The Girl from Krakow (4 page)

CHAPTER TWO

N
ot everything Tadeusz Sommermann said that afternoon was a complete lie. He had been in Barcelona, and he was going back. He had treated a few combat casualties from the International Brigades. Remember that Englishman with the look-alike pencil mustache and the bullet wound in his throat? What a waste to be maimed like that. It was the Spaniards’ Civil War, not his. Of course, he knew what side he was on. The “Nationalists”—that’s what they called themselves—were just fascists, openly armed by Hitler and Mussolini. Their
caudillo
, their
Führer
, Franco, didn’t have any qualms about using Moroccan shock troops. Surely there was more useful work Tadeusz could do than stop a Moorish bullet while pumping morphine into some illiterate Republican foot soldier’s thigh. He would support the Spanish Republic. That it was supported by several different communist parties in Spain and by Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t trouble Tadeusz at all. But he was neither a Stalinist party hack nor a supporter of POUM, the Trotskyite party. Paris had made him “a plague on both your houses” leftist. He needed to preserve his freedom of action, even on the barricades of the Popular Front.

The idea of going to Spain had come to him when he first heard about the International Brigades, after his final year of medical lectures in Marseille. Tadeusz had begun his medical degree in Paris. For two years he had allowed its distractions to seduce him. He needed to get away if he was ever to complete his medical qualification. Moving to Marseille, he enrolled in the faculty of tropical medicine. It was open to foreigners, and afterward posts in a French colony—Senegal or Guyana—were not hard to secure. Few French medical students really wanted to spend a half dozen years in Dakar or Cayenne. But the closer he came to climbing up the gangplank of some colonial
paquebot
, the more distasteful grew the prospect of serving as a colonial health officer. There had to be an alternative.

There always had been. He had always found the intelligent alternative before—a way around obstacles, hardships, challenges—as far back as his childhood.

From the time he was a small boy, Tadeusz knew that his mother’s bookshop was not for him. He loved reading: first the endless stream of Karl May westerns shelved behind the counter to reduce pilfering, then the histories—especially Napoleon, and finally the Marxian scholars who made sense of Napoleon and everything that came after him. History was intoxicating. But reading books was not the same as selling them. He couldn’t be tethered to Jastrob’s Bookshop
.

Tadeusz had been good at school, and better at chess, which was fortunate since he had neither the physique for heavy labor nor the temperament for poker. At fourteen or so, it was clear. The way out was a profession. That meant university abroad. He could never bring himself to study as hard as he’d need to for a chance in Poland.

Tadeusz would have liked to study history. But there were problems. First, by the time he finished gymnasium
,
Tadeusz had already acquired a pretty tolerable understanding of the course of human events over the previous several centuries. There wasn’t much more to learn once he had discovered scientific socialism. Plekhanov’s
Materialist Conception of History
was really all you needed. At twenty, he’d read enough to see that history was an open book. He understood everything now.

But even if there had been more to learn about history, there was no living in it. If he were to escape Jastrob’s Bookshop, Karpatyn, or Galicia, for that matter, it would have to be medicine, six years of it, and in another country.

Italy would have been the best bet for medical school. With an Italian qualification, one could work in the British Empire. Entry was not difficult, the fees were manageable, and living was cheap. He’d have to learn Italian. No problem. Tadeusz was good at languages. But Italy was a fascist state, operated by a dictator who made Pilsudski seem like a democrat. France was a better choice. And besides, French was so much more useful a language than Italian. Most of all there was the allure of Paris. The
Faculté de Médecine
was on the Left Bank, a stone’s throw from the Latin Quarter.

He had only to convince his mother. She held the purse strings.

Paris didn’t make it easy to be a medical student. There was just too much to distract a young man with a world historical understanding.

Tadeusz arrived in the early summer of 1932. Three months would be enough to learn the French he needed before the lectures began in the fall. He found a room on Monsieur le Prince, between the Boulevard St. Michel and the Place Odeon, at the back corner of the medical faculty. The first night he tried to treat himself to a meal at the
Crémerie Polidor
. The waitresses were famous for surly service to customers seated at communal tables. Frustrated trying to decipher the handwritten menu dropped casually before him at the table, he had to go back outside to study the posted printed one with his Polish-French dictionary in hand.

Even through the language barrier, Paris was exactly what Tadeusz had hoped for. There were a few Polish medical students who eased his entry to the Fac’ while playing mild practical jokes on him. Sending him to a haberdashery for a
capot
—a condom—when he wanted a
chapeau
, a hat, for instance. As for the lectures at the Fac’, it didn’t take very long to see that they were not going to help much anyway. There would be an exam—the
extern
—at the end of two years, filtering those who were capable and serious from the rest. But these lectures wouldn’t help.

Two years was a long way off that first fall. Of much more immediate interest were the risqué novels of André Gide and the work of a new author, Louis Aragon. They would help his French, which was just as important as anatomy or physiology. Even more seductive were the politics of the Third French Republic. The Socialist Party was led by Leon Blum; the Communists followed Thorez, who obeyed Stalin; the Trotskyites obeyed Trotsky (or tried to); and the anarchists followed no one at all.

When he looked back on that time, it was smells he remembered most: acrid smoke from the blue cloud of a hundred Galois drifting below the ceiling of a café on a winter’s day, the smell of the ground coffee as he stood waiting for a morning
express
at the
zinc
, the ozone draft of a metro leaving the station at Châtelet while the portillon gates opened to a new scrum of passengers, the starch and bleach at a
blanchisseur
in the Rue de Vaugirard, all its windows thrown open on a hot day in May, and all the year round, the early morning aroma of
boulangeries
.

The most permanent of these memories was the scent of Arpège perfume—an ineffable mixture of peach, iris, rose, geranium, and a dozen other hints he couldn’t identify. Anywhere, anytime, for the rest of his life, Arpège would instantly bring back the first time he encountered it, that second summer in Paris. It was wafting from the sloping shoulders of a young woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse loose enough you were sure it was about to fall below the breasts it clearly silhouetted. Her thick black hair was cut in a plain, almost Chinese style—bangs at the front, falling to a perfectly even length across her neck and shoulders. Her eye makeup suggested the Orient too, accentuating heavy lashes under dark eyebrows. Was it eye shadow she wore, or was it fatigue? He couldn’t tell. Below the thin muslin blouse, against which nipples visibly pushed, there was a dark peasant skirt, no stockings, and flat shoes. And the Arpège
 
.
 
.
 
.

She was plastering a poster for the ICL on a wall of the Rue Racine side of the
Ecole de Médecine
, blotting out the first word of the prominent notice—“
Défense d’Afficher
” (Post No Bills)
—
in black letters on the gray stone wall. One look from her, and Tadeusz was instantly inducted into her own special cell of the ICL—the Trotskyite International Communist League
.
He stopped and pretended to read the poster.

Her name was Lena, though he didn’t learn it till later. With almost the first words out of her mouth, it was evident that she too was Polish, though much more fluent in French. “Going to report me to a
flic
for defacement?”

Tadeusz smiled. “Only if it’s a violation of revolutionary morality. You’re Polish, yes?”

“My nationality is proletarian. But I was born in Warsaw.”

“I’m from around Stanislava.” She didn’t seem to care, so he asked her about the bill she was posting.

“It’s for a meeting. Read for yourself.” She turned and started down Monsieur le Prince, looking for more blank walls. He stayed and read through the hectoring prose until he found the time and place.

The meeting was that very evening, in an amphitheater at the Sorbonne. Tadeusz was early, finding a seat back far enough to scan the room for her. The
amphi
was half full when she came in, and just a little later proceedings began. As the speaker began, Tadeusz realized the subject wasn’t French politics, but Germany. The speaker’s theme was the complicity of the German Communist Party in the election that had just brought Hitler to power. Following Stalin’s orders the German Communists had stood aside and let the Nazis win. Their slogan had been
Nach Hitler Uns—
After Hitler, it’s our turn. But the German Communists would never get a turn now, the speaker assured all, and Stalin’s Russia would reap the whirlwind. Employing all the tools of dialectic, he predicted an inevitable war between Nazism and Stalin’s state fascism that would usher in world revolution.

It all made perfect sense, but Tadeusz was just waiting for the meeting to end. When it did after an hour or so, he managed his exit so that Lena found herself beside him in Place de la Sorbonne. She was fumbling in her purse for matches when he lit her cigarette. “
Merci
.” She looked up at him. “Oh, it’s you.” She smiled. She was still wearing that thin blouse, and it was still threatening to fall away from her shoulders.

“I didn’t report you.”

“To the police or Stalin’s stooges in the Comintern?”

“Neither. Can I buy you a glass of something?” She nodded, and they moved to the nearest of the four cafés on the
Place de Sorbonne
. Wordlessly she led him to the inside seats—cheaper and a little more secluded. He liked that.

She lit another cigarette from the stub of her first and offered him one. They ordered two
blondes
, light Alsatian lagers. “So, did you buy all that talk in the meeting?” She exhaled. Her skeptical tone surprised him.

“Didn’t you?”

“Not a word.”

“But you helped organize the meeting.”

“It’s the family business. My father is on the political committee of the ICL. You don’t have to believe in the lyrics to like the melody.”