The Girl from Krakow (43 page)

She forced a smile. “But, Dani, you never told me you were engaged. In all these months and years
 
.
 
.
 
.” Rita had no idea how to continue, what to say, where to steer the conversation now.

The young man decided to help. “Yes, well, she had no reason to think either of us were still alive. Tell her how we managed it, Michael.”

Neither man appeared to notice Rita’s distress. The older man cleared his throat. “It was the last roll call Leideritz ordered in the Karpatyn ghetto. I wouldn’t be separated from Eve.”

Dani volunteered, “My mother.”

“Paul and I were able to escape out of one of the last Belzec cattle cars. One guy in the car had somehow gotten bolt cutters past the guards. He cut the lock on the sliding door as the train slowed for a bend. Twenty of us jumped and ran for it. They stopped the train to try to round us up, but the guy with the bolt cutters knew where he was going in those woods. We followed him. We traveled at night for a week or so to the Pripet Marshes north of Belzec. Impenetrable to German trucks or tanks, and full of partisans.”

The shock of Dani’s fiancé was now replaced by Rita’s realization of who it was this man was talking about. “The man with the bolt cutters, who led you to the Pripet Marshes and the partisans. Did you ever learn his name?”

“Oh yeah. We lived with him for another year. Strange bird. People respected him, but no one got close. Or at least no decent person. His name was Erich Klein. He was a
feygele,
a
queer, a nancy boy.”

Paul added, “One tough guy, but a homo. Lived with another guy in a bunker for almost the entire time we were together.”

“What happened to him?” Rita demanded to know, looking from each of the men to the other.

Paul volunteered. “He was killed in a fight with the Wehrmacht. Probably killed, along with his
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
buddy. No one was willing to go out for their bodies after the firefight. So we can’t be absolutely sure. There were some pretty violent Russians among the partisans with us. They didn’t like
golubye
—queers—any more than we did, and they didn’t mind acting on their likes and dislikes. So he might even have got it in the back during that skirmish.”

Michael Cohen now interrupted, asking with a hint of suspicion, “Did you know him?”

Rita was not going to dissimulate for a moment. “Yes. We were close friends in Karpatyn. In fact, he rented a room from me, and then we shared space in the ghetto. He saved my life. He was a wonderful
man
.”

Neither man knew how to respond to this proud assertion. Michael finally said, “Well, I am sorry if he was a friend of yours, but he was a degenerate
 
.
 
.
 
.”

Rita was too tired and too bitter to deal with this attitude. She simply rose and walked out of the room. Out on the street, she was stopping to light a cigarette when Dani caught up with her.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a fiancé, that you were going to be married?” Rita accused.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were living with a homo in Karpatyn?” Dani responded.

“What? Are you going to take a high moral tone about men after being my lover for two years?” Dani was silent, so Rita continued, “You never told me anything about a fiancé, or even so much as a male friend.”

“You never asked, and I had every reason to think he was dead.”

Rita decided to cut this argument off. “Look, Dani, I have satisfied myself that Stefan is dead. I can’t stay in Poland. When can we head back west?”

Dani took a breath. “I’m not
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I can’t go back. I’m staying.” She began to cry, seeking Rita’s shoulder, but Rita held her away, glaring into her face.

“I’ve been gone three, maybe four days. What’s happened? Is it that boy upstairs? Your father’s disapproval?”

“No, no
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
he doesn’t know about you, about us.”

“What? Didn’t you tell him about the last two years?”

“I can’t talk with my father, with any man, with anyone at all about
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
about that.” Rita thought,
You can’t even say “us.” Instead, what we had has turned into what we did—“that.”
Dani was still talking. “You heard them upstairs.”

“Yes.” Rita realized she would have been equally unwilling to talk about what she had done with Dani to them or anyone. “I understand, Dani. You don’t have to say anything to them. But you’re coming, aren’t you? Back to Frankfurt?”

Dani shook her head. “No. I can’t. I am going to stay. I’ll try to make a life with Paul.”

“But
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I love you.” As she said it, Rita asked herself whether she believed it, whether it was true. They had never said these things to each other, even in the moments their bodies had responded to each other’s touch. What reticence could have come between their bodies to stop them saying it? Now as she said the words, Rita knew they were true.

But Dani shook her head again. “It was the war, Rita. It was the fear, the loss, the abandonment we suffered. It was the need for a little pleasure in a world with none of it. It wasn’t really love, the kind you can build lives from.”

Now Rita understood. “It’s not guilt, it’s shame that’s driving you away from me. You never felt guilty about lying in my arms, not for a moment. You did love me. You still do. It’s what other people will say, the shame they’ll extract from you, that is too much for you to bear.”

Now Dani burst out, “Yes! It’s too much after all this. I just can’t keep living a secret anymore—with another woman, under another false identity. It would be a constant reminder of the horror. I can’t keep fighting against
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
everything. There’s a real life with Paul, with my father. With you, we’d spend our lives pretending we were something we aren’t.”

It came to Rita: Dani couldn’t deal with her love for Rita because she suddenly had a family again. Rita had the luxury of being alone. There was no one to shame her. And she wasn’t really the kind of person who could be moved to shame by what others thought anyway. She had known this all the way back to when the bullyboys called her a whore for sitting on the ghetto benches in the lecture theater at the law fac’ in Krakow.

Rita pulled Dani toward her, even as her thoughts were pushing Dani away. She knew that there was no reasoning with emotion, no inducement that could convert feelings. There was nothing to do but accept their reality and walk away. She might hope for a change in Dani later, but for now, there was nothing to do but cut her own losses. Rita thought she understood people well enough now not to delude herself about what moved them and what didn’t. And then these analytical thoughts were replaced by her own emotions—disdain and anger. “Very well. I understand. Good-bye.” She stood back and took a long pull at the cigarette in her hand, as though she were trying to draw a breath from it. Then Rita walked away, trying to control the turmoil inside her, trying both for the sake of her appearance to Dani and for the sake of her own mental balance. To finally lose the hope of Stefan without being able to find oblivion in love was so much to carry. All she wanted now was to sleep, alone, in a room by herself.

If she was going back to Frankfurt, the Polish zlotys in her pocket wouldn’t be of much use. She decided to spend them on a hotel room all to herself.

Late the next afternoon, kitted out in her UNRRA uniform, Rita was crossing the street from the Joint hostel to the Katowice railway station when an American jeep with a Red Army insignia pulled up beside her. Out from under the canvas top, an officer’s cap emerged. She heard the word, “Rita.” It was Urs. He called again, “Rita.” She stopped, putting down her bag. “Please get in, Rita. I have been waiting for you to get back for the last few days.”

“I just got in last night. What do you want?”

“I want to take you somewhere.” Rita waited. “Not far. Forty kilometers
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Gleiwitz, if you must know.” Now she understood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

U
rs stopped in front of the Polyclinic door. “Go in and ask for Tadeusz. He knows you’re coming. I’ll be in the café.” He pointed across the street.

“How does he know I’m coming?”

“I told him I’d bring you.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Sorry. What I told him was that I would try.”

Rita thought,
Well, you didn’t have to try very hard.
She had been thinking things through all the way across the rutted roads as mud splattered into the jeep, finding its way between the metal and the canvas top and sides. She recognized that she was worried about how she looked. She couldn’t deny the hints of arousal she was feeling. Was it the hard seats and the jostling vehicle? Or was it memories of languid afternoons long ago? Was she so variable in her sexual attractions?
I suppose I am
, she thought with feelings of candor and satisfaction.
Think back to Erich
 
.
 
.
 
.  You might have loved him, and let him slake his appetites without possessiveness.

The real question wasn’t whether she could have with a man what she had with Dani. She understood herself well enough to know that she could. The real question was whether she wanted to start again with someone else, so soon, with a man or a woman? And if so, was this the right person? Could there be real
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
compatibility, chemistry, partnership, love, between this man and Rita? Once, in what seemed another world, she had thought so.
Well,
she said to herself,
these questions will soon sort themselves out, thanks to Urs of all people.

She walked into the clinic and asked for Dr. Sommermann.

“Appointment?”

Rita thought briefly. “I suppose so.”

“What name?” The nurse looked up at her, holding the receiver.

Good question, she thought. Feuerstahl, Guildenstern, Trushenko? “Just tell him it’s Rita, please.”

At least the chemistry was there. She could feel it grow even as he walked down the hall toward her, grinning, then smiling, finally laughing with delight. It was infectious, and despite the admonitions of caution she had imposed on herself, she too began to smile, rather sheepishly.

“You are alive! You are here!” He repeated it three times. But he didn’t reach out to touch her, as though fearing she would dissolve, disappear, evaporate, evanesce.

“So are you.” She said it quietly. Finally she reached out, and their hands met.

“How did you make it?” Was he asking or exclaiming?

“Same as you, I think. A great deal of chance and not much foresight.”

He turned to the receptionist. “I’m finished for the day, Nurse.” He took off the white coat and pulled a suit jacket from the closet at the desk. Turning to Rita he said, “There’s a café across the street.”

“Urs is there, waiting to take me back to Katowice.”

“Should we tell him to wait?”

“No.” Her emphatic reply surprised both of them.

She and Tadeusz were two hours in the café, getting slightly drunk on Romanian wine, telling each other a few half-truths, several three-quarter truths, but only a few complete truths about their respective trajectories through the years since 1938.

It was dark long before they noticed. Tadeusz looked up at the gloom. “Dinner?”

“Can we get a good meal anywhere in Gleiwitz?”

“Only at my place,” he replied. She agreed with alacrity.

They walked arm in arm. Rita searched her feelings as they did so.
I did this last with Dani, when she was still Dani to the world. Does it feel as natural now? Yes. I don’t understand it, but I can live with it.

“I’d like to make you a Barcelona paella, but I just ran out of saffron.” Rita missed his joke, and Tadeusz decided that explaining it would be a mistake. “I got a half dozen real eggs from a grateful patient yesterday. I am going to make you a Spanish treat, a tortilla de patatas.”

Dinner over, Rita offered Tadeusz an American cigarette. He lit hers and then his. Both leaned back, exhaling smoke through their nostrils. Watching Rita do this aroused Tadeusz. Remembering their afternoons eight years ago, Rita immediately realized its effect on him.

“Rita, will you marry me?”

Before she could answer, he came around behind her and bent over, his lips reaching hers as she turned her head up. He slid his hands from her shoulders to her breasts and felt the nipples harden through her khaki uniform shirt as she deftly unbuttoned it. At the same time she rose, pirouetting to face him. They began tearing their clothes off.

“So, we’ll get married and live happily ever after.” He stopped for a moment, but not to hear her answer. “Not here, not in Poland, and not as Mr. and Mrs. Tadeusz Sommermann.” He had not noticed that his proposal had been left unanswered.

“You have it all worked out?”

“No. I have only filled in a few of the blanks. It’s up to you to fill in all the others. We’ll live where you want, so long as it isn’t Poland. You don’t want to stay here, do you?” Rita shook her head. “And I don’t want to be Tadeusz Sommermann. I want to be Guillermo Romero. I’ll go anywhere I can become him again.”

Later they made love again, with infinite slowness, teasing and tempting, each bringing the other to the brink again and again, before finally spilling over the precipice together, punctuated by spasms from her, modulated by long moans from him. Then he collapsed on top of her. It was the way they had done it once, before the world had gone to war. Each quietly rejoiced in the reality that they had been able to do it still.

In the haze of smoke rising from two more cigarettes, they lay next to each other staring up at a ceiling, watching headlamps occasionally play across it. He spoke first. “Rita Romero. Has a nice ring to it, no?”

“Gil”—she was already calling him that, and he liked it—“I think I prefer my own name, Feuerstahl, Rita Feuerstahl, no matter what happens.”

He didn’t seem to notice the possibilities the statement implied, or if he did, he had decided not to respond to the provocation. “Shall I tell you how I managed to survive?” Gil was expecting a warm invitation to begin a romantic narrative that would occasion expressions of surprise, admiration, even enjoyment, and in the end satisfaction. But his words hung in the silence.

Finally Rita responded. “Not now, Gil. I think I know why you and I survived. That’s enough.”

Months later, working backward, Rita was sure her twins had been conceived that night in Gleiwitz.

The next morning, in two uniforms—UNRRA and Soviet Army Medical Corps—they left for Brno. It cost Gil a nice Swiss watch to get them both there in comfort, and another one to cross the Czech border at Bratislava. A few weeks later, Rita was working at the tracing desk in the Salzburg railway station, and Gil was the medical officer for six displaced person camps in the American zone of upper Austria. And they were living in the loveliest apartment in the city, requisitioned by the US Army from a Nazi family.

August 1947.
Mirabelle Gardens, Salzburg, Austria. One could sit there all day, looking up at the castle under the hard blue Alpine sky. Rita listened to the fine white gravel crunch as people strolled, dogs scampered, and small children trudged, pushing the small stones ahead, their open-toed sandals making wakes behind. Late every afternoon she would bring her twins, pull each from the pram, and allow them to crawl, toddle, and begin to walk along the low hedges in the grassy rectangles that surrounded the fountain.

Rita sat at a distance rather greater than a young mother might have. The boys were not her first, and she knew toddlers were not fragile. A woman approached. “May I?” She pointed to the space next to Rita’s. Rita nodded without really looking up, and she sat down.

The woman took a book from her bag and laid it on her lap. It was Polish. Rita looked more closely at the cover.
Lord Tadeusz
, the epic poem Dani had been reading that first day they met at the Terakowski works in 1942.

The woman opened the volume at a place marked by a ribbon and began to read.

As she held a page down, Rita noticed her finger ends. No nails, none at all. It was too late to dissimulate her look of discomfort when the woman happened to glance at Rita. The woman flushed slightly and closed her fists, hiding the nailless finger ends.

Rita addressed her in Polish. “I know that book.”

The woman smiled. “It meant a lot to me in the war.”

“Me too.”

Now Rita looked up from her fingernails to her face. She was about thirty-five, thin, tall, with short, prematurely gray hair. So short it had to have been completely cut off and recently regrown. Delousing? Rita speculated to herself. The face was lined by experience, and there was a scar across the forehead.
This woman’s war was worse than mine.
There also was something else about her. Her mouth seemed slightly tilted to the right. A stroke, a birth trauma?

The woman closed her book and began to speak. “The Germans took them—the fingernails.” She opened up her hands again and contemplated the fingers.