The Woman from Hamburg (2 page)

“Our daughter is not for sale,” Barbara and Jan said, and saw their guests out.

Their daughter was a well-behaved and very pretty little girl.

Her father spoiled her. They went together to sporting events, to the movies, and to cafés. At home, he would talk about how people admired her beauty, especially her hair, which hung down to her waist and was twisted into French curls.

When Helusia was six, packages began to arrive. They were sent from Hamburg; the sender was a woman with a strange, foreign name.

“She’s your godmother,” Barbara explained. “I don’t wish her an easy death, but write her a letter and thank her nicely.”

At first, Helusia dictated her letters; later, she wrote them herself.

“Thank you, dear Aunt, I am doing well at school, I am dreaming about a white sweater, maybe angora, but mohair would be better.”

In the next package, a white sweater would arrive.

Helusia was ecstatic, but Barbara sighed and said, “If there is a God, she won’t have an easy death. Sit down and write a letter. You can mention your First Communion and that white taffeta would come in handy.”

Sometimes there were banknotes in the packages. There were never any letters; just once, between two chocolate bars, there was a photograph. It showed a dark-complexioned woman in a black dress, with a long fox fur draped over her shoulder.

“That’s a silver fox,” Barbara observed. “She’s not very poor.”

But they didn’t get a good look, because Jan took the photograph out of their hands and hid it somewhere.

Helusia didn’t like her father’s rapturous moods. They were exhausting. She would be studying or playing with her friends, and he’d be sitting there and looking at her. Then he’d take her face between his hands and look again. And then he would start crying.

He stopped drawing artistic letters.

He began drinking.

He cried more and more often, he drank more and more, and then he died. But before he died, a couple of months before his death, Helusia was leaving for France. She was twenty-five years old. A girlfriend had invited her so that Helusia could calm her frazzled nerves after her recent divorce. Helusia came home one day, radiant, holding a passport in her hand. Her father was drunk. He studied the passport and embraced her.

“Stop over in Germany,” he said. “Pay a visit to your mother.”

“Your godmother,” Barbara corrected him.

“Your mother,” her father said again.

“My mother is sitting next to me and smoking a cigarette.”

“Your mother lives in Hamburg,” said her father, and burst into tears.

She changed trains in Aachen.

She arrived in Hamburg at seven in the morning. She left her suitcase at the station and purchased a map. She waited in a little square, and at nine she stood in front of the gate of a large house in a quiet, elegant neighborhood. She rang the bell.

“
Wer ist das?
” she was asked from behind the locked door.

“Helusia.”

“
Was?
”

“It’s Helusia, open up.”

The door opened. She saw herself standing there on the threshold: Helusia, but with black hair pinned high on her head, with blue eyes and a too full chin. Helusia, only somehow astonishingly aged.

“Why did you come?” the woman asked.

“To see you.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see my mother.”

“Who told you?”

“My father.”

A maid brought in tea. They were sitting in the dining room, amid white furniture with tiny painted flowers.

“It’s true. I gave birth to you,” her mother said.

“I had to. I had to agree to everything.

“I wanted to live.

“I don’t want to remember your father.

“I don’t want to remember those times.

“I don’t want to remember you, either.”

Her mother paid no attention to Helusia’s sobbing, which was growing louder and louder; she just kept repeating the same few sentences over and over.

“I was afraid.

“I had to live.

“You remind me of my fear.

“I don’t want to remember.

“Don’t ever come here again.”

Helusia got married again, to an Austrian—a quiet, rather boring owner of a mountain inn near Innsbruck.

On the anniversary of her father’s death, she came back to Poland. She went to the cemetery with her mother. (Barbara was still her mother; she referred to the woman who had given birth to her as “The Woman from Hamburg.”)

Over tea, Barbara told her, “When I die, you will find everything in the drawer with the lids.”

Helusia bridled at this; then she confessed that she was pregnant and a little afraid of giving birth.

“You have nothing to be afraid of!” Barbara exclaimed. “I was older than you, and even skinnier, and my water broke too early, but I had no trouble giving birth to you.”

Helusia was terrified, but Barbara was behaving completely normally.

“Should I notify The Woman from Hamburg when the baby is born?”

“Do as you like. That woman caused me a lot of grief, but do as you like.”

Barbara grew pensive. “My God, how happy we were without her! How gay! If it weren’t for her, we would have been happy for the rest of our lives.”

If it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t have me
, Helusia thought, but she could not say this to her mother, who had given birth to her without any difficulty, despite being old and skinny.

In the drawer that Helusia opened after Barbara’s funeral, there were two large envelopes among the pot covers. In one of them was a packet of hundred-mark banknotes. In the other was a notebook divided into two columns: “Date” and “Amount.” Barbara had set aside and recorded every banknote that had been sent from Hamburg.

Helusia bought long silver-fox furs with the money. She sewed a black dress to go with them, but it turned out that the fox furs were poorly prepared, they shed, and they didn’t go with black at all.

Several months after her second wedding, she had told her husband about her two mothers. She didn’t know German yet. She knew what the word for “wardrobe” was:
Schrank
. “Pillow,”
Kissen
, she also knew. “To hide” she found in the dictionary:
verstecken
. “Fear,” also in the dictionary:
Angst
.

When she told the story the second time, to her twenty-year-old son, she already knew all the words. Despite this, she was unable to answer several obvious questions: Why didn’t Grandma Barbara throw Grandpa out? Why did Grandma Regina run away without you? Does Grandma Regina not love you at all?

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “How could I know all that?”

“Look in the dictionary,” her husband advised her.

Twenty-two years after their first conversation, The Woman from Hamburg invited Helusia to visit her for a couple of days. She showed her old photographs. She played Chopin mazurkas for her on the piano. (“The war interrupted my studies in the conservatory,” she said with a sigh.) She recited Tuwim. She talked about men. She had had two husbands after the war who adored her. She hadn’t had children.

“And what is your husband like?” she asked.

Helusia confessed that her second marriage was falling apart.

“It’s because he bought several hotels. He doesn’t come home at night. He said that I should make a new life for myself.”

She spoke to her not as to “The Woman from Hamburg” but as to her own mother, and The Woman from Hamburg panicked.

“Don’t count on me. Everyone has to survive on his own. One has to be able to survive. I was able to, and you must be able to.”

“You survived thanks to my parents,” Helusia reminded her.

“Thanks to your mother,” The Woman from Hamburg corrected her. “That’s the truth; thanks to her alone. All she had to do was open the door and walk a couple of meters. The police station was across the street. It’s extraordinary that she didn’t open the door. I was amazed that she didn’t do it. Did she ever say anything about me?”

“She said that if it weren’t for you …”

“I had to.

“I wanted to live.”

The Woman from Hamburg began to tremble. She repeated, louder and louder, faster and faster, the same sentences:

“I was afraid.

“I had to.

“I wanted to.

“Don’t come here.”

What do you really want?” the lawyer she consulted after her return from Hamburg asked. “Do you want her love or her estate? If it’s about love, my office doesn’t deal with that. If it’s about her estate, the matter is no less difficult. First of all, we have to prove that she is your mother. Do you have witnesses? No? Well then, you see. The testimony of Mrs. Barbara S. should have been recorded. It should have been notarized. Now all that remains is a blood test. Are you determined to sue? So why did you come to a lawyer’s office?”

“Then which woman’s are you, really? And who are you?” her son asked her.

“I am your mother,” she said, although, for effect, she ought to say, “I am the one who survived.”

But people respond that way only in modern American novels.

Axel von dem B. can trace his ancestry back to Countess Cosel. It is not entirely clear who fathered her child. According to one version, it was August II the Strong, a Polish king and elector of Saxony. According to another version, it was a Polish Jew, a rabbi who, involved in a conflict with other rabbis, left the country and settled in Germany.

Both versions—the king and the rabbi—have been kept alive in the family of Axel von dem B. for two hundred and twenty-five years.

She had luxuriant, raven-black tresses; large eyes that were extraordinarily expressive; skin as white as marble, and a small mouth. That is how Anna Cosel was depicted by memoirists and painters, and by the novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski.

August swore to her that she would be queen. He broke his promise, abandoned her a few years later, and ordered that she be imprisoned. Her place of exile was the Stolpen castle. She lived in the castle’s tower and remained there (voluntarily, in later years) until her dying day.

The imprisoned countess’s favorite reading was Hebrew books. Or so Kraszewski wrote. She surrounded herself with Jews. The rabbinical works were translated for her by her pastor, a scholar of Oriental languages. She paid him generously. At first, she sent him the money through a discreet emissary; later, they would meet and conduct lengthy discussions about the Talmud and the Jewish religion. The pastor’s wife put an end to these conversations; she was jealous of the countess, who was still beautiful despite her sixty years.

Who was Anna Cosel’s Jewish lover?

(He definitely existed. How else can one explain this
peculiar fascination—with Jews, with their religion? He was a fascinating man, that’s obvious.)

So: a rabbi—Poland—a conflict with other rabbis—departure for Germany …

Jonatan Eibeszic?

He was born in Kraków. He was a sage. He was invited to Hamburg to rein in the angel of death, because women were dying in childbirth. He handed out cards to women inscribed with a strange prayer, with mysterious symbols. He was accused of believing in a false messiah. He appealed to the rabbis in Poland. The Diet of the Four Lands rejected the accusation. Despite the Synod’s verdict, many Polish rabbis, including Mojżesz Osterer, the great rabbi of Dubno, pronounced anathema on Jonatan E. and his science.

Salomon Dubno?

He was born in Dubno, from which he drew his surname; he died in Amsterdam. He was married off when he was fourteen years old. He studied in Lwów and in Berlin. He became a tutor for the son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and theologian (whom many consider the greatest figure of the German Enlightenment after Lessing). Salomon D. persuaded the philosopher to undertake a new translation of the Pentateuch into German. He himself wrote a commentary on the Book of Genesis. When he was in the middle of writing his commentary on the Book of Exodus, Naftali Herc, the grand rabbi of Dubno, came through Berlin. He criticized the friends his fellow countryman was associating with and ordered him to change his
milieu. Salomon D. left Berlin without completing his work and set off for Amsterdam.

Jakub Kranc?

He was born in the Wilno region. He was a
magid
, an itinerant preacher. True, he did not quarrel with the rabbis, but nevertheless he left for Germany in order to study and debate with the scholars there. He quit Germany for Dubno. Here he was paid six zlotys a week; later, he was paid two more zlotys and his stove was repaired.

(The Magid of Dubno was asked: “Why is it that a rich man is more willing to give alms to the poor who are blind and lame than to poor sages?” He replied: “Because the rich man has no assurance that he himself will not become lame or go blind, but he knows for certain that he will never be a sage.”)

In portraits, all three men have white beards, sad eyes, and a distracted look. Perhaps this is because they had been unwilling to raise their eyes from their open books. But the countess might have met them earlier, when they had black beards and a twinkle in their eyes.

She did not meet either the Magid of Dubno or Salomon Dubno. The former was born shortly before her death, and the latter after she died. But Jonatan Eibeszic was twenty-six years old when she was sent to the tower.

So, could it have been Jonatan? Who, other than he, accused and anathematized, would have dared undertake such a romance? And with a
shiksa
! With the King’s discarded favorite.

There is another possibility. Contrary to Axel von dem B.’s family tradition, it was not a rabbi who was their forebear.

It was a merchant. Let’s say it was Herszel Izaak. He lived in Dubno and was a fur merchant. He frequented the Leipzig trade fairs. He traveled in the company of his servant, Michał Szmuel. We know nothing else about him, but Dr. Ruta Sakowska, who has translated Yiddish texts for me and helped me discover Countess Cosel’s Jewish lover, believes that he was married off when he turned fifteen and that his wife bore him numerous children, became fat, and wore a wig. Should one be surprised, then, that he lost his head over an elegant, beautiful lady? He was handsome, that is clear: blue eyes (they must have looked charming with his black curly hair), a broad smile, dazzlingly white teeth, and a sable fur coat. It is not unlikely that he presented the countess with some sable pelts as well. (Hasn’t Dr. Sakowska confused Herszel Izaak with Dmitri Karamazov?)