The Upright Heart (3 page)

We like playing games. We do lessons sometimes as well, examining our old botany books, or even studying geography, which was a favorite subject for many of us. We used to dream together of all the places in the world we would one day go. Many of the girls wanted to go to Hawaii, but I have always dreamt of one day seeing the great mountains of Peru.

With our knowledge of astronomy we can sometimes locate the constellations through the roof of our broken home. This is another one of our favorite activities, especially little Sarah’s. She was only nine when we died, and so had less time to learn and to love. Often she becomes angry and doesn’t want to participate or agree to anything, but we must be patient. Her time was even shorter than ours.

When she is inconsolable, I take her by the hand and lead her to the grand hallway that looks out over the road where factory smoke billows in the distance. Łódź is filled with factories, many of which were opened by our relatives. The sky is vibrant here, and I try to teach her the names of all the constellations: Andromeda, Cassiopeia. Every so often she dares to crack a smile.

“Will it always be this way?” she asks, her eyes still wet with expectation, even long after the answer has been found.

“No it won’t,” I tell her, looking into her eyes, trying to reassure her and maybe even myself. “It won’t always be this way, but I don’t know how or when it will change.” We are waiting for someone to come and unlock the gate.

Nobody knows for sure just when we will be allowed to leave this home and move on to the next.

Sarah, whose grandfather was a great rabbi, says we are caught between worlds because we died too fast and did not complete our tikkun. Sarah is the one we always turn to when we have important questions. Her name used to be Irina, which is a Russian name. Her mother was a Jewess who fell for her father one night in Petersburg. He was a traveling salesman, and was so taken by her mother’s beauty that he laid his most beautiful Persian rug at her doorstep as a sign of his devotion.

Sometimes when the moon is full and we feel most at peace, Sarah tells us stories her grandfather once told her. She says that maybe, since we died so soon, we will return and live again. Maybe, Sarah says. This is all we know. We love our books and our stories. They are our tradition, our history. They may not be much, but they are what we still have. After all, we are only thirteen years old.

This night is quiet. All the dogs have gone to bed.

Wiktor is running again. Out of the crypt, past the church where he crossed the threshold with his wife on their wedding day, where his three children were baptized, where people came to mourn when he died.

Elżbieta is leaning against the kitchen table on Strzelecka Street, crushing rose petals and sugar with a spoon. The roses are freshly picked, as they always are in spring, still wet from the morning dew. It is almost midnight now, but she is still standing, trying her best to hold up the world. Making jam is a sign that home still exists, and so she turns the petals in a rhythmic motion, releasing their perfume into the night air that wafts from the cracked window into the room. Spring is on the tip of nature’s tongue, and for a moment there is harmony. In one breath, life persists. As rose petals transform into a paste that will later become the jam of the gods, Elżbieta looks out the kitchen window onto the fields and scans the distant skyline, so soft that it is almost like a painting whose edges have been blurred by the addition of a splash of water.
Somewhere Papa is still running
, she thinks with a smile.
He is out there, up in heaven, now entering through those glistening gates
.

You see that star down there? It explodes every seven days or so. It gathers its strength for a little while, and then day after day it grows brighter until it bursts forth with the intensity of its own energy. I watch how it grows, how it catches remnants of the passing sun and competes with other stars for ultimate glory. You win, we all want to say, and oh how we laugh. Nobody cares up here about who is strongest, because here everybody is strong, even my little feather, who flies higher than all the rest.

This is the night that Wiktor says goodbye to Rybnik, his hometown.

Ulica Strzelecka, goodbye. Town square, goodbye. River that runs, goodbye. Goodbye to all of the places and people I have loved
.

Tiny newborn flowers are sprouting from the ground. They are deep red, pale violet, yellow, white.
The colors of my childhood, the colors of my life
. Green. And, of course, gray, the color of the Rybnik skyline.

Wiktor runs back toward the train tracks without knowing why. He sees the fields where he lived his entire life and they fill him with the memory of profound joy.

No more maybes. There is always a light shining somewhere beyond.

Wolf Ain is sitting at the window of wagon number four on the night train to Białystok, watching an endless stretch of darkness rush past. Just hours ago he was traveling through Austria. Now he is passing through Katowice on his way to Warsaw, and he will then go further east. This night is long as the train moves across the Polish landscape. If it were daylight he would see passing fields—humble, soft, endless green. A house in the distance where there is always a chimney smoking, even in summertime. Little red berries along the tracks, nettles pert and ready to prick any animal that dares approach; shadows, branches, and forests filled with the last traces of snow. But night shrouds the country in darkness. Wolf counts the occasional lamppost and chimney. Everything is silent other than the sound of the train rumbling over the tracks. It is that feeling of being cradled that rocks him to sleep, that sensation which brings him back to the first months of life, when there was always someone to hold him in her arms.

Wolf twirls a pink string given to him by baby Leah around his left fingers and tries to remember the Polish word for “spirit.” In Russian it is
dusha
, and in Hebrew,
ruach
, like the wind. In Polish, it is
dusza
. This language is so difficult to learn but even harder to forget. Wolf plays with languages the way other people play with cards.

What kind of person would I be if I didn’t go back to see?
He asks himself, nodding off as the surrounding scenery fades into the background. The train lulls Wolf slowly to sleep, and his glasses slide down to the tip of his nose, so they might easily fall and shatter, but never do they let go.

Running beside a train, you would normally feel the strength of steel as it barrels across the land. You would know your vulnerability, and would sense, suddenly, the fragility of your body as it pales in comparison to a great machine, to a product of man’s imagination and not a figment of nature. But without a solid body, things are different, and running beside steel is no different than running beside a stream. You are like water, the steel is like a chariot waiting to take you in its arms. You can swim together. In fact, you could just as easily unite with the whole world. It is almost like flying. Wiktor feels that ecstasy as he leaps aboard the local train to Katowice. Not even a thought is needed to make it happen. Just the slightest intention, and he is already there.

Wolf’s reflexes are fast enough to catch his eyeglasses before they fall to the floor of wagon number four, but it takes him longer to come to terms with his surroundings, and for a time he still hears a baby crying, still sees delicate pine needles pricking at his peripheral vision, as if his dream does not yet want to release him back into reality. The first signs of pink are appearing along the horizon in prelude to the dawn.

Having taken the leap from the fields that surround Rybnik onto the train, and then swiftly jumping to the Białystok train as it passes through Katowice, Wiktor walks through the corridor of
wagon number four looking for the one who is calling him. Wiktor recognizes him immediately. Though he isn’t wearing his kippah, he still looks like a stranger. (Not wearing a kippah is the one concession he felt he had to make in returning to Poland—that and leaving his tefillin and his tzitzit at home. This decision came after a big internal debate, though he felt he was making the right decision in the end.) Alone in the darkened car, Wolf sits below a small brown leather bag placed on the metal rack above his head. His dark beard is thick, and his wavy hair is carefully parted. He wears a lightweight brown woolen suit and a starched collared shirt. There is a discreet tear on the pocket of his shirt, barely visible as he leans against the window, asleep. He flinches, grabbing his glasses before they fall to the floor. Wolf’s eyes open in a blurry manner that reminds Wiktor of his grandson, Mateusz, who always grins absentmindedly while drifting off to sleep. Wolf smiles in the direction of the open train car door, and Wiktor smiles, too, feeling for a moment that he is being seen. Wolf rallies himself and returns to gazing out the window at the last vestige of the night and the passing fields. He questions the world that streams before him.
Now I know
, he thinks.
Now I know that whatever you are away from feels like a dream
.

Wiktor comes to sit beside Wolf on the lumpy old bench. Just as it was with the soldiers in Rybnik, he feels compelled to be here with this man.

Now Rybnik is behind him. Now Rybnik is everywhere.

Wolf looks out the window, and Wiktor watches Wolf. The world drifts away as night gives way to dawn and heartbreak, their backs turned toward the future.

There are three faded photographs stuffed into Wolf’s suit coat pocket. No handkerchief, no dash of color, only three small
crumpled photos to commemorate a life that has already split in two. The still, serious faces scattered across paper, the family posing in a dark parlor, backs upright, gazes still. From the torn lining of Wolf’s coat, decorated with faded representations of European landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the papers tucked into his breast pocket, nothing is hidden from Wiktor anymore.

Wolf twirls a little pink string around his pinky finger. The string was given to him by his daughter, Leah. She is the spitting image of his sister, also Leah, who used the Yiddish spelling of the same name, Leye. He gazes out the window and wonders just how long it has been since he has seen these forests of endless white birch, like fragile ghosts standing, shivering imperceptibly in the silent wind. And the beautiful poplar trees, the upright
topole
so characteristic of his childhood. He remembers when he was studying at Slobodka Yeshiva in Lithuania, how he looked to those trees as an embodiment of the kind of man he wanted to become, proud and unmovable.
Every time I travel home I will look to them as a marker of who I am becoming
, he would tell himself late at night as he was falling asleep, face in a book, night giving way to the dawn. Then, early in the morning, he would take a long walk in the forest, turning over the latest ethical question in his mind.
If I feel at one with that tree
—he would say to himself, pointing to the tallest and most alone of the scattered group—
then I will know that I am growing in the right way. Only then can I return home and call myself a man
.

If only I had known. If only I had known what kind of wind was about to blow
.

When we left Poland I held on to that image. I am strong inside, I told myself. I know what it is to be a moral person in this world. It may have broken my heart to make the choices that I made, but at least it did not destroy my family life. How could I have known that life can be so cruel? That even though I was a young man of twenty-five, I was still no more than a child?

Wolf cracks a sad smile and so does Wiktor, gently exposing small, crooked teeth as he listens to Wolf’s thoughts and looks out the window over his shoulder. Wolf’s suit is made of fine wool that is uncommon in Poland, especially after the war. With his black, wavy hair, his dark clothes and beard, Wolf stands out from the crowd. A small group of militiamen, the law enforcement of Poland’s communist regime, passes through the corridor of the train verifying passengers’ identities. They stop to look at him.

“
Dokumenty
,” the youngest of the threesome asks, a wry smile playing across his face.

Wolf removes from his pocket an American passport and hands it to the man. Wiktor notices how Wolf uses his left arm to hold the right one in place, doing what he can to conceal his trembling. The body exposes everything that the mind wishes to forget.

“What are you doing in Poland? Where are you going?” the young man asks in Polish, laughing derisively at the bald eagle on the cover of Wolf’s passport. He opens the window in the train corridor and spits sunflower seed shells out the window as he speaks. Wolf’s passport pages flutter in the wind as the young officer leans his elbow out the window, flailing his arm about. Pieces of shells leap between his teeth as he mocks the yid who has come back for a second beating.

Wolf takes a breath and sits up straight. Exhaling, he says, “I’m going to Białystok. To visit my family.” His two fingers grab on to that little pink string on his pinky as if to say,
Nothing is going to happen to me baby, don’t worry
.

“
You
have family there?” the militiaman asks, changing to Russian now.

Wolf replies in Russian.

“Yes, I do. I could not come to see them during the war, but now that the war is over, I am here. I am going back to America next week.”

The militiaman takes a step back and one of his friends nudges him to move on.

“Okay, okay,” he says, returning to Polish, handing Wolf back his passport, clinging to it for just a moment more.

The young man grasps the metal rack above Wolf’s head and leans in so close that Wiktor has to move aside. His breath is labored and has the distinctly sweet smell of alcohol that has been lingering in the body all night long.

“Is it really like they say it is?” he asks Wolf. “You know, America.… Streets paved with gold.…”