The Upright Heart (8 page)

I first discovered it when I was transported to a camp near Kraków. I was with my father, but then we were separated, and an old man took me under his wing and told me about the pill that would help me to survive. He was right. I made it here because of this pill I will show you now, the one that will help change your life.

His hand is small and delicate, like that of a young pianist, or of one who has not yet withstood the test of time. The nails on his fingers are jagged and deep grooves of dirt form beneath them. His face is constructed of wide smooth planes, and just like a baby’s, his skin shows no indication of worry, no scars to suggest the things he has seen. His eyes are a glassy blue, long in the way many of his countrymen’s eyes are long. They recall the Mongol. They are a reminder that racial purity does not exist. Not even in Poland.

The boys emerge from a small cluster of trees that cast shade across an old brick wall stretching from one block to the next. Staggered but together, they make their way back into the street. The older boy, the leader of the two, walks in front of the little one, who is no more than seven years old but who has the look of a wrinkled old man who has seen enough and wants to close his eyes to the world. The leader is adolescent but small, his oversize shirt, stolen off a corpse one year ago, rolled up at the sleeves. Here is Ulica Szewska, one of many passageways
leading to the market square. Streets stretch out from the center of Kraków like the many arms of Ganesh reaching past the obstacles of the world. If only they could. Leaving the market square they pass the cool shade of Planty, a ring of green surrounding the city center. In winter, Planty is a wonderland in miniature—branches bending down to cover pedestrians from the snow, though the walkway is covered with ice and it is inevitable that someone will fall. Ah, but in summertime the very same place is imbued with the sweet smell of lilac, and people walk slowly. They sit and talk, enjoy an ice cream cone. Grown men in their short-sleeve shirts with starched collars sit and lick to their heart’s content. Suddenly everyone becomes a child. Here the boys make their way slowly, oversize shoes toiling against the uneven cobblestones.

Anna is heading toward Planty while they are walking in the direction of the market square. Maybe today they can find a little work, or else some food to eat behind one of the few still-operating cafés.

When you want to walk like a lady you arch your back, extend your buttocks, relax your face. When you do it well, nobody notices the pain with which you step or the black seam drawn up the backside of your leg. She is focused on the pain in her feet, the rumbling in her stomach, but it is the feeling of fear that causes her to lift her gaze and notice the boys, as if fear is a forward-cast shadow preceding the one whom it is devouring, alerting the public to its presence. The first boy is no more than eleven or twelve years old. He passes by, eyes holding her gaze long enough to make her recognize his suffering. She feels his hunger, and it makes her shudder someplace deep within. She looks away quickly. As if he could take something away from her with his despair. It seems as if all human experience has passed through him, and now there is nothing left in this world that could make him cry.

She walks past the shops selling last year’s wares: an old pair of shoes, a sack of sugar, a toy German Shepherd that winds up and barks. It sounds like an electric siren. Everyone is struggling now to make ends meet. Everyone is trying to make do. Anna cannot help but mull over how much everything has changed.

When the Russians first arrived, we fed them our last morsels of bread, our sausage, our stored potatoes and beans. Whatever we had became theirs. The Germans had received news of the Soviet Army’s approach before their arrival in January of ’45, so the majority of Nazi soldiers had left Kraków for the west by that time. A few Nazis remained. The Soviet army did take prisoners of war, especially those who had been Gestapo or SS, and there were some executions, in a nearby village, but it was almost impossible to see a Nazi’s body on the streets of our town. It did happen sometimes, though. There was an occasional fight with a soldier, a traitor, or a collaborator. There was an explosion caused by some Nazi soldiers that took place on a bridge away from the Wisła River. The possessions of those dead soldiers became fair game. There were boots, watches, shirts to be taken. People needed clothes. Here was a portrait of humanity that would not be easy to forget. Not only war can instill fear in a person’s heart. Life is better without war, yes, but I cannot help but wonder what is yet to come
.

Anna stops her internal rant to admire a small ornate opal pin in a shop window. The pin is a simple gold line dotted with tiny opals that form the points on a delicate star. Anna would like to own something like this. She imagines herself wearing a new dress made of fuchsia silk, imagines walking into a dance, being admired by the handsomest man in the room. The store owner, a woman of about seventy, sits at a table in the back. Barely visible through the foggy pane of the storefront window, she leans against her left hand, staring into space, smoking a long brown cigarette with her right hand. Every thirty seconds her pursed lips take a puff. Like so many other people around, she looks sad, gray. This is the
life that has descended upon their world. They are all lucky to be alive, yes, but what price does living through the war make you pay? Anna takes another painful step, and with that twinge returns the ramblings of her mind.

Before the war, life was one big party. My family lived in Łódź, had a big, beautiful house with paintings on the wall and a maid in the kitchen. We didn’t know that our house would be robbed or that we would be threatened. We were still enjoying our summer vacation in a small country village when my father returned to Łódź to gather some papers, only to find that Germans had broken into our home, stolen all our belongings, and even burned much of our house to the ground. We never went back
.

Before the war, I was a girl of fourteen. We lived in a big comfortable home, my mother, father, Wojtuś, and I. Wojtuś is six years younger than me. Mama had him just when she thought that she couldn’t have babies anymore. There he appeared, and so we all loved him the most, like he was our little doll. Wojtuś even looked like a doll, so pretty and delicate with his little blond curls and big blue eyes. Where I was a moody troublemaker, he was polite and kind. I remember once a beggar came to our house, and Wojtuś stopped the game he was playing in order to open the gate for the beggar, even helping him to pick the finest apples off the tree. Someone else’s father would have given his child a scolding for what he did, but our father just laughed and picked Wojtuś up in the air, swinging him around with joy
.

Not understanding the fuss he had caused, Wojtuś began to cry, tears spouting from his sweet innocent eyes
.

“That’s okay, dear Wojtuś,” my father said, laughing, “We can have one less apple pie this year.”

Every day my mother gave me a warm, buttered roll wrapped in foil for school, and every day as I reached the corner of our street I would throw the roll into the trash, smiling with the secret joy of knowing that I didn’t have to eat it and that nobody would ever know what I had done. During the war, every day that I was hungry I thought about that buttered roll. Even now my mouth waters. If I knew then what I know now, things could have been different
.

My hair has always been this stormy shade of black and blue, and my eyes have always been this dark. I was born blond just like the rest of my family, but I became ill when I was only four and had all of my hair shaved off. I didn’t cry or blink an eye. I remember it like it was yesterday—I simply observed myself with grave consideration, watching my golden locks as they dropped slowly to the ground. With my solemn face and dark eyes, I resembled one of the old portraits hanging on the wall in the town library. My smile was so infrequent and surprising that when it did happen, everyone stopped to look. Even dinner got cold
.

“Do it in circles,” I demanded of my mother the time she shaved my head. She stood behind the old stuffed chair, razor in hand. I remember sitting before her, wrapped in a white cotton sheet, staring at my reflection in her ornate vanity mirror, tiny brown shoulders exposed, posture alert. “I want it to come back black and blue.” Somehow my wish came true, and it was then that I imagined I might be a witch
.

By the time I was five, I was well and had beautiful thick, dark curly hair
.

Somehow everyone picked up on my strange capacity for sorcery, and everyone would tease me and call me a witch
.

“That’s right,” I would joke, “I am a witch and you had better watch out, or else I will cast a spell on you.” I could sense that even though everyone was friendly with me, they were also always a little bit afraid. I took pleasure in frightening my teachers, spouting nonsensical words, imitating black magic invocations. My teachers and my friends enjoyed these games, however slightly unnerving they might have been
.

Of course since the war came, my abilities seem farther and farther away. Now I find myself thinking only of things: shoes, blouses, skirts, hats, coats, bras and panties, potatoes and bread. I never imagined that my life could become so mundane. But I remember when I was still a child and we had so much fun. I was the teacher’s pet. I was their mistress of the occult, their Catholic girl, their dark horse in a sea of once and forever night
.

My best friend, Rachelka, was also an unusual girl. She wore her long black curly hair in plaits that wrapped around her head like a rope on the dock
of the black sea. Those ropes were like coiled snakes waiting to be provoked, unraveled, and drawn out into the murky waters of an unconquered world. She was like Rapunzel’s dark sister, only she did not let down her golden hair, but rather collected her black silky locks and kept them to herself, creating the look of a child in an old woman’s body, just waiting to be set free
.

Rachelka was known by all our teachers as the special one in the group. She passed all of her lessons without effort, sang like an angel, and was a gifted painter. Everyone knew that one day soon she would become a great artist. Rachelka knew this about herself as well. She believed in her own bright future the way most young girls know for certain that they will become brides, mothers, have a house all their own. Their sheer confidence even allows them to imagine how many children they will have, and whether those kids will be boys or girls
.

All of the students in the Mikolajskiej School for Girls were Jewish except for myself and three other girls. Why did our parents send us to a mostly Jewish school? Who knows? Maybe because it was the best school around. Things were not so separate then. Just because most of the students were Jewish doesn’t mean that there was much of a difference between us. We all wore the same pleated gray skirt and starched white shirt. We studied the same maps, had our first periods, attended class trips, ate the same foods. Rachelka was the neighbor of Małgosia, whose father was in business with Malwina’s uncle. Their mothers shopped at the same grocer, but not at the same butcher. Most girls went to temple, a few of us went to church. Our differences were small and almost unnoticeable
.

The teachers at our school were mostly Catholic, though it was common knowledge that the beautiful and graceful young history teacher, Pani Tarkowska, came from a poor Jewish family in a nearby town. She wore long skirts and silk blouses in bright, friendly colors, but she could not hide her youth or her beauty. She was set to marry one of the most successful young merchants in Łódź—the son of a banker and a self-made businessman. Her eyes were bright with possibility
.

Anna walks across the town square into St. Mary’s Church, where she lights a candle, kneeling on the cold stones, staring up at the son of God.

Anna wonders if Jesus was really a man who existed in this world or if he is just a myth, an ideal man. Was what he suffered so different from what many people endured? Anna never was the type to go to church unless her parents forced her to, but now, ever since the war ended, she finds that it brings her some comfort, and comfort is hard to come by. She thinks of all those girls, her classmates from school, of how such a tiny difference in background could shape their whole world.

She didn’t want to hear it, but he told her. Her kind father’s face has taken a blow since the war, and now his skin looks waxy, as if he were quickly turning to stone.

“I want you to know, to understand, how lucky we are,” he said, and then he told her what had happened. How her entire class, along with one or two younger students, had been locked in a tool shed behind the school, and then burnt to the ground.

“How do you know that?” Anna shouted, her face burning with rage, covering her ears in desperation, trying to block out a truth that cannot be ignored. And the ringing was so loud, as if upon hearing her scream the girls could finally scream, too, all at once. The heavens were in her ears, resounding with their call.

“No!” she cried, and fell to the table, hitting her forehead as she wept.

“But it is,” her father said, softening, sitting beside her now, stroking her hair. “Everyone else was put in the ghetto, taken to the camps.”

She had known without really knowing. Something had gone quiet at the start of the war, as if the memory of the girls’ distant laughter were fading away. With that feeling came both terror and inner peace, a calm that was now wiped away by the spoken truth, by reality. Gone was the last bit of peace inside.

Even though she hadn’t eaten enough soup that day to satiate her hunger, Anna still ran to the toilet and threw up what little was there. Never before was hunger so irrelevant as it was now, seated at her family table.

Elżbieta makes a habit of collecting and hiding things. Clothes, books, old newspaper clippings. And what about drying the orange rinds to make a fire? She washes and presses her second-hand goods and locks them up in an old wooden wardrobe.