at Mietek’s photo, she says, ‘It’s twenty years since he died. The most wonderful husband in the world, sensitive, kind-hearted, obliging. We complemented each other: he was introverted and laconic and I was the lively, energetic one.’ She still has so much energy that it’s hard to believe she’s eighty. Every day she walks for miles in search of the best veal or the juiciest oranges, and then lugs them up four steep flights of stairs. ‘Mietek treated me with great respect,’ she reminisces. With a twinkle she adds, ‘But not in bed!’

  Mietek worked on the railways until he retired. ‘That’s why I have a pension, a rail pass and coal coupons,’ she says, ‘but who’s going to haul bags of coal up four floors now that Mario’s moved out?’ Mario, their only child, was born nine years after they married, long after she’d given up hope of ever having a baby.

  She interrupts her story to slip on her well-worn dog-brown shoes and gabardine belted jacket, and continues talking while we walk to the market. Stout women in blood-stained aprons hack veal shoulders with cleavers, and babushkas in headscarves crouch on the pavement, holding posies of lilies-of-the-valley. Aunty Slawa buys me a bunch of these white bells which tremble against spear-shaped leaves of forest green, and I bury my nose in their sweetly delicate fragrance which always reminds me of Poland.

  Scrutinising a scrawny chicken held up by a hawker in a cloth cap doesn’t interrupt my aunt’s flow of memories. ‘Life was tough when the communists took over,’ she says, shaking her head at the price the man’s asking for the chicken. Life is still hard now that the communists have been trounced, and her widow’s pension can’t keep up with escalating prices. But like all the Baldingers, she has a joke for every occasion. ‘Life in Poland is just like the unhappily married woman who went to have her fortune told. “You’re going to have ten terrible years,” the clairvoyant predicted. “A
nd then?” the woman asked eagerly. “And then you’ll get used to it!”’

  When Slawa and Mietek set up house in their one-room flat on Urzednicza Street, all they had was Karola’s walnut sideboard and the bedroom suite which my parents had given them before leaving Krakow. Her present flat, in which she has lived for over thirty years, is a repository of family furniture. I sleep on Lunia’s old divan bed, take dishes out of Jerzy and Rutka’s painted kitchen cupboard, and look at Karola’s sideboard while eating breakfast. That link with the past is exciting but it saddens me that furniture is all that remains of my uncles and aunts.

  I don’t think that Aunty Slawa has ever thrown anything away. The blue woollen dressing gown which I wear during my stay arrived from Australia forty years ago. ‘Your parents sent me that even though they had to struggle themselves at the beginning,’ she says. I remember that as soon as my father had saved up a few pounds, he used to send skeins of Australian wool and warm clothes to his sisters Slawa and Andzia. ‘Your father has always been good to his family,’ my mother used to say. She was right. While he was sending parcels to his sisters overseas, we had so little money to live on that my mother used to cut and glue Kromite rubber soles onto our shoes to make them last longer because we couldn’t afford repairs.

  Aunty Slawa is thrilled that I’ve come to Poland to see her. Every morning she brews a pot of coffee and brings it to me in bed with great ceremony. This precious French coffee, which she keeps for special occasions, has come from her brother Marcel who sends her parcels filled with delicacies several times a year. Like a squirrel, she stashes the treasures away and makes them last. But when I ask whether she feels close to these brothers who have helped her all her life, she shakes her large head. ‘I never felt close to any of my siblings except Jerzy who used to cuddle me,’ she says. ‘Just once, after Father died, Izio put his arm around me. Other than that, I don’t recall any of them showing me any warmth or even being interested in me. Being the youngest, I didn’t count.’

  Resting her plump cheek against her hand, she reflects on her life in Poland after the rest of the family had left. Mending nylons strained her eyes, so when she saw an advertisement for tourist guides, she applied and became a guide for the government tourist agency, Orbis. The work suited her friendly, energetic personality and enabled her to travel overseas at a time when political restrictions made this very difficult. Sighing with nostalgia she says, ‘I adored my work. I met interesting people and visited fantastic places like Turkey and France and Egypt.’

  Supplementing Mietek’s small salary was essential because Mario, who was seven years old at the time, developed a worrying cough and had to be sent to a sanatorium. ‘The treatment was so expensive that we virtually lived on dry bread for two years. After that I took him to the seaside every summer and he grew strong, but he was highly strung as a child. He still is. Mario was afraid of his father. Mietek was terribly strict. Most of our arguments were about the way he disciplined the child.’

  I always knew that I had a cousin called Mario, but the little boy with the Slavic face and smooth blond hair whose communion photograph Aunty Slawa sent us many years ago never really seemed part of my family. Although I knew that his father was Catholic, my aunt’s next words take me by surprise. ‘For most of his life Mario didn’t know I was Jewish,’ she says. ‘I never told him.’

  From the way her face sags, I can see that it’s painful for her to talk about this. ‘Although almost all the Jews had been killed off during the war, anti-Semitism here never stopped. In fact, it got much worse during the sixties,’ she explains. ‘Jews were bad. Anything Jewish was bad. When people opened up, you felt their consuming hatred, as if they wanted to eat Jews alive.’

  In 1967, when Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War provoked a wave of anti-Semitism in the then pro-Arab communist bloc, Poland’s communist government followed suit. Jews were vilified, accused of causing all the country’s problems, persecuted, and fired from their jobs. Aunty Slawa didn’t lose her job because they didn’t know that she was Jewish. ‘Ever since the Occupation I’ve had a complex about admitting I was Jewish and the events of 1967 proved me right. I never said I was Catholic, but I didn’t say I was Jewish either, not unless I was asked outright. To this day I don’t advertise it,’ she says. ‘That fear stays with you all your life.’

  To Aunty Slawa’s horror, Mario used to repeat the anti-Semitic comments he heard at school. ‘You can’t imagine how it hurt me to hear him say those things, but I just didn’t have the courage to tell him the truth,’ she tells me. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was Jewish, and that he was Jewish too. I tried to explain that people envied Jews because they were successful, educated and wise, and that for centuries Jews have been persecuted and discriminated against for being different. I told him that one day he’d read books and understand.’ She gives a long sigh. ‘But nothing I said made any difference. He didn’t want to know.’

  How strange life is. Growing up in the city where his devout grandfather once prayed in synagogue every morning, Mario was ignorant of his heritage. ‘I felt terrible about it, but I had to deal with the world I was living in,’ Aunty Slawa shrugs. ‘To this day, being a Jew is considered a disgrace in this country. If someone wants to discredit a politician, they spread rumours that there’s a Jewish skeleton in his closet. Either he had a Jewish mother, or he’s a converted Jew. I wanted to spare Mario the pain of belonging to a despised minority. I didn’t want him to go through what I did.’

  Mario didn’t find out the truth until he was twenty-five years old, and only then because his mother was being blackmailed. A Catholic acquaintance threatened Slawa that she would tell her son she was Jewish unless Slawa gave her a piece of jewellery she wanted. In a panic, Slawa rushed to Lola’s place for advice. Izio Baldinger’s first wife, who was also widowed after the death of her second husband, was her closest friend. Lola, who was always level-headed and objective, saw the crisis as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. It was time that Mario knew.

  I ask my cousin how he felt when he discovered the truth. At the age of twenty-five, I imagine that he must have been horrified to learn that he was half-Jewish. Mario’s reply is so swift and matter-of-fact that I can’t conceal my surprise. ‘I wasn’t shocked at all,’ he says. ‘It was perfectly all right, it felt fine. Things I’d never understood before suddenly fell into place. I used to wonder why my mother cried sometimes, why she got so upset about things which didn’t seem important. Naturally I wondered why she hadn’t told me sooner, but I understand that she was worried about how I’d react.’ Talking to Mario about this, I recall that I too once faced the same revelation and that, like him, I’d always known deep down that my family was different.

  When he fell in love, however, Mario also lacked the courage to tell his fiancée about his Jewish blood. He was so much in love with Gosia, a sensual blue-eyed blonde with a dreamy manner, that he was terrified of losing her and didn’t tell her until after the wedding. ‘She accepted it,’ he says, ‘but said that I should have told her sooner.’ His bride’s parents, however, found it so difficult to cope with the fact that their son-in-law was Jewish that for a long time their relationship with the young couple was very distant.

  While he talks, Mario’s ash-blond hair falls across his forehead. It’s hard to imagine that this tall, handsome man of thirty-five was once a sickly child. With his regular features, thick moustache and slightly sardonic expression, my cousin looks typically Polish, but beneath the Polish charm, the explosive Baldinger temperament lives on. Eloquent, knowledgeable and intense, he overwhelms me with a torrent of facts and figures. ‘All they understand here about capitalism is putting up prices,’ he scoffs. ‘Every merchant in Poland has to become an instant millionaire.’ The words tumble out thick and fast, and when he’s finished, I feel I’ve been run over by a truck.

  As Mario and I wander around the Kazimierz district together, he is a lively companion, peering into windows,
pushing open gates, darting down alleys. When we peer through the grimy windows of the temple on Miodowa Street, across the road from our grandparents’ first home, he hoists me up so that I can see the impressive colonnaded interior with the Star of David on the wall, the vaulted ceiling, wooden gallery and the thick tomes stacked on dusty shelves.

  Walking along these twisted lanes, I’m aware of the ghosts of the past all around us. The patina of every building seems imprinted with untold stories and vanished lives. Invisible eyes are watching me and phantom fingers clutch at me as I pass. There’s a brooding stillness here. Everything seems poised, watching, waiting. The cobbled lanes twist, widen and narrow, and grasses push up between the paving stones. Some buildings have the tell-tale elongated, curved windows of old synagogues and shtibls, some facades still have traces of old Yiddish signs. Children with pale faces and flaxen hair stare at us from doorways. It’s strangely silent here, like watching a movie with the sound turned off.

  As we walk through the sad overgrown alleys of the Jewish cemetery, Mario explains the symbols on the graves: lions, deer, candelabra, hands clasped together. He reads books about Jewish history and traditions and studies Hebrew tombstone inscriptions. With the hushed voice and shining eyes of someone about to disclose an exciting secret, Mario confides, ‘I’m really glad that I have a Jewish background, because that means I belong to the chosen people!’

  It takes me a while to realise that he’s speaking from the perspective of his new religion. In an effort to resolve the dilemma of his religious identity and reconcile the Christian and Jewish worlds, he and Gosia have joined an evangelical Protestant sect which accepts the Old Testament alongside the New and gives him permission to be proud of his Jewish heritage. His mother marvels at his interest in religion. ‘You should see how he pores over the Old Testament!’ she says.

  Aunty Slawa has joined us outside her old family home in Sebastiana Street. It’s a shady street, where the boughs of the chestnut trees let little sunlight through. Inside the entrance to number twenty, I take in the curved ceiling, the ochre and maroon geometric patterns on the tile floor, and the fragments of royal blue glass set into the semicircular pane above the door that leads to the back of the house. Outside, the paving is broken, the paint is peeling and the walls are crumbling. Aunty Slawa is shocked. ‘It never looked like that when we lived here!’ she exclaims. Then she points to the shed at the far end of the courtyard. ‘That’s where my father had his workshop. I remember him standing there in his overalls, pottering around, tinkering, soldering and making his first prams.’