The Woman from Hamburg (9 page)

A Jewess with a child. A beautiful Jewess. Two Jewesses in Dobre. Fredek in the barn. Szmul in the woods.… Thomas Blatt began counting again. They are all here, he pointed all around, and there are no graves. Why are there no Jewish graves? Why is no one sad?

We passed Izbica, Krasnystaw, and Łopiennik. The sun was setting. Everything was even uglier and older. Maybe because specters are wandering about. They don’t want to leave, since no one mourns for them, since no one weeps for them. From unlamented specters there is such a grayness.

When he was twenty years old, he started to write a book. It was a book about his childhood. His childhood had lasted seven years, until the Warsaw Uprising. He is still writing this book. For thirty-five years he has been writing a book about a childhood that lasted seven years.

The world that he decided to write down took place in a spacious apartment, in a large Warsaw apartment house.
There were three rooms: a golden room, with walls the color of honey, with toys on an étagère, and a teddy bear with shoes (his father took one of those shoes for good luck when he went to join the uprising); a dining room, filled, as he described it, with mature bronze, in which the furniture was enormous and full of inner strength, while the fragile delicateness of glass was sheltered behind the panes of a credenza; an office, with a gloomy library, with paperweights in the shape of ships, and with the surging waves of seas in a couple of paintings.

Within this stage set existed the world that was to become his theme.

After a year or two, the thought occurred to him that his book was complete. He retyped it, reread the typescript, and when he put down the last page he understood that everything had to be a lot better. It should be like Tolstoy’s
Childhood
. Or like Proust. He was in his fourth year of law school. Since his studies might interfere with his continuing work on the book, he abandoned his studies and began correcting the book. Alas. By now, all the rooms were peopled with spirits; his beautiful mother, sunk in thought, paced back and forth in the dining room, eternally waiting for his father who never returned; his kind-hearted aunt told fairy tales, always with a bad ending; in
the golden room, grandmother dozed in her armchair, and her faithful maid was always about to set the table—he extracted these spirits by force, by their hair, from the nooks of his memory, from cracks, and it still was not Proust, despite everything.

He was working in a store at that time; at night, he worked as a guard transporting goods. Since work interfered with his writing even more than his studies had done, he returned to the university and completed his master’s degree—with distinction, in fact.

He became a legal adviser in an important institution. Realizing that marriage would assure him the peace that is essential for writing, he married a classmate. He bought a dog, a coarse-haired terrier. He drilled holes in concrete walls and hammered in pegs to support storage shelves. This task did not disrupt his concentration; on the contrary, it helped. He began to go for long Sunday walks with his wife and dog.

First he gave up on the storage space. He’d already measured and cut the paneling, but he had to record the day on which his aunt told the fairy tale about the death of the nightingale. It was the first time he’d heard the word “death” and he immediately decided to find a profession in which he would never die. Pilot was ruled out, sailor
was ruled out, even trolleycar driver didn’t seem safe, so he asked his father in what profession you never die, and his father …

Next, he gave up the Sunday walks.

Next, they were late for Easter breakfast with his wife’s parents. He was already standing in the anteroom, dressed in his holiday clothes, ready to go out, when he recalled how very dissatisfied he was with grandmother’s presence in the rocking chair, in the golden room. She will reprimand him any moment now for the noise, he thought. No games work out when grown-ups are present, but it turned out that not only did grandmother not punish him, she wasn’t looking in his direction at all. He played louder and louder, the old lady still kept silent, until finally he knelt beside the chair and stealthily peered into her face. His wife was already taking the keys out of her pocketbook when he, looking closely at the old woman in the rocking chair, understood that he had not seen such a face on any grown-up. He saw the abandoned house from which they all had left; he saw the empty rooms, one after the other, growing ever smaller, disappearing into the distance like a long chain into the depths of time.

“Are you coming?” his wife asked, but he was thinking with regret that the woman in the rocking chair was long since gone, that she would never respond to him who was kneeling beside her.

They arrived at his inlaws’ toward the end of Easter breakfast. His mother-in-law was crying; his father-in-law
said nothing. When they got home he said, “From now on you will go there by yourself,” and he returned to the woman with the empty face in the rocking chair. When he suddenly heard her quiet voice, “Thread the needle for me,” he felt an enormous sense of relief, took off his holiday suit, and brewed himself some fresh, strong tea.

Next, he moved out of the house. He rented a room in which he found quiet and concentration. When his money ran out, he went home and asked his wife if she could move back home with her parents for a while. She moved, but she had to come back, because martial law had just been declared and people had to live where they were registered.

One day his wife’s girlfriend asked if a man from Solidarity could spend the night at their place. He was in hiding; a warrant had been issued for his arrest. They found a newsletter from the conspiracy with a photo of the man, took a good look, and told the friend that he could come to them.

The man from the underground arrived in the evening. They talked with him until late at night and even gave him some chapters from the book about childhood to read. The man from the underground was surprised that the word “I” was repeated in it so often; they went to sleep; in the morning they told their guest that he could stay longer.

The man from the underground lived with them for several months, moved out for a while because of the danger, then came back to live with them again. Every day his comrades or other people who were being pursued came to see him. This must have been going on for a couple of years, because the man was already there when they had the old dog, who was paralyzed and blind, and whom he found slightly disgusting, and he was there later on with the new, black and yellow dog, whom he would sometimes lift into his lap. They asked him what was really the sense of hiding like this. He answered that he didn’t know himself, maybe not much sense, sooner or later they would be found and would go to prison, but they couldn’t behave differently because they would be betraying the people who trusted them.

He didn’t like the thought that the man from the underground would go to prison. That meant that they, too, would go to prison, and he didn’t like thinking about prison at all. They don’t give you paper. Is it possible that he would have to give up writing his book for a couple of years because of the man from the underground?

He worked in a frenzy. Behind the wall, in the little room, the man with an arrest warrant out for him was discussing something with his colleagues; his wife was moving about in the kitchen, trying not to make any noise; he was sitting in the main room and writing his memories of childhood.

He loved the world to which he was transported by his writing. It was safe; everything was in order; he was in order in that world; no one expected anything of him—that he would study, that he would earn a living, panel the storage space, go to his inlaws’, and hide a man from the underground. In the spacious rooms of that world he hammered nothing, he hid no one, and despite all that, he was in order.

In the past, he had strived to unearth every detail in his memory. He had tracked them like a hunter stalking birds in the forest; if a bird fell, he picked it up, looked it over and delighted in every little feather. Now he gave up on new birds and kept on describing, over and over again, the same walls, the same furnishings, the same events. His mother was waiting for his father. His aunt was saying, “The nightingale died.” He was asking, “Died? What does that mean?” His grandmother was asking him, “Thread the needle for me.” A man handed over a pistol. Mother was waiting for father. The nightingale died. “Would you like to shoot?” the man asked.

SHOOT?

At first, he didn’t recognize the man and didn’t understand his words, but slowly a forgotten scene that he had not yet described even once emerged from memory.

The uprising was in full swing.

They were all sitting in the cellar.

The golden child’s room resembled a large barricade.

A tall man, dressed in civilian clothes, with a red-and-white armband, handed him the pistol. “Would you like to shoot? Then shoot.…”

There were Germans in the next building. They had an excellent sharpshooter whom it was impossible to kill. For days on end there were conversations about how to lure him out and who would finally kill him. When the man said, “Would you like to shoot?” he immediately imagined that he, a seven-year-old boy, would kill the expert German marksman with his first shot.

“Here,” said the tall man. “Hold it. Here’s where you squeeze. Yes, right there.”

With the pistol that barely fit into his hand, he slipped over to the window. Through a slit between the drapes and the wall, he spotted the balcony of the neighboring building. On the balcony stood a man. He was bending down; it looked as if he was watering flowers. The man was wearing a German uniform. He thought that he was imagining everything; after all, you couldn’t see that much through a slit.

“Well?” The tall man was impatient. “Are you going to shoot?”

Again he raised the pistol; the man in the German uniform was standing with his back to him, bent over the flowers.

“But I could kill him,” he whispered, terrified.

“Then kill him,” the man laughed.

He got up from behind his desk and went into the kitchen.

“Listen,” he said. “Now I know how my book should end. I’ve remembered a very important scene. There’ll be nothing after this scene. Do you understand? Childhood will end, the book will end …”

“Wonderful,” his wife rejoiced. “Sit down and write.”

“How can I write?” He was furious. “They could come for him tomorrow.” (This was during a short absence of the man from the underground, who was supposed to return the next day.) “They’ll take him away. They’ll take us away. Can you picture it? I’ll be in prison, without tea, without paper, and that scene, which I cannot write, with which my book is supposed to end.”

“Are you moving out again?”

“No,” he replied. “HE won’t come here any more. Go to them. Say that … Whatever, but go at once. And I’ll take a leave without pay, I’ll sit down and finish my book.”

He took a leave without pay and began to describe the golden room, transformed into a barricade for the uprising.

It turned out to be harder than he’d thought, because he didn’t remember the most important details.

Where was the huge brown credenza that had been moved out of the dining room?

How had the fragments of a crystal glass that was kept in the credenza scattered?

Where was the bear from the top shelf? (He was lying there without shoes, so what had happened to the other shoe?)

And the sea paintings that were removed from the office? In what place had the expert German marksman drilled holes in the surging waves?

He remembered nothing. Long, extended labor awaited him.

The man from the underground never returned to them.

One day, during his evening stroll, he heard the howling of a dog and a girl’s scream. He set off in that direction. He saw two young men. One was beating the dog; the other was twisting the girl’s hands behind her back.

He shouted, “Leave them alone! Well? Will you leave them alone?!”

Both men turned away from the girl and the dog and ran toward him.

He remembers that they were holding a stick.

He remembers that he was lying on the grass.

He remembers that, protecting his face with his hands, he thought, “Fortunately, they’re wearing running shoes.”

He remembers the voice, “You might kill him.”

And the other voice, “So I’ll kill him.”

He came home from the hospital.

He hasn’t taken up his memories yet.

He is under the impression that he has already tracked down all the birds, but, although they are lying dead all around him, he doesn’t feel like bending down for them.

His favorite author is Conrad, and his favorite book
Lord Jim
, but it doesn’t occur to him that refusing the man his house, that abandoning the man from the underground, ought to remind him of Jim’s escape from the deck of the “Patna.” He also doesn’t think that there was any connection between the affair of the man from the underground and his struggle to defend the girl and her dog.

He believes that he will be judged some day for two things: how he lived and how he acquitted himself in the mission
that was assigned to him. Everyone has a mission, only one doesn’t always or immediately understand it. Sometimes the task is unclear and one has to expend a great deal of effort in order to deduce its meaning.

Kafka’s
The Trial
is not a metaphor for totalitarianism, as Havel suggests; that would be too simple. It is the trial that awaits each of us, and life is an accumulation of defense material for the coming judgment.

So, he will be judged on how he lived: how he offended his wife, shoved a dog off his lap, and denied his home to a man from the underground.

And he will be judged on his mission, his writing.

Under one condition, naturally.

That God not guffaw at the sight of him and cry out, “Writing? But that’s a joke! It was only a joke that you treated seriously. Well, well, don’t be angry. I did it out of pity. So you could live. You don’t think, do you, that you would have known how to live your life without writing?”