Her Mother's Daughter (7 page)

She watched the other children following the teacher's directions, and she did whatever they did. Even in kindergarten, they taught words to this potpourri of children from different backgrounds, and Bella copied meaningless words from the blackboard: BOY GIRL DOG CAT. In time, she came to understand what these words meant, but she could not put them in a sentence.

She went home that day and sat quietly waiting until Momma arrived. Then Bella told her she had to have a pen, a tablet, and a blotter. Momma said she had no money. Bella threw a tantrum. So astonishing was this to Momma that she left the house and walked back to the shop and got a nickel from Poppa and returned and gave it to Bella. With a shaky pride—only partly believing she had accomplished this—Bella walked to the stationery store on the corner clutching her nickel, directed the purchase of the tools of her education, and with great dignity, returned home.

She did not do well in school, but somehow, she passed. She was impeded by the fact that she did not hear everything that was being said, and did not know she was not hearing everything. But she admired—oh, she admired!—the children who had 100 written on the top of their test papers, or even 85. She fell into her usual pattern of behavior quiet, docile, obedient, and somewhat abstracted. (Stupid, stupid!) She was promoted, from first to second, second to third. But by then everything had changed.

My sophisticated mother blows smoke across the room. “Oh, I was so stupid. I was so stupid I was left back in the third grade.”

My mother's mother's name was Frances Bzychkowska. She was the daughter of a storekeeper in Zmegrud, a tiny village in the Carpathian Mountains. Her friend Dafna Pasek was a distant cousin—most people in this village were somehow related—who would be the mother of my father. Frances was not a peasant. It was important that Bella understand that neither of her parents was a peasant. Frances went to a church school, and was taught to read and write in Latin; she could speak German, the language of the invader, the only language permitted in public forums. At home, she spoke and learned to read and write in Polish.

Why did she leave?

For it must have been a terrifying journey for a girl of thirteen who had never even been to Kraków—all the way to Bremen, alone; buying her passage with the money Aunt Sophie had sent her from America; traveling steerage in the immigrant ship, locked in the bottommost deck with hundreds of others, some sick, babies crying, no privacy. And then the horror of Ellis Island, being treated like some subhuman creature by self-satisfied grey men important over their pens, their ledgers, their stamp pads. Maybe Aunt Sophie met her. I am writing that Aunt Sophie met her, because I can't bear it to have been any other way.

So she went to Aunt Sophie's and slept on a cot near the wood stove in the kitchen, and got a job as a servant girl in a Jewish family. She was abused, overworked, and underpaid; she developed a strain of anti-Semitism. Perhaps she had brought it with her. But she never built upon it. She saved all her money and sent it back to Poland, for passage for her two younger sisters. Why did they want to come?

Because, by then, they all must have known what it was like here. Sophie first, then Frances: the hard conditions, the strangeness, the near slavery, the awful poverty—families of twelve living in two rooms. So, one can only conclude it was worse at home. The country was partitioned, Polish culture was proscribed. Did they come here to speak Polish freely? My mother says they came for work. Frances worked hard. She moved up, to work in a sweatshop over a sewing machine. She learned to speak English, to read it and even to write it. She learned her way through the maze of Brooklyn, the red tape of American institutions. I like the thought of her then, she isn't a weight on me. She was slight, slender, sprightly; she edged her way past obstacles, she used charm. Perhaps she had intimations of Poland's future, accurate ones, for she survived and those left behind did not.

I needed to know…something. So, in 1975 I went to Poland. I had only a little money, because I went without an assignment, hoping I'd find some pictures that would interest somebody. Poland was hardly in the news then. I thought my small budget would be enough, because Poland is poor; I thought I'd get by, as I had in Greece, on three dollars a day. But I was totally ignorant about socialist governments, who set a currency rate and force you to prove you've bought money legally. The exchange rate they gave Americans was fifteen złotys a dollar, while the black-market rate was ninety. My trip to Poland was the most expensive I'd ever taken, even though I did not stay in hotels. I came back dead broke and exhausted.

Because I also did not understand that there would not be little hostels, pensione, whatever, for someone like me, that you had to have a hotel reservation for the exact length of your stay in each place, arrive and depart on precisely the date you had stipulated on your visa application. And hotels were booked a year ahead, because there were so few of them. A charming little sandwich seller who spoke to me on the train from Paris to Warsaw hit his cheek with his hand when he heard me say I expected to move around with my backpack and cameras, finding beds, meals, camaraderie wherever I went. He was French, but his parents worked in the French embassy in Warsaw, so he spoke Polish, as well as English. He spent the next hours trying to do something for me. Within an hour, everyone on the train knew about me, and came into my compartment to speak to me. Many brought their children, who were learning English at school and who could, they thought, speak it. People offered me fruit they had stowed away in Paris against the coming dearth—although I didn't know that then—and I took an orange. The sandwich seller gave me his entire leftover stock at the end of his tour—two sandwiches and a small bottle of wine. For I hadn't anticipated there being no food on a twenty-four-hour train ride. He also found someone who offered to take me home—a retired judge named Anna Kosakiewicz, who was a little older than I, and as shocked as everyone else at my situation.

Anna did not speak English or French, nor did anyone else on the train. Polish, a little Russian, considerable German: the irony of invasion. The train moved forward very slowly, and for an hour or more, ran backward. I couldn't help thinking of all the Polish jokes I'd bristled at in the past. There was no water on the train, which meant that the toilet, after twenty-six hours of travel, was stuffed with soda cans, fruit cores, chicken bones, kielbasa string, and human shit, much of it mine—I was still sick from some mussels I'd eaten in Normandy. Despite all this, the train was noisy and cheerful until we crossed the border into East Germany, when silence and mean-faced guards with huge dogs descended upon us. There was a sigh as we crossed the border into Poland—of sorrow or relief or both I couldn't tell. Then there was absolute silence. A woman sitting opposite me—the compartment had filled up over the hours—leaned forward, poked the book I was reading and pointed to my suitcase. It took me a few minutes to understand her. I was reading Shulamith Firestone's
The Dialectic of Sex,
and she had understood one word of the title. She waved her hand to let me know such a subject was forbidden in Poland. I buried the book among others and, laughing to myself, pulled out Henry Miller's
Tropic of Capricorn.
But I had no trouble with immigration, only with the moneyman who came with a black suitcase and refused to give me złotys because my visa said I would remain in Poland for three to four weeks. That, he said, was imprecise and therefore forbidden. I argued that the visa had been granted with that condition. He closed his mouth and his suitcase. I shouted. The people around me were hushed and terrified, and put gentle hands on my arm. I continued to shout: I had paid for that money, I said, and I wanted it! I had no Polish money even to pay for a cab from the train station! He owed me those złotys, having taken my dollars. I could feel the trembling of the bodies seated near me, but I knew my man. He gave me the money.

As it turned out, I didn't need it. Anna was met at the terminal by all her friends—Keren, Marie, Krystyna, and Marie's husband Stanislaw, who brought his car—and they gathered me up along with her and took me to her house. Stanislaw was yelling, arguing, but the women ignored him. They took me to Anna's nicely furnished two-room apartment; I was black from the soot of the journey: they undressed me, and drew a bath. They took my clothes and put them in a little hand-run washing machine, and hung them up neatly to dry. Stanislaw was still yelling, but when I was clean and dressed, I opened a liter of scotch and put it on the table. His roaring settled down to an amiable growl, and the women and he and I all sat around Anna's table drinking—none of us able to communicate easily in any language whatever.

I stayed with Anna for two weeks. I saw her many scars, and heard about her operations. We spoke with a combination of sign language and a French-Polish dictionary. She took me around Warsaw and she and her friends told me about the tragedies of their lives—and all had, indeed, been tragic. Then I went off on a train to Kraków, with their anxiety hovering around me. They had managed, by pulling strings, to get me a hotel in Kraków, but only for two nights. What would happen to me then? They insisted that I write, but how? I said I would write “Je suis bien,” and they could look up the words in the French-Polish dictionary. But on the train I met another instant friend, a beautiful, elegant young man named Adam, who took me home to his parents' house. They were conveniently away on a trip. Then Adam and his friends set about trying to find the particular Zmegrud of my grandmothers. There are many Zmegruds in Poland, but I knew this one was near Kraków.

After some days, they found a map that showed it. We spent a day standing in line to buy railroad tickets for Zmegrud, and another standing in line at a bank, so I could buy money. Then we went, early in the morning, six o'clock, by trolley, trolley, and a train. Zmegrud is less than a hundred miles from Kraków, but it took nearly four hours, standing all the way, to reach it. We had a coffee in the train station, a filthy place with little to eat—like other shops in Poland—and wandered around the town. There were a couple of nearly empty shops and a church. We tried to find the priest, but the church was locked and no one answered at the parish house door. Adam asked around for the road to Zmegrud, and we set off.

It was a beautiful August day, the pale land flat and green around us, few houses and no people in sight. We walked along a broad dirt road at an easy pace, conversing in the stilted way people do when one of them has learned a language from textbooks and language classes. Adam spoke English but I was never sure he understood what I said. Still, I jabbered, happy to be able to speak after my long near-silence. We were lovers, at my initiation, and happy.

Then, from a side road hidden by high wheat fields, a man emerged. I was old enough to realize that he was very young, probably only in his early twenties. But I paused when I saw him, and he stopped dead and his mouth opened as he stared at me. He was very tan and as wrinkled as newly washed linen. He had few teeth. His eyes were pale blue and empty. And he looked at me as if I were of another species, the way we might look at a six-foot-five Sikh in Manhattan, complete with red fitted jacket, white sash, scimitar and turban. I was forty-five, and the best-looking I'd ever been; I was thin, too. I was wearing a pale blue soft safari suit that I often took on hard journeys, a cheap straw hat with a stylish brim, and sunglasses, and I carried my heavy bag of camera equipment over my shoulder. But his expression suggested I was a goddess offering him a visitation.

And I thought: so that is what a peasant is. Or anyway, what
peasant
meant to my grandmother. Subhuman. The man may have been intelligent enough—he certainly knew crops and weather, and animal husbandry—things I didn't know. But intelligence didn't appear on his gaping face; I could not imagine him speaking. He was a creature immured in blue sky, the wind, wheat fields, shaky wood-fenced yards full of dung. Circumscribed within nature, and benighted, benighted. I was shocked by him. I was shocked that the word
subhuman
crossed my mind. So this is what they meant, the old ones, when they talked of peasants.

The moment passed. He crossed the road and we walked on ahead of him. We didn't look back. We arrived at Zmegrud and wandered its two streets, looked at the few houses, the one closed shop, the church, also locked. But by asking, Adam discovered a man who claimed Dafna Pasek was his mother's mother's cousin. He took us home, where his wife and sons welcomed us like visiting royalty. They gave us a meal I could barely eat because the parents stayed in the kitchen, and I knew Adam and I were eating their portion. The sons—four of them—had been educated under the socialist government and were all professional men. Only three were there: the fourth, the pride of his mother, was a papal functionary stationed in Rome. The centerpiece of her room was a gift from him, a small model of the Vatican that could be plugged into a wall socket, and lighted up. They listened to my tale, through Adam.

They told us we were not really in Zmegrud. The old Zmegrud had been several miles down the road. But we had no way to get there and there was no reason to go there, they said, for there was nothing there. Zmegrud had been a Jewish town. I don't know if it was a Jewish town when my grandmothers lived there, or if it was mixed then, or if it became a Jewish town in the decades after they left. But it was a Jewish town when the Nazis came. The Nazis collected all the people of Zmegrud from their houses and marched them to a valley deep in the mountains. Standing behind the two hundred or so people—children, women, men—the Nazis forced them to dig a hole. Then they shot them so they fell into the hole. It is said that some were not dead when the low-ranking Nazi soldiers filled up the hole with dirt and poured lime over it—lime speeds decomposition. But no one knows for sure.