Chasing the King of Hearts (Peirene's Turning Point Series) (7 page)

A tall, thin woman steps up to Izolda. Her hair is pinned in a small bun, her brow is pencilled black. She tests Izolda’s shoulders, which are in order, and inspects her palms, which are large. All in all Izolda is a tall, sturdy woman, and the German points at her.

A female clerk standing behind the farmers writes down in her notebook: Maria Pawlicka, Raddusch. Then she smiles kindly at Izolda and says: Good luck.

Raddusch is a village with respectable houses, a train
station and a prisoner-of-war camp. The German woman takes her to a room with an earth floor where another forced labourer is already living. He comes from around Kielce and his name is Józio.

Evening comes. Izolda lies down on the straw mattress and tries to fall asleep. In the darkness she hears bare feet and Józio whispering: Move over. She takes him by the arm. Józio, she says gently, I’m married, my husband is in a camp, and you’re a good Pole, right? So go back to your bed.

Józio proves to be a good Pole, but he feels sad. He wants her to cheer him up, talk to him, tell him a story, but it has to be interesting… She doesn’t know any interesting stories. Of course you do, he insists. Just think of something.

She’s got it: High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince…

Józio doesn’t like fairy tales. He wants to hear something real, most of all something about love.

I’ll tell you about a girl, she begins. She had green eyes and ventured out of the depths of the forest to visit her lover, always at daybreak…

And so she recounts the story of
Ingeborg
, her and Hala Borensztajn’s favourite book. The summer was hot that year and the earth was on fire, as though someone had baked bread on the very ground. The sunlight was hot, too…

Sunlight at daybreak isn’t hot, Józio corrects. And the earth can’t be on fire, especially in the forest.

Don’t interrupt, she says. They felt like they were on fire, so that’s how the earth felt, too.

Izolda and Hala were always very envious of that Ingeborg. Not over Axel – he would have been much too old for them – but because he loved her so much. On the way home from school they promised each other that neither would get married unless they found a love like that.

We made a promise… she tells Józio.

Who’s we?

Hala Boren… my friend Hala and me.

And did you wait? asks Józio.

I waited.

And your friend?

What about my friend?

Are you listening to me? Is your friend still waiting?

She’s still waiting, Józio. Now go to sleep.

The farmer’s wife wakes her up in the morning and sends her to the cowshed to milk the cows. Izolda has never seen cows up close. The farmer’s wife watches her trying to take the udder, then sends her to help with the threshing instead. Izolda has never seen a thresher before either. The German woman tells her to sweep the bits of straw off the machine, watches her and sends her back to the cowshed, where a cow knocks out one of her front teeth. So she’s sent to the washroom. Izolda has seen a tub and washboard before: their servant girl used them. She sits down to use the washboard… What do you know how to do? asks the German woman. I know how to take care of people who are sick. (She almost blurts out: Sick with typhus.) Nobody’s sick here, everyone’s healthy. The German woman is getting annoyed. And what else? Izolda thinks for a moment. I’m pretty good
at French… The German woman starts to yell and sends her back to the thresher.

The news that Izolda speaks French makes its way to the prisoner-of-war camp.

An officer stops in for a visit. His uniform is dirty and marked with white letters: KG for
Kriegsgefangener
–prisoner of war. He’s longing to talk to a charming woman,
avec une femme charmante.
He bows and kisses her hand.

She smiles to the officer as winsomely as she can with a missing front tooth. She tries to recall what charming women talk about with handsome men. Not about typhus. Not about Pawiak. Not about packages to Auschwitz either… The Frenchman calls her his little girl,
ma petite.
It would be good to know what little girls talk about. The war will end and then what? She won’t know how to talk with a man?

The farmer’s wife is fed up with her milking, laundering, threshing and French and sends her to the labour bureau. She’s reassigned to a canvas mill, where she works alongside German women. They tend the looms, fixing any broken threads. There are several hundred looms in the hall, the women run from thread to thread. They’re
deaf from all the noise, they have varicose veins on their legs and white dust in their hair, eyelashes and brows… They aren’t good to her. They aren’t bad to her. They are tired. She asks how long they’ve been running from thread to thread. Fifteen years. Twenty… My God, she says, shocked, but the German women cheer her up: You’ll get used to it.

They don’t work Sundays and are allowed to go into town on a pass. The French POW receives a pass as well, he borrows a civilian jacket, drapes it over the KG sewn on his coat, and they go for a walk.

The city is called Cottbus. They see men on crutches and haggard, badly dressed women… An air-raid siren goes off. They take shelter in an entrance. I’m here, the Frenchman whispers, and shields her with his manly arm, to protect her from the bombs. Panes go flying out of the windows, his words get drowned out by the shattering glass. The planes quieten down one minute and come back the next, like a storm unable to pass. It reminds her of the air raid in Warsaw and the garrison church.

There was this priest who asked me to pray for him, she tells the Frenchman.

And?

Nothing. I didn’t do it.

Not once? That’s not nice, the Frenchman scolds. Not nice at all…

She tries to explain as she walks him to the station: I’m saving all my prayers for one person, I don’t have strength to pray for anyone else. Do you understand?

Of course he does,
ça se comprend.

The Frenchman goes back to Raddusch.

An idea hits her and she looks around the station for a train schedule. It’s easy to travel from Raddusch to Cottbus and from there to Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt.

They don’t work Sundays… No one checks to see if they’re there… That means that all Sunday long no one will be looking for her…

Saturday evening she takes the local train to Raddusch. She plans to spend the night at Józio’s and leave in the morning. The bed in the little room is occupied, but Józio has important information: he has an aunt in Łódź. Go to Nawrot Street, he says, find the linen press and tell my aunt that I say hello. And give her this (he reaches under his straw mattress and takes out a matchbox containing an oval stone he passed in his urine, in great pain because of his ailing kidney). What’s this for? A present. A keepsake.

The Frenchman smuggles her inside the POW camp and takes her to the shower room. She can sleep there since it isn’t used at night. He spreads his coat on the floor. He brings her an envelope and a sheet of paper. She sits on the coat – the floor reeks of soapsuds and Lysol – and writes a letter.

The Frenchman asks who she’s writing to.

My friend Stefa.

Is she pretty? asks the Frenchman.

She has pretty dark-blue eyes, with long lashes.

(Stefa had a grandmother from Vienna, a crazy mother who ran off with a younger man and a father who was bitter and not good at much. They rented out rooms. When they didn’t have lodgers, Stefa couldn’t afford textbooks or school trips. Izolda very much wanted to help and collected money from friends or sold film tickets at school. So Stefa went on the trip to Wieliczka, but didn’t even give Izolda so much as a crib for the algebra test. I didn’t have time – she explained – I barely managed to finish myself.) Thanks to her Viennese grandmother, Stefa is fluent in German and works at the offices of the Ostbahn railway. She has a locked drawer where she can keep valuables. Izolda left her silver compact there every time she went to see Franciszek.

Sitting on a coat in the shower room of the French prisoners, she tells her friend that she’s been sick lately. ‘I don’t know if we’ll meet again. If we don’t, give the compact to my husband. If you don’t see my husband, keep it for yourself. I hope it brings you luck.’

The Frenchman looks over her shoulder and asks what she’s writing about to her pretty friend.

About a compact.

The Frenchman is enchanted by her handwriting, by her hand that’s holding the pencil, by her knee that’s holding the paper, by her dusky, silken skin…

She gets up, undresses, stands under the shower. She turns on the warm water and washes her neck, her breasts,
her thighs, her stomach… Here she has no disguise. And here she is no worse than anyone else. She’s not Jewish, not Polish. And she’s prettier than the women who haven’t had teeth knocked out, who don’t get dragged out of rickshaws or shoved into an entrance at dawn.

Early in the morning they go to the station. She asks the Frenchman to post the letter. He begs her to make it through the war. Promise that you will, he says, and he starts to cry. It’s nice that she isn’t expected to save that Frenchman, that she’s the one who’s supposed to survive.

She climbs aboard the train.

She doesn’t try to remember the French name or the address in Provence.

She has to make a decision: Do I take a seat in the compartment? Stand in the corridor? Hide in the toilet?

On Nawrot Street the caretaker whistles as he clears the snow with a shovel. A child is building a snowman. The linen press is open, Józio’s aunt carefully removes the sheets from the rollers and folds them. She looks at the kidney stone, moved, and invites Izolda to spend the night at the press.

Józio’s aunt is officially in the Reich, Warsaw is in the Generalgouvernement. The border isn’t far, you just take the number 12 tram, make your way to Stryków and find someone to take you across. Everybody knows who they are: they trade sugar for stockings and vodka for warm underwear, or else sugar for warm underwear.

Józio’s aunt generously gives Izolda some socks for the smugglers and a pair of stockings for her, with a long black arrow pattern. She assures Izolda that arrows are the latest fashion, they start above the ankle and have to be darker than the stocking.

One year she will say: I have to look them up. I have to thank Mr Bolek, who led me through the sewers; Józio’s aunt, who gave me presents; the woman in Stryków who cooked dumplings; the German family in Berlin…

A few more years will pass and she will say: It really is high time I pay them a visit. Mr Bolek. Józio’s aunt. The woman in Stryków…

She won’t visit anyone. Not that she was ungrateful, on the contrary – she will think about them time and time again. That’s just how it will work out, because there will always be more urgent matters that need attention.

She takes the tram. She reads the German names of the streets and tries to guess (she doesn’t know why) what they used to be called. The tram comes to some barbed wire and slows down. There’s a guard post and behind it a bearded man wearing a yellow patch on his overcoat. The patch is in tatters, in the shape of a star. In Warsaw they had different stars – blue, on armbands. Seconds later it
dawns on her: that man is a Jew. This is the ghetto. She didn’t realize that number 12 went through the ghetto. A few passers-by stop and peer inside the tram. She’s sitting by the window and they fix their gaze on her, on no one else but her. She turns away, but there are people on the other side as well. They just stand there stony-faced, peering inside…

At the end of the line she gets off together with a young woman her own age. She tells the woman about the forced labour and her escape, the woman invites her home. The woman’s mother is very kind, makes her feel welcome. What do you like, she asks Izolda, dumplings? The mother cooks a pot of dumplings especially for her and mixes in some crackling: eat up, she encourages Izolda, for your health. Well, here things aren’t so sweet for us either, she explains that evening. Business used to be better, the gendarmes were fewer, and now they’re searching everywhere for Jews. They’re looking for Jews and finding all the goods. Eat, child, for your health. They make her bed, cover her with a down duvet and wake her in the middle of the night: the smugglers are here.

The men look tired and dirty, a little like Bolek’s crew. They take vodka and sugar out of their rucksacks and pack women’s underwear. Izolda trades the socks from Józio’s aunt for a white sheet. They give her instructions: we hold the sheet over our head, we move by jumping and every few metres we crouch down. Then we keep still for a while. Make sure you’re covered by the sheet, it has to touch the snow. Please remember: keep absolutely still. Then we take a few more jumps and crouch down again. We call it rabbit-hopping, think you can manage?

She runs with the men – across the snow-covered field, through the forest, across another field – she crouches, doesn’t take off the sheet, keeps absolutely still, then runs again. A pale, cold sun appears. They’re in the Generalgouvernement. She hands back her sheet and asks the way to the nearest train station.

She dyes her hair (her favourite colour – ash blonde).

She replaces her tooth (the new tooth comes on a little screw, very practical, the technician assured her, you can take it out if you need to. She found that strange: why would you want to take out an artificial tooth?).

She retrieves her compact. (Stefa cried so much when she received your letter, says Stefa’s colleague, a typist at the Ostbahn. She was so sorry she didn’t give you that crib for algebra… But I’m giving you a hat instead, Stefa announces, and sure enough she hands Izolda a beautiful black hat, with a large fancy brim, a keepsake from her romantic mother.) The typist gives her a pair of patent-leather shoes with high heels (custom-made on Nowy Świat right before the war) and Mrs Krusiewicz painstakingly alters the overcoat left by her husband.