East of Time (15 page)

Let our freedom song resound,

Let our voices reach the sky.

Let our freedom song re-echo,

Let us walk hand in hand;

Wherever brothers sing together

The whole wide world is fatherland.

I remember the day the floodgates of the sky broke open, and our white tents could not protect us from the sudden turn in the weather. Drenched to the bone, we crammed into a nearby barn, where, clinging to each other for warmth, we burst forth in song. At nightfall, the storm having subsided, each of us took a dry piece of timber from the barn and we sat around the fire to listen to a speaker.

He spoke late into the night, shaping his every word with great care, and each of his sentences had a vividness, a coherence, that showed beyond doubt how it was all up to
us
if we wanted to bring to fruition our dream of a perfect reality. As I took hold of my hoped-for girlfriend's hand, I noticed the full moon's esoteric smile. In the diary of my mind I quietly noted the special feeling of that moment — a mental note I have never to this day forgotten.

 

 
Traumas
 

At the threshold of what would be the last year of my formal education, I had to change schools. I was nearly fifteen. Father couldn't take any more of my rascally, unruly behaviour and my academic negligence, which practically every week saw him
summoned to my principal's office. Enough was enough, he said, and enrolled me in the local state school for Jewish boys. The change was quite traumatic. On several mornings, walking in a daze, I actually found myself, to my own bewilderment, in front of the gates of my former school!

My new principal, Szelupski, was a medium-built man with soft brown eyes and a flat, greying moustache under his slightly crooked nose. ‘You have to repeat grade six,' he told me, politely enough. I asked him why. ‘Because I have no great faith in your Yiddish schooling.' After adding a few words about my former headmaster, whom he seemed to admire, Szelupski led me into my prospective classroom, where in front of some forty students Miss Maler, teacher of literature and language, set about interrogating me.

‘Do you speak Polish at home?' was her first question.

‘No, Miss.'

‘Oh, how awful. Do you read Polish books?'

‘Yes,' I whispered.

‘Well,' said the gentle Miss Maler, who, like most of the teachers at the school, was Jewish. ‘I was led to believe that your school reads only Yiddish books... So tell us, young man, what do you like most in our Polish literature?'

‘Mickiewicz,' I answered, still whispering.

‘Excellent,' she exclaimed, ‘he's my favourite writer too. And as it happens, he is next on our reading list. Perhaps you would like to inform your new friends which book by Mickiewicz you like best. You might even treat us,' she continued with an ironic smile, ‘to a line or two from this great work.'

I don't know why, but I didn't respond to the first part of Miss Maler's request. Instead, I began to recite from memory ‘The Year 1812', the eleventh book of
Pan Tadeusz
... and didn't stop until the bell for recess shook my new teacher of Polish literature out of her state of mesmerized amazement. ‘Is that
what they teach in your Yiddish school?' she asked at last, shaking her well-groomed head.

‘Yes,' I said.

As she showed me to my desk, I heard her mutter: ‘If only they would stop speaking that dreadful language at home.'

After dinner that evening I related the whole episode to my father. He was visibly upset. Obviously, the teacher's assimilationist sentiments had made him realize that taking his son out of the Yiddish-speaking school had been a mistake. It was now too late to remedy it.

‘Why do they dislike Yiddish so much?' I asked him.

‘Well, it's in the nature of the assimilators. Actually, it's not the language — it's the people who speak it they abhor.'

‘Would that change if we all spoke Polish?'

‘No. Unfortunately, this is an ongoing historical trauma. Such characters are basically ashamed of their own people.'

Later, as night lost its fear of the dark and the stove died in a whisper, I dreamt that I was back at my old school. The history teacher was praising my work, praising how deftly I had paraphrased a parable of Rabbi Akiva's:

On the banks of a sparkling river walks the mighty emperor Hadrian, enemy of the teaching of Torah. He is imploring the Hebrewspeaking fishes to join him, in a celebration of life, on the grassy banks of the sparkling river...

 

 
Karinka
 

We belonged to the same movement, Skif. She, at fifteen, was already twenty-five. A blonde with an elongated face, olive skin and deep serious eyes, she was proud and incomprehensibly fickle. A whole universe of boys, including me, was madly in love with her. And Karinka? Possessed of a nonchalant sensuality, she loved us all but cared for none of us.

One midnight, in the Tatra mountains, at a summer camp in the village of Bundówki near Zakopane, I was privileged to stand guard with her. The night was cold, so we kept each other warm talking about socialism and free love. Karinka was sweet and evasive, but as the moonlight fell on her face she appeared to me like a teasing Madonna. Languishing in the dark, I asked her: ‘Why do you break so many hearts?' ‘To make them complete,' she said. Then she placed her warm lips to my eager ear and murmured:

‘
The grass was wet with dew,

The well stood deep in thought;

He made love to me,

I loved, and loved him not.'

At that moment we heard footsteps — a change of guard. We parted and walked off to our respective lodgings. At morning roll-call,
my
Karinka gave me a strange look, as if to ask:
Who are you, boy? Have we ever met?

On the train journey home we travelled, not by accident, in the same compartment. I sat by the window and she stretched herself out on the seat, placing her beautiful head on my lap. It was night and most of the others were fast asleep. She allowed me to kiss her lips, slide my hand behind her bra, fondle her paradise apples, fresh from the very tree of life.

In that autumn of 1937, Karinka became a student in a girls' high school, and I became a furrier's apprentice. This situation placed us on two different planets. But three years later, at the beginning of the end, I ran into her again. She was carrying two buckets of water and seemed distraught. I wanted to help but she pushed me away. ‘Don't you dare come near me,' she cried.

I discovered later that poverty, hunger and loneliness had forced her to marry a smallish man twenty years her senior.
Apparently he was high up in the service of our inverted ghettostate. It was rumoured that he had previously been employed in a girls' high school as an instructor in moral behaviour.

My heart pined for Karinka but there was nothing I could do — except dream that she had agreed to run away with me, though there would have been nowhere to run. So my mighthave-been beloved vanished from my horizon like the wistful smoke from a passing steamer. But to this day, it hasn't stopped hovering before my dimming eyes.

 

 
The Climb
 

The summer camp we set up in 1937 at Bundówki was within view of Giewont, the highest mountain in the land of our birth. Our leaders were Miss Muster, Niemele Libeskind and Juda Kersh, assisted by the tall willowy silverbirch-pale Nono Goldman, the brave Geniek Boczkowski — much respected because at sixteen he was already shaving his chin — and the incorruptible Bono Winer, my underground cell leader in those days without years.

At morning roll-call we hoisted our Red Falcons flag, and with songs dedicated to universal brotherhood we began our daily activities. Not far from us, the ND — the xenophobic National Democrats — had established their own camp headquarters. Apparently, songs of eternal brotherhood were not much to their taste, and in response to our efforts they strung up on their flagpole the effigy of a Jew, with a big red sign that read: THIS IS OUR ANSWER TO THE PROVOCATIONS OF THE JEWISH COLONY.

For days we enthusiastically prepared ourselves for our excursion up the famous Kasprowy Wierch. We knew this was a rather dangerous undertaking, since the ascent of the mountain
up to the plateau at the summit was precipitous, the traffic was strictly one-way, and the climb was possible only with the aid of iron hooks and chains.