by Jimmy Fox
These Americans and their craze for genealogy. She couldn’t understand it. Didn’t they know? They were the envy of the world. The destiny of the world was in their hands. Why try to be something or someone else from another age? Most of the world is trying to forget its past, but not these Americans. They are like children who must have something, even though it will probably make them sick.
Since the opening of Eastern Europe, the requests and the seeking tourists had poured in, a veritable flood. At the Archives, where the pace was, well, relaxed, they had years of American genealogical work piled up. And it wasn’t just those haunted Jews whose relatives had been exterminated. It was all kinds of people.
Elzbieta considered herself an intellectual of heightened sensibilities, an exponent of unpopular ideas. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she felt modern Poland was not feeling guilty enough about the annihilation of the Jews. Everyone had suffered, certainly, but the Jews, native-born and deportees from elsewhere, had been unimaginably tormented, hunted, snuffed out.
For her, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t even alive at the time, the Kielce pogrom of 1946 was a raw wound on her country’s honor. Almost all of Poland’s more than three million Jews already wiped out by the Nazis, and the pitiful remnant had to suffer pillaging and murder from their own countrymen!
At least Poland had survived, ultimately. Not so the Jews of Poland.
She always gritted her teeth whenever she heard the old ones–some in her own family–mumble that Hitler had done the country a favor; now some in her generation weren’t mumbling.
The pain of the Jews was always the fault of someone else, today and throughout history, it was said in her country: the Catholic Church or the many occupiers–the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, the czars, the communists–or even the Jews themselves for their alleged arrogance. Never the good Polish people. And there had been and were many good Poles. She had read a lot about Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, and the Righteous Among the Nations. More Poles listed than any other nationality. Stands to reason, of course, given the sheer number of native and transported Jews. Still, there had undeniably been heroism, Poles who sheltered Jews, risking their own execution, as their own country was being devoured by wolves.
Yes, she would have been one of those heroes, she told herself, navigating the airport throng.
Let them hate. She was just one woman, who had grown tired of admonishing self-serving consciences. Anyway, the dead Jews were beyond harm, and there were hardly any live ones left in Poland.
Somewhere in this complex of moral indignation and weariness lay her reasons for stealing the documents she carried. To make amends, somehow, in her private way; to give back, even if by proxy, some of the past to those who had lost so much of it.
And why shouldn’t she be paid for her effort and risk? Paid well.
Only she, the Deputy Director, and the Librarian spoke English with any fluency. By chance, Elzbieta had taken the phone call that winter afternoon. It was a woman on the other side of the Atlantic, an American. A rich American from New Orleans, who wanted very specific genealogical information on her Jewish ancestors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland. “Information” wasn’t exactly the correct word. She wanted the real thing, the actual documents. She wanted them removed, stolen, and sent to her. Anything dealing with the surname Balazar.
Elzbieta didn’t tell anyone. The enterprising budding capitalist that she was, she took it on herself to make the deal–$10,000 the woman offered–a sum that quickened Elzbieta’s pulse.
She found everything requested and more. She even had to do some traveling, paying out her own money, which she would definitely mention. Soon, she sprang her daring counteroffer–$100,000. It was her big chance to change her life, perhaps even to leave dreary Poland for good. The price had gone up, dramatically, but Elzbieta would assure the safe arrival of the documents by carrying them personally. Otherwise, who knew what would happen to them? She had worked it all out: her vacation month was coming up. Several phone calls followed. Finally, her veiled threat worked. Surprising the dickens out of Elzbieta, the woman agreed, though not without a certain coldness that characterized their final transatlantic conversation.
Funny thing…she would never give her name, this woman. Just a phone number. Perhaps these weren’t even her people, these Balazars. Maybe she was only a secretary, didn’t want to get involved further than giving telephoned instructions. Elzbieta didn’t care. She just wanted that money.
So many signs, so many unfamiliar names and words.
There! There was her ride: two men standing next to a big car. One man held a piece of cardboard, but she couldn’t quite catch the name on it. The man scanned passing pedestrians, showing his sign quickly only to certain young women, as if it were a dirty photograph.
Her relief turned to wariness. Both men seemed impatient, angry for some reason. Was she the cause of their annoyance? She recalled the nervous young men in the Customs line; each second of delay could have cost them their lives. Everything seemed to be faster over here in America, passing minutes grabbed ravenously. She hoped these men would not be mean to her. Maybe she was later than she thought. What time was it at home? Had she set her watch back too far, failing to account for Daylight Saving Time? She would have to ask them, apologize if so.
These men…she held back. Both of them were big, muscular, handsome, in fact. Good teeth. One was blond, the other was darker, vaguely Siberian looking. Then she remembered there was a lot of aboriginal stock in the population, here in the South. What did they call them–Indians? How can all these people live together in peace? she wondered. Europeans can’t seem to do it. Since New York, black people, especially, had fascinated her. She had seen a few in Virginia, on campus and in town, of course, but now she really noticed them in all their variety of colors and facial constructions and raven hair. What a wonderful country!
But these men scared her. Their eyes were cruel, hunter’s eyes. She remembered that look in the eyes of the worst of Jaruzelski’s security forces, in December of 1981 when martial law was declared. Recently, she had seen the look in the eyes of Russian and Ukranian gangsters in newspapers and magazines and on television. Such eyes looked on horrible things and did not blink.
“My name is Elzbieta,” she said. “You are here for me?”
“Yeah, babe, we’re here for you,” the fair-haired one said, a troubling leer on his face.
He tried to take her briefcase, but she clutched it to her.
“Suit yourself. Get in.” She heard him say something to his darker friend, and she thought it ended with “dumb Polack bitch.”
Surely she had misunderstood.
The car amazed her. The president of Poland himself, the great Walesa, probably didn’t have a car this big or nice. All this comfort, this complexity. It was almost as big as some apartments she’d lived in back home.
She was embarrassed. She knew she did not smell all that great; it was so warm here, and she had been sweating in the heat. She checked her breath. She began to worry about her jaw-length light-brown hair–a disgrace, stiff and lusterless; she had tucked it behind her ears because it refused to do anything else. A bath, a long, luxurious bath in a clean American hotel room! That’s what she most wanted right now. She should be living like a queen, she was going to be so rich!
The dark-featured man drove very fast. He ran red lights. Neither of the two men spoke. They stared straight ahead as the engine roared.
Elzbieta had a guidebook with a foldout map. She prided herself on her map-reading skills. The car was going in the wrong direction. She was certain her reservations were at a hotel downtown.
“We should go that way?” she said, pointing over her shoulder.
No answer. The blond one turned up the radio. Spunky jazz. Elzbieta would have enjoyed it in other circumstances.
“You are mistaking,” she said. Fear made her chin quiver. “I am staying in hotel downtown. That way. Here are my papers.�
�� She held up her hotel confirmation for the blond man to see. He didn’t turn around.
As she looked back in the direction of downtown New Orleans, through the heavily tinted rear window, she understood that there was indeed a mistake, a terrible one. And she had made it.
Elzbieta frantically yanked the door handles. Both doors were locked solid from the front.
Praying to the Holy Family and John Paul II, she cried quietly.
3
“Nick,” Una said, after one of those long, observant, nearly telepathic lulls in the conversation that characterize the meetings of longtime friends. They were sitting around a shellacked salvaged cable reel that served as a table at the Folio, a favorite hangout of diverse groups from the adjacent Freret University campus.
At the Folio there was a boozy truce between highbrow and lowbrow, professors and students, art and science, social dissidents and frat members, aesthetes and athletes.
Nick’s earlier plan to jog had lost out to an invitation from Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus to meet here.
“Dion and I have a proposition for you,” Una said and waited. She adjusted her glasses, leaning forward on the table in earnestness, her blue eyes daring him to take the challenge.
Nick raised an eyebrow in suspicion. He put down his beer mug with a thud. “Hey, I was just sitting here, tending my own psychic garden, enjoying the music, and the whole time you two have been laying a trap for me…oh yeah, I definitely smell a conspiracy. What is it this time? An office job in the geology department? Somebody at the library on maternity leave? Assisting a Ph.D. candidate in his research? Hey, friends, please: you don’t have to throw me scraps anymore. In fact, I like my work. I haven’t been able to say that in a long, long time, have I?”
They nodded in unison.
“Look, I know it must be unnerving for pampered, tenured, grant-rich scholars like you to acknowledge that; it does violence to your self-image; but I am actual proof that there is life outside the shaded groves of academe.”
Always focused on the higher motivations, like one of her long-suffering Victorian literary heroines, Una ignored his self-defensive outburst: “We’ve noticed that you’re overworked. The rat race doesn’t agree with you. You’re too thin…those circles under your eyes.”
“Just allergies, that’s all,” Nick replied.
“For a minute there, when I came in, I thought Una was sitting with Keith Richards,” Dion Rambus said. “He’s coming to town for a performance, as the posters stuck all over campus proclaim.”
“Ouch! That hurt,” said Nick, wincing in feigned discomfort.
“‘O how full of briers is this working-day world!’” Dion continued.
“As You Like It, act 1, scene three,” Nick said between sips.
“Very good. Listen to Una, Nick. You need our help. I remember the days when you would outpace me, in spite of my longer legs, on our brisk walks across campus. And outtalk me! Now, you’re stooped and brooding like a medieval monk in a scriptorium. What a horrible yoke it must be to have to work twelve months a year.” Dion shook his head and tsk-tsked.
“I remember a time when I thought you were somewhat handsome, in a tragic-hero way,” Una said.
“‘Somewhat’!?” Nick echoed as if hurt to his core.
“You miss appointments, you don’t even answer the phone most of the time.”
“It’s positively infuriating that you refuse to hook up that answering machine we bought you for Christmas,” Dion complained.
“I mean, really, Nick,” Una said, “you’re living in the past, yours and mankind’s. It’s 1993, not 1893 or 1793. It’s a new world out there, full of possibility, and you’re stagnating, cutting yourself off! You need an infusion of fresh ideas.”
“Hamlet asked Horatio to absent himself from felicity,” said Dion, “but only for a while. Haven’t you done enough penance?”
Una continued the verbal assault: “You probably aren’t even aware we have a dynamic new president–”
“You mean that guy”–Nick snapped his fingers–“what’s his name…Grover Cleveland?” Una was an earnest liberal, like most of his other former colleagues; he couldn’t resist teasing her for what he now saw as good-hearted naivety. He’d come to believe that we were all “useful idiots” to self-dealing narcissists in power, on either side of the left-right line.
“That’s rich!” Dion shouted through the music. “But your cynicism has proved our point precisely. You’ve become a card-carrying member of the Party of Yourself–apologies to Walt Whitman.”
“Okay, okay, I give in. What’s going on?” Nick asked. He had in fact tried to hook up the answering machine but had given up in frustration. They didn’t need to know that. Technically inclined he was not.
“Dion and I have come up with a solution to your dilemma.”
“A dilemma you’ve conveniently manufactured.”
“Her name is Hawty Latimer.” Una let the name sink in a few seconds and sipped her daiquiri–her first drink to the men’s fourth. “She’s a junior, with a double major, English and computer science.”
“I don’t like her already,” Nick said. “Computers?” He contorted his face into a grimace. “I hate computers.”
“A Blakean nightmare vision, eh, Nick?” Dion asked through a mouthful of pretzels. “Our invention has made us its slaves.”
“Be nice, now, Nick. Don’t be so quick to judge. She had a two-year scholarship, and now she’s exhausted her family’s ability to help her. What talent! Quite an overachiever.”
“Una’s right, Nick. Seriously, I’ve read her stuff. Her papers are so well reasoned and innovative she could replace any one of about half our staff. For instance, that incompetent philistine–”
“Dion, shhhhh! Someone could overhear,” Una cautioned.
Dion bit his lower lip in suppressed rage. “Yes, yes, I’ll muzzle myself. Anyway, Hawty’s poetry is damn good, too. She’s an exceptional lass…and, uh, spirited.”
“Spirited? What’s that supposed to mean?” Nick demanded, suddenly wary.
“Her true intellectual loves are literature and history,” Una said, avoiding his question. “Good fit for you, right? And I’m certain she has a vocation for teaching. This past semester she taught an introductory English course. The kids loved her. The faculty review group gave her high marks, too. She had some, oh, slight medical problem, and missed out for a summer course. Nick, I’m afraid that this time, if she goes home–a tiny town in north Louisiana–she won’t be able to return. We’ll lose a fine future teacher. What you’re doing will mesh very well with her developing abilities and interests; and she could really, really use whatever small salary you could pay. By the time fall gets here, I should have some funding lined up for her.” Una held up crossed fingers.
“Pay! You got to be kidding,” Nick protested with a laugh. “Most months I can’t handle my rent. Or as President Cleveland’s advisors would say, it’s about the economy, you well-intentioned dolts–mine!”
Smirking in disappointment, Una looked at Dion, as if to confirm their suspicion that Nick had turned into a hardhearted capitalist swine. They contemplated their drinks while Nick fidgeted, and the loud, eclectic, alternative-alternative music of the Folio swirled around them.
“Just think about it, okay?” Una urged before lapsing into a pout.
How could he refuse? Nick asked the dregs of his beer, as Dion launched into a particularly inspired diatribe against their perennial archfoe, Frederick “the Usurper” Tawpie, currently the assistant department head of the Freret University English department.
He owed these friends so much. And for a time twelve years before, he and Una had been much closer than friends–lovers, in fact.
She had just joined the department then, a rosy-faced, diminutively sexy, enthusiastic young professor, who frolicked like a nymph through the wordy marshes of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, and Trollope. There had been three, four years of passion and c
ozy togetherness, many late nights of nakedness and laughter and wine and both Brownings aloud by candlelight. A lifetime of love seemed the logical outcome–at least in her mind.
And Nick? Well, he merely let things go on their course, feeling cocky and smiled upon by the universe, feeling the very focus of creation in his unvanquished young man’s egoism.
But the happier he told himself he was, the more dissatisfied he became. He changed, became moody, solitary; life lost its savor. He turned into a cad, though his students continued to crowd into his classes. Everybody who cared said it was too much Shelley and Byron, the subjects of his graduate seminar that fateful semester. Just an affectation, a Romantic pose he would grow out of. Now, looking back, Nick supposed it was nothing more unusual than a normal professional burnout, which would have been temporary had malice not worsened his circumstances, had Tawpie and computers not given his wheel of fortune a gratuitous damaging turn.
He had enemies he never suspected, who resented his youth, his good looks, his popularity with the students, his relationship with Una–who knows what. Does jealousy really need a good reason? One thing he did know: jealousy takes more insidious form in the minds of highly educated people.
There was a charge of plagiarism. He wasn’t sure to this day who first made it; it permeated the department, as if someone had broken wind. He had always suspected that Tawpie at least had something to do with not letting the matter drop, as some of the school’s heavyweights, on and off the faculty, wanted to do.
An article Nick had published in a literary journal seemed to echo too closely an obscure article by a long-dead critic. Nick was no paragon, but he did have a deep respect for words in the service of art and knowledge; that’s what had drawn him to the study of literature as a profession in the first place. He had never even read the earlier article and maintained that fact through it all.
