For Those Who Dream Monsters (10 page)

Then
one day, having apologised to the comatose boy a dozen times and cried himself
to sleep the night before, Ralph awoke to find the boy sitting up in bed,
watching him. Startled, Ralph started mumbling incoherent apologies, “Forgive
me, please forgive me.”

The
boy dropped his gaze from Ralph’s face and reached slowly and painfully for the
edge of the bedclothes, pulling them off himself. Then, equally slowly and
painfully, he swung his legs out of bed and tentatively put his weight on them.

Ralph
looked on in amazement and trepidation as the boy got out of bed and walked
stiffly across the room, to the far corner. Leaning on the wall for support,
the boy bent down cautiously and retrieved something from the floor. As Ralph
watched, too shocked to move, the boy came towards him, one painful step at a
time. When he was right in front of the trembling baker, the boy lifted his
functioning arm, holding out the object he had picked up. Ralph looked down to
see the horsewhip; the boy was holding it by the whipping end, offering the
handle to Ralph to grasp. As Ralph looked in horror from the whip to the boy,
for the first time since he had come into Ralph’s home, the apprentice’s face
broke out in a smile.

So it’s our last day together. You’ve
been a good listener. And thanks to you I’ll have a voice – albeit a posthumous
one… I’m sorry – I’ve made you feel uncomfortable. But I believe that’s what
you wanted to cover today – my thoughts on my imminent demise. Well, we can do
that, but first I want to tell you a story. I’ve never told it to anyone, but
then again you’re not really anyone – are you? Please don’t be offended – you
know I value your work, and one day you’ll be a successful writer in your own
right and under your own name. But today you’re just the extension of a dying
old man.

The
painkillers they’re giving me have stopped working; the pain is becoming
unbearable, and soon I’ll be on morphine. The doctors tell me I’ll be
hallucinating and delusional, and nobody will believe the ranting of a
cancer-ridden old man… Is the Dictaphone working? Good… As you’re my
ghostwriter, the story I’ll tell you is most appropriate because it’s a ghost
story – at least, I think it is… Do I believe in them? Perhaps once you hear
the story,
you’ll
be able to tell
me
. I don’t know. It all
happened long ago…

I’d only been working at the
History Magazine
for four months, but they
were pleased with my research skills, and I was the only person on the staff
who spoke Polish. It was my second job since leaving university, and I’d
already cut my teeth on an established, if somewhat trashy, London daily. So
when the powers that be decided to revisit the Holocaust, the Senior Editor
chose me to go to Poland.

I’d
been to Poland before, of course. My mother’s family hailed from the beautiful
city of Krakow, and I’d been taken there fairly regularly as a boy to visit my
aunt and cousins. But this time I was to travel to Miedzyrzec – a small and
unremarkable town, the name of which caused considerable hilarity among my
colleagues, and which I myself could scarcely pronounce.

“You’ll
be going to My … Mee … here …” said my boss, thrusting a piece of paper at me
with a touch of good-natured annoyance at the intricacies of Polish
orthography. Foreign names and places were never his thing in any case. He
seemed happiest in his leather chair behind his vast desk in the
Magazine
office, and I sometimes suspected that the furthest he’d been from Blighty was
Majorca, where he’d holiday with his wife and children at every given
opportunity. And nothing wrong with that; nothing wrong at all – I thought – as
I drove my hire car through the grey and brown Polish countryside, trying hard
not to pile into any of the horse-drawn carts that occasionally pulled out in
front of me without warning from some misty dirt side track.

I’d done my homework before driving the eighty miles east from Warsaw to Miedzyrzec.
Before the outbreak of World War II there had been about 12,000 Jews living in
the town – almost three-quarters of the population. The town had synagogues,
Jewish schools, Jewish shops, a Jewish theatre, two Jewish football teams, a
Jewish brothel and a Jewish fire brigade. I wondered idly whether the Jewish
fire brigade was sent to extinguish fires in Christian homes too, or just in
Jewish ones. I figured it was the former, as by all accounts the Poles and Jews
got on like a house on fire – excuse the pun – and most of the town’s
inhabitants worked happily side by side in a Jewish-owned factory, producing
kosher pig hair brushes, which were sold as far afield as Germany. In fact,
commerce in Miedzyrzec flourished to the degree that the envious,
poverty-stricken inhabitants of surrounding towns and villages referred to the
place as ‘Little America’… Does prosperity render a man better disposed towards
his fellow man? I don’t know. Certainly, during the course of my research I
read of various acts of generosity – big and small – which were extended to
others regardless of background, so that, for example, when a film such as
The
Dybbuk
came to town, the cinema owner would organise a free screening for
all the citizens of Miedzyrzec, and the queue stretched half way down the main
street.

As
with any positive status quo, the good times in Miedzyrzec were not to last
long. When war broke out in September 1939, the town was bombed, then taken by
the Germans, before being handed over to the Russians, and finally falling into
German hands once more. The horrors that followed were fairly typical for
Nazi-occupied Poland. The Polish population was terrorised, while the Jews were
harassed, attacked, rounded up and either murdered on the spot or sealed in a
ghetto, from which they were eventually shipped off to death camps. Nothing new
there, I thought, as by now I was becoming – not jaded by all the atrocities
I’d read about, but something of a reluctant expert on Nazi war crimes and the
pattern they followed in the towns and villages of German-occupied Poland. And
yet something about the destruction of this surprisingly harmonious community –
not just the murder of people, but the annihilation of a functional and thriving
symbiotic organism formed from thousands of disparate souls – added to the
customary level of distress that I’d somehow learned to live with since being
assigned to the Second World War project.

Finally
the countryside gave way to ramshackle housing, and the dark green and white
road sign confirmed that I’d arrived at my destination. All I had to do now was
find the town library, where I had a meeting with the librarian turned amateur
historian – a pleasant fellow with a neatly trimmed brown beard, who furnished
me with the details of several elderly local residents, including a lady who
‘remembered the War’.

“She
doesn’t have a telephone,” he told me as I thanked him and took the piece of
paper inscribed with the names and addresses, “but she’s almost certain to be
at home. You can’t miss the house. It’s the last house but one on the left as
you leave town, going east. It’s one of the old wooden houses, and you’d be
forgiven for thinking that you’d already left Miedzyrzec, as those old houses
are virtually out in the countryside.”

I
decided to start at the far end of town, with the old lady. Everything was as
my bearded friend had said: the ugly apartment blocks and equally unattractive
family houses (presumably built hastily after the war to re-house those whose
homes had been destroyed) gave way to what looked like small wooden farmhouses,
with fields and meadows behind them stretching away into the distance.

I
drove slowly in an effort to ascertain which house was the last but one on the
left-hand side before leaving town. I was fairly sure it was a run-down wooden
house with peeling green paint, set back from the road. I drove past just to
check, but I’d been right – there was only one more house beyond the one I’d
instinctively picked out. I turned the car around carefully and doubled back,
pulling up on the grass verge by the side of the road. Chain-link fencing some
six feet in height surrounded the property, and the only way in – from the
roadside, at least – was through a gate, which was locked. There was a bell,
but no intercom. I pressed the bell and waited. After a minute or so I pressed
it again, not sure if it was even working.

After
a couple more minutes, the front door of the house opened with a creaking
worthy of an old horror movie, and an elderly grey-haired woman peered out
apprehensively. I waved at her and after a moment’s hesitation she waved back.
Then she went back inside and shut the door behind her. I was taken aback and
nearly rang the doorbell again, but then the woman reappeared, pulling a
woollen shawl over her shoulders. I smiled at her reassuringly as she made her
way slowly and painfully down the porch steps and across the front yard towards
me.

“How
can I help you?” she asked through the fencing.

“Hello,
my name is Frank Johnson,” I told her. “I work for the
History Magazine
in London, and I understand from Dr Lipinski that you remember the time when
there was a ghetto…” I never got to finish my sentence. The old lady had been
observing me with amicable curiosity, but now her face crumpled and she started
sobbing uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face and gathering in her
wrinkles. I was mortified and started to mumble a hasty apology, but the woman
raised her hand in a conciliatory gesture.

“I’m
sorry,” she managed to say. “I’ll take some medicine for my nerves. Please come
back in an hour and I’ll tell you all about the ghetto.” I smiled at her as
best I could and nodded my head vigorously. “The gate will be open,” she added,
trying unsuccessfully to stem the flow of tears with a shaky hand.

“I’ll
come back in an hour,” I told her.

There was really nothing constructive I could do in an hour, but I didn’t want
to make the old lady any more uncomfortable by sitting outside her house, so I
drove back into the town centre, parked up and sat in my car. There was no
decent pub to speak of and there was no point in getting a cup of tea, as I
knew from my experience of Polish hospitality that I’d be having tea and cake
at the old lady’s house whether I wanted it or not.

I’d
interviewed survivors of trauma before, and I’d had interviewees cry during
interviews, but never before I’d even started. I’d always imagined Polish
peasants to be a hard breed, taking history’s worst cruelties in their stride
and not shedding much in the way of tears for themselves, let alone for the
plight of an ethnic minority that shared neither their religion nor their
cultural traditions. If nothing else, the old lady should provide some good
first-hand material for the
History Magazine
– provided she was able to
pull herself together and wasn’t totally nuts.

After
half an hour of sitting in the car, going through my notes and interview
questions, I got bored and decided to drive back to the old lady’s house and
see if she’d talk to me a bit earlier than agreed. This time I knew exactly
where I was going, so I was able to concentrate less on houses and house
numbers, and more on the road itself. It struck me how deserted it was. Despite
having only one lane in each direction, this was the main road heading east
from Warsaw, all the way to Belarus; and yet my car seemed to be the only
vehicle on it. Not even an old peasant on a hay cart in sight. Perhaps an
accident somewhere further up had stopped the traffic, but that would explain
the lack of cars in one direction, not both. Perhaps all the other drivers knew
something I didn’t… I chided myself for letting my imagination run away with me.
But as I pulled up alongside the chain-link fence, I couldn’t shake the feeling
of unease.

The
gate was open, as promised. I wondered if I should ring the doorbell anyway, to
warn the old lady of my imminent arrival, but I didn’t want to bring her all
the way out in the cold again, so I slung my bag over my shoulder, locked the
car and let myself in, closing the gate behind me. As I headed across the front
yard to the rickety old house, a chill breeze stirred around me, whispering in
the unmown grass and rustling the leaves of the sapling trees that had seeded
themselves and sprouted unchecked on either side of the stone slab path.
Although only a dozen or so metres separated me from the old lady’s porch, I
paused to zip up my parka. As I did so, the breeze grew stronger, making a
high-pitched sound as it weaved its way through the eaves of the house.
Unexpectedly it died down, and the air around me was as still as the proverbial
grave. Then a sudden gust of wind – this time blowing from the direction of the
field behind the house. Urgent, angry almost, the wind brought with it
something else: a sound – human, yet unearthly; a cry or moan – distant, but so
heartfelt and full of despair that, despite the warmth of my down anorak, an
icy shiver ran down my spine.

I
made my way to the back of the house and looked out over the field that led
away to a swampy patch of land, and ended in a stream or river of some sort –
obscured by sedges and tall reeds. Beyond the line of water, a wasteland
of grass, bushes and wild flowers stretched away to a railway track, and
then further, to a dark tree line on the horizon. A mist was rising from the
marshy land and, as I peered into the miasma, I thought I saw something: a
flash of blue against the grey and brown. The wind blew in my direction again,
and this time I was sure that the sound I heard was a young woman weeping.

“Hello!”
I called out.

“Hello?”
the voice came from behind me, making me jump. “Young man!”

I’d
forgotten all about the old lady and my interview. She must have seen me out of
a window, and was now holding open the back door, gesticulating for me to come
inside. “You’ll catch your death of cold!” she chastised gently. I noticed a
slight frown crease the woman’s already furrowed brow as I threw a last glance
back over my shoulder before entering the house. Apart from that passing shadow
on her face, my interviewee was a different person from the one I’d left
sobbing her heart out almost an hour earlier. Calm and collected, she smiled at
me in a warm and friendly manner. When she spoke, her voice was clear and
steady.

In
no time I found myself sitting in a worn armchair in a small parlour, nursing a
glass of black tea in an elaborately engraved silver-coloured holder.

“I’m
afraid I don’t have much to offer you,” said my hostess, holding out a plate
with four different types of homemade cake. “You said you wanted to know about
the War. I’ll tell you everything I remember.”

Her name was Bronislava. She was born in Miedzyrzec and lived with her mother
in an apartment block near the town centre. Her street was mixed Polish and
Jewish. Not all of the Jews spoke Polish, but most of the Poles spoke at least
some Yiddish, and it was normal for children from the two ethnic groups to play
together in the street. Bronislava’s father had died when she was little and,
as her mother was out cleaning for some of the town’s more affluent residents
during the week, the little girl spent most of her time at the house of her
best friends Esther and Mindla, so that her friends’ mum was like a second
mother to her. Bronislava and Esther were nine when war broke out; Mindla was a
couple of years older. For a while not much changed, but slowly, rationing and
other increasing restrictions meant that hunger and fear crept into all their
lives. Esther and Mindla’s family, along with all the other Jewish residents,
were ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David, but at this point
violence against the Jewish community was incidental rather than systematic.