The Upright Heart (11 page)

Up here the world looks so different than it does down there. Through the stars I can see a tiny white globe in the distance, and I recognize it as the place where I have been before and where I will go again. Soon. And oh, little feather, I don’t really want to go.

My little feather laughs as if to assure me that I will never be alone anyway.

If only people down there knew what my feather knows, then they could see through their veil of tears.

Not since the war ended had Elżbieta felt so beautiful as she did on that golden September day. The weather was occasion to smile. It was a sign of happier days to come. Her auburn hair was pulled back at the temples with small green enamel clips and tiny white baby’s breath buds attached at the ends. Her dress was made of fine black silk. At the left tip of the collar and hidden within the asymmetrical pleat on her right leg was an embroidered black rose. If you could see an x-ray portrait of her heart, you would find another rose flowering there, one color for every season.

If Elżbieta were to dance, then the black rose would be exposed, displayed to the world and released from its hiding place. But that never happened, especially on this day.

There were things other than the black embroidered rose concealed by her dress. There was a new life growing and stirring inside her, three months to the day. This baby may have been conceived out of wedlock, but it didn’t matter. He would be brought into this world with love. Though Wiktor had offered Bolesław a way out, saying that he would take responsibility for
the unborn child, Bolesław decided to do the right thing, to marry the delicate and charming young Elżbieta, to learn to be a husband and to love.

In her short life Elżbieta had seen babies born and even seen babies die, but never had she considered what it would feel like to have one growing inside her. There was a rustling of subtle movement, a wave of ocean within, and such an ecstatic joy to experiencing this fertile ground, to looking out at the vast garden behind her grandparents’ home, watching summer’s end as evidenced in the bounty of vegetables pulled from the earth, and knowing that, inside her, a kind of harvest was also taking place. Inside there was water, inside there was sun, and inside there was also purest, sweetest life.

At this moment she did not know that even though the war was over, life would continue to take from her many of the people whom she loved, that life was still life. But to Saint Thérèse she could whisper, now and always,
What sweet child grows inside? Take care to bless him with your goodness, to keep him healthy and safe and warm. Take care, Saint Thérèse. Shower him with your roses. May no harm come to him
. And it never did.

Elżbieta had never imagined this excitement nor could she envision the accompanying goodbye. This whisper: so long to dreams of a better life, to sitting at the piano with a student, to knowing more. Yet at this moment, standing at the altar of the tiny chapel with Bolesław by her side, the growing child in her stomach, her mother and father, sisters and brother, the golden autumn in full swing, and the late-day sun pouring through the red and yellow stained glass windows, casting a halo of light above the sculpted head of Christ, she knew that she could happily accept that what she had was enough. Rybnik was her home, and this new family was her life. If only she could memorialize this moment and take a picture. But she never would.

Now that she was an adult, Anna wished she had never been a witch as a child. Witches are smart. They know too much, and if they are true to themselves, they grow up to become wild.

Every morning at daybreak she would climb the stone walkway and enter the gates of Wawel Castle, showing her papers first to one soldier and then to another.

During the war, her dreams were overpowered by images of her old schoolmates, especially Rachelka, who seemed to be everywhere she turned. Rachelka’s image even floated below the Wisła River’s surface, her pale, thoughtful face mounting an endless stream of water, facing the sky for all time.

In dreams Anna envisioned herself playing in the garden behind her old house, even dancing with a young soldier in the pale moonlight. She climbed Mount Everest, and just as she was about to reach its summit she knelt carefully in the snow, removing a tiny Polish flag from the frozen corners of her coat pocket. There was Rachelka, alone and naked in a quiet snowdrift. She didn’t speak to Anna at all, only closed her eyes and leaned back, frost decorating her hair like crystal balls dangling from the mangled branches of an old tree.

In visions and in dreams. How many times did she have nightmares in which faces were measured, analyzed, condemned?

Black hair and dark eyes. Oversize noses and heads. Children being beaten by tall, handsome soldiers. Hungry maggots devouring bodies with delight.

Black hair and dark eyes aren’t everything. The Gypsy, the Jew, the unknown stranger. The nose whose tip leans toward the sky like a flower opening to the sun, this is the one that protects you from a desperate fate. But some noses are tricky, don’t you think? So many Polish faces cross that line, and yet you say that
you always know. But it isn’t just the nose, you say. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, right?

And then there is the dream that repeats and extinguishes all others. In this dream, it is always night. There is a large, burnt-out building in the middle of an empty city where even the darkest corners are shadowed by the moon. Three young girls, strangers, play a game in which they sing and dance in a circle, holding hands in the pale, white light. They sit in the empty yard building sculptures out of dirt. They make furniture and dolls and play house, the starched white collars of their uniform shirts dirtied from layers of soot and soil. Anna reaches out to touch one girl’s shoulder, and it crumbles beneath her hand. Everyone disappears. She is left only with a dark, empty house.

In an instant she is on a train moving away from the city into the countryside, two newborn lambs by her side. One of them is crying for its mother, and whenever she tries to offer him comfort, he just cries louder, tears big enough to fill a glass slipping between the wooden slats of the train car’s door, stretching wide before the vast green world, falling into the passing landscape, disappearing down into the forbidden, fertile earth.

Anna had only just arrived in Kraków when the streets were renamed. Even the town square was now called Adolf Hitler Platz. As if the country had been stolen from itself, now hiding until the storm would pass. And what if it never did? Then Polish words would be absorbed deep into the earth, sounds blurred and covered. Murmurs emitted in this language built for secrets. These sounds, they roll off the tongue like an endless whisper.

The governor-general of occupied Poland had chosen Kraków as his home base, in part due to the city’s Germanic
flare.
So much beauty here
, he said to himself and to his many colleagues. Such opportunity. So, so many Jews. The Jewish population made up roughly a quarter of the city’s population, and so he fantasized about what their removal could do for this otherwise beautiful town. There was a plan set in motion, though it would never be completely fulfilled. Men stood at his altar, and whatever he said, went.

Niklas might have been the last man you would imagine to be found working under such a high ranking-official, but here he was, sleeping in a room in Wawel Castle, overlooking the Wisła River, which ran through this beautiful city of Kraków, drifting past the ghetto walls, rough within and perfect without.

Raised in a small German town in the north, he had never left his village until Hitler came to power. He couldn’t even read or write, but it was his skill for sweet-talking, his talent for charming people, that helped him to move quickly through the ranks of the new regime. First a local landowner sent him into the Wehrmacht as a soldier, and, before long, Niklas became a close confidant of the governor-general of occupied Poland. This job suited him better than any other he could have ever imagined. It looked clean and respectable on the outside, but there was still plenty of dirty work involved. Having lived the majority of his life isolated on a farm, Niklas had raised countless herds of cows, honing his skills, learning the best ways to care for and fatten the animals before slaughter. He was made for this work.

Though he had spent so much of his young life alone with his parents on the farm, Niklas had a way with people that was unmatched. It was as if he could see into them, identify their greatest fears and their greatest desires, and from that point of understanding, anything was possible.

As a child, he was terrified every time his father prepared the animals for slaughter, but as he grew older and became man of the house, he came to enjoy the contrasts of building life up
only to tear it down. There was nothing like the feeling of raising an animal, knowing all along that whenever he wanted, he could simply kill it with a single blow. There was an unknown pleasure that he experienced when encountering another being’s fear. This was power, he long ago realized, an excitement like none other he had ever known.

It all made perfect sense now, Niklas thought, stretching his tan arms in the early morning sun. A faint haze was rising over the river on this summer morning, just as it often did until the strong afternoon light could penetrate the seemingly ever-present soft pink fog. Then there would be a stunning clarity to the day that would last until early evening, when the miasma would descend across the city once again. Kraków was like a dream.

His time on the farm, his father’s brutality whenever he made a mistake with the animals or the barn, the thrashings that he took as a child, they all helped him to become the man he was today. And when his father beat his mother, calling her names and forcing her to clean on her hands and knees, Niklas learned to fight his weaknesses and resist the temptations of the heart. He learned quickly that it didn’t pay to feel attached to anyone. He tried to stay close to the cycles of life. It was strangely comforting to accept the fact that death was always on the other side.

And when his father died, he wept like a baby, hiding inside the linen closet for days. His mother implored him to open the door, take a drink, eat a little bread, but Niklas adamantly refused. When he came out, he was a different man. He made certain that from that point on, nothing would ever make him cry again.

It was too late for Anna to go back once the job had begun. She thought about it more than once, about leaving the whole thing
behind, but she could never move herself to do it. She felt she had no choice. At least this way she could help out her father, support her mother and Wojtuś in the countryside, buy real stockings with a seam up the back.

She had lived in Kraków for only one week when she began working for the Nazi Party. She was hired first as a secretary in town, in part because she was young and pretty, but also because her German was excellent. Here was one advantage of growing up in multicultural Łódź. Now was the time to boast one’s German-language skills and to conceal one’s knowledge of Yiddish. Less than two years later Anna was given a job cleaning in Wawel Castle. She would stay for one year before returning to work in town. It didn’t matter, she told herself one sunny day, while passing a gang of young Polish laborers standing on the street in their Baudienst uniforms. This was just a moment in time, another step on Poland’s road to nowhere. She had become a member of the lost herd, working to survive. Never in her life would she admit to another human being just how grateful she was for the distraction, despite her absolute hatred of the job, the people, the cheap uniform. Why had she gotten the job? Why, out of all of the beautiful and smart and stupid candidates, had she been chosen to have more money—to clean the desks, to make the coffee, to be very still, to listen and to obey? Where was the happiness in luck? In being the chosen one? Why is any witch ever given an advantage over any other? No, sometimes Anna wished she had never, ever begun.

Every morning she would wake up earlier than she had ever done for school. The strange half-light at this time of day reminded her of important holidays as a child. Those were the days when excitement pulled her body from sleep, and nothing could keep her down. Times were different now.

There were the long hours spent washing, folding, dusting, and cleaning the floors of marble staircases so grand that they could supply the whole world with heavenly imaginings. There was
a grand ball, a room full of dancing couples, in her mind. It was a perfect gathering in which the past was resurrected; only now it would be better. Poles and Jews danced together, served by a German wait staff that wore white gloves to offset the pale marble staircase. They supplied drinks and said “yes” and “thank you” whenever necessary. Jewish women would display their dark, curly hair, and blond Polish dames would flatter them by saying, “Oh, if only my limp hair would do the same.”

This was a game Anna played whenever she became really angry or bored, for in the world of her imagination she could do whatever she wanted with the German waiters, especially when she was in a particularly witchy mood. She could force them to wear masks that resembled pig snouts, push them to their knees, even use the most preciously designed riding crop normally reserved for the local nobleman’s horse to whip them on their wild pony behinds while they served drinks.

As pretty as this ball may have been, as many exquisite dresses as may have been present, constructed like live replica confectionary delights—women as cream puffs and such—and as many lovely waltzes and handsome men may have offered her their perfect, most masculine hands, pulling her out onto the dance floor for “one last turn,” Anna’s imaginings were neither delicate nor kind. But they did help pass the time.

Days went like this: First she received orders from the Polish head housekeeper. Then she cleaned the hallways or the first floor with three young women and took a break for lunch. Finally the group split up to clean various parts of the castle. Although the governor-general and his family had a trusted staff of German servants (with exception of their house twenty kilometers outside of town, which was cared for mostly by Polish housekeepers), Anna and her friend Maryna—who, like her, spoke excellent German and was fifteen-years-old passing for seventeen—were chosen to clean for Niklas, the governor-general’s close subordinate, as he
lived on the Wisła River side of the estate, in a building away from the governor-general’s home. This was the most interesting part of Anna’s shift, because Niklas was almost never around, and the girls had some freedom to drift through the rooms and let their minds wander. Sometimes Anna played another game with herself, spying on him or snooping through his things. You could learn about people by searching through their possessions. Like how the boss folded the cuffs of his shirtsleeves just so, as if always preparing for perfection, as if life did not provide him with enough time to crease his shirt cuff in anticipation of … what? In the privacy of his castle, this monster became more like a man.