Jewels and Ashes (26 page)

A middle-aged couple carrying yellow chrysanthemums walk along the flooded paths of the cemetery. They stop by a grave and set to work. Weeds are removed, the stone wiped clean of dust, the marble surface polished. Oil lamps are lit and arranged with flowers by the base of the tomb. A pair of hands held up in a gesture of blessing, engraved on the headstone, indicates that here lies a descendant of Cohanim, the priestly caste.

Today is the tenth anniversary of David Schaffner's death and, by chance, I have become a participant in the occasion. His son Henry claims it is no coincidence that we have met at this time. He sees life as a series of interrelated events, all of which have significance against a wider scheme of things. ‘There is no random chance', he claims, as he tends David's grave, ‘but patterns: some evil, others beautiful. The goal of life is to intuit beyond the apparent chaos an infinite order of things, a higher intelligence at work.'

Henry's flat is on the Royal Way, in Ulitza Grodzka. The building is six-hundred-years old and stands near Rynek Glowny, the mediaeval market-square that occupies the centre of the walled city. Henry and his Polish wife live in two small rooms. Everywhere there are clocks, piles of clothing, and short-wave radio equipment. The clothes are repaired by Mrs Schaffner to augment her husband's sickness pension. The clocks sit on tables, mantelpieces, bookshelves and cupboards. Others hang on walls, while grandfather clocks squat on the floor. On the hour, every hour, bells chime, cuckoos fly out of cages, trumpets blow, and drums beat. One clock, disguised as a painting of an idyllic rural scene, comes to life with chimes synchronised to the movement of buckets being drawn from a well by village women.

Clocks are one of Henry's two grand passions. He collects and restores them. He scours market-places, remote hamlets, antique shops, and will travel many miles to follow up the slightest rumour that a clock is languishing somewhere in an attic or barn. He has transported them in taxis, buses, trains, and on foot, back to the cramped apartment in Ulitza Grodzka. His father had been a clock-repairer and had passed on the skills to his only son. ‘Clocks are a constant reminder', Henry affirms, ‘that there is a way to create order out of chaos. No matter how insane the world may seem at times, the chiming of a clock reminds the executioner, if only for a moment, that he too will one day be forced to move on.'

Henry's other great love is the short-wave radio which sits on the living-room table. It is a massive apparatus, always awake, crackling in the background, lights blinking a multitude of signals, the occasional voice filtering through with a call for ‘Hotel Sierra', Henry's radio code-name. He is in regular contact with operators in seventeen European countries. They send each other cards and letters. Many can be seen stacked high on the mantelpieces, between clocks. ‘Hotel Sierra' shows me a card he has received this very day from Viking Radio in the Shetland Islands. They had made contact for the first time a fortnight ago. The card is inscribed with the motto: ‘Vikings raise the wind on the air', and beneath is printed their anthem:

On distant seas their dragon prows

Went gleaming outward bound.

Stormclouds were their banners;

Their music, ocean sound.

The radio card of ‘Hotel Sierra' features a drawing of Krakow's walled city, against a background of red and white, Poland's national colours, inscribed with the motto: ‘Though we are miles apart we are not strangers, but friends who have never met.'

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of David Schaffner, who lies buried beneath a vase of yellow chrysanthemums. In the kitchen of a six-hundred-year-old apartment on the Royal Way, near the heart of the walled city, I listen to the bare outlines of his life. story, told between the chiming of countless clocks and the faint voices of radio operators from all corners of the continent.

David was born in Krakow in the last decade of the nineteenth century. During the First World War he fought in the Polish army. Taken prisoner, he was sent by the Russians to Siberia. On his return he left his native city and settled in Germany. It would be safer there, he believed, far from anti-Jewish pogroms that had flared up in Poland at war's end.

His son Henry was born in Germany fifty years ago. During the Kristallnacht pogrom, on November 9, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers broke into the Schaffner home. They rampaged, looted, and overturned David's extensive collection of antique clocks. ‘Time stopped', says Henry, ‘and for the next seven years we were continually on the run, seeking refuge, a place to hide.'

After deportation from Germany the family made their way back to Krakow. Within three months, the Nazis had invaded the city. When the Jews of Krakow were driven from their ancient quarters in Kazimierz and herded into a ghetto on the opposite banks of the Vistula, David urged his wife and son to escape. They hid in a village not far from the city. With the help of local peasants they survived.

David Schaffner was shunted from camp to camp. Somewhere within that vast network of terror, doctors of the Reich used him in their experiments. They pulled apart his immune system as one would take apart an antique clock. But they were not so concerned with reassembling the parts.

At war's end the Schaffhers were among the few Krakow Jewish families to return. David remained a sick man, his constitution irretrievably broken. He passed his last years silently immersed in restoring clocks. ‘It is no coincidence we met today', insists Henry. As a result you are recording my father's story. Every being craves recognition, someone to bear witness. Only then can a soul be finally put to rest.'

‘Hotel Sierra', keeper of clocks and guardian of the airwaves, one of the last members of the oldest Jewish community in Poland, rides the waves of time and space in a landlocked apartment on the Royal Way. He receives messages from distant kingdoms, restores timepieces, and creates order out of chaos. ‘This is the least I can do to combat evil forces', he claims. ‘Heed the passage of time, listen carefully to a story, a cry for help, and restore that which has been damaged or broken.'

Feigl Wasserman is small and rotund. Her greying hair remains strong, and is tied in a series of buns which sweep upwards to a rounded summit. She ties her hair as she does everything else — with precision, care, and a sense of symmetry. As caretaker of the Rema she keeps watch over its dwindling congregation with a stern eye. ‘They are useless', she declares. ‘They cannot do anything by themselves. They need a mother to look after them.' She dusts off their coats, adjusts their ties, scolds and fusses and, at closing time, bundles them out of the synagogue.

Between chores she sits in the courtyard and chats to tourists who come to see the tomb of Moses Isserles. In return for advice and information she receives tips. American dollars, in particular, are most welcome. The visitors relieve her isolation and she is bemused by them, especially travellers such as myself. ‘What are you looking for?', she asks. ‘You think you can bring the dead back to life?'

In the evenings I return to her apartment. On the kitchen table stand rows of candles which she makes for synagogue services. When she retires to bed she moves the telephone to within arm's length. Calls from her two children are always imminent. There is a daughter in Israel, a son in Russia. She often talks about her grandchildren, shows me photos, describes their many virtues. Except for Shabbes eve she remains at home every evening, alone, awaiting the next call.

‘Why don't you join them?', I ask her. ‘And who would look after my husband's grave?', she replies, removing the crumbs from the table. When there is absolutely nothing left to clean or dust, she sits by the telephone and knits. ‘He was a pious man, my second husband', says Feigl. Fifteen years ago he was invited by the Krakow congregation to become the sexton and cantor of the Rema. With their two children grown up and married, Feigl and her husband moved from their native Russia and took up the post in Krakow. And the first husband? That is another story altogether; to tell it, we need a cup of tea, several slices of almond cake and, if you wish, a glass or two of vodka.

The year is 1941. In a village somewhere within that vastness called the Red Empire, a man says farewell to his wife and one-year-old daughter. He sets off with his Red Army unit and vanishes from their lives. As the Nazis advance into Russia, the village is razed. The woman and her daughter move from town to town, always one step ahead of advancing armies. To recount the details of that epic journey would take many hours. Let us just say they survived but, despite Feigl's many attempts to locate him, it seemed as if her husband had disappeared without trace.

In 1950 he abrupdy reappeared. He had been badly wounded, he explained. Shrapnel had lodged in his lungs. For many years he had been dangerously ill: hospitalised, listless, without any interest in life. Finally he had regained enough will to insist that, with whatever strength remained, he would search for his wife and child. And you think this story is unusual?', Feigl adds with a shrug. And indeed it now seems I have been listening for months to one common tale, with slight variations, a common chorus from which individual voices emerge to take centre stage for a moment, before retreating back to the wings.

‘We were reunited for a mere ten months', continues Feigl. ‘His lungs were on fire until the day he died. I was seven months pregnant at the time. It was only after I raised my children that I remarried. And when my second husband died, two years ago, I decided: enough, no more wandering, this is where I will end my days.'

Her knitting needles move fast. A pattern emerges. There is a touch of steel in Feigl Wasserman. ‘It is not wise to dwell too much upon the past', she warns me. ‘Do your job and stay one step ahead of trouble.' She is sharp, shrewd, just a touch angry, extremely wary, and very kind, in a motherly fashion. The keeper of the Rema, protector of the tomb of Moses Isserles, Feigl Wasserman is a wise and irritable babushka, mother of the last congregation of Krakow Jewry. ‘Do not dwell too much upon the past', she insists. ‘It will be of no practical use.'

On the wall there hangs a portrait of Jessica and Shylock, the merchant of Venice. His face is suffused with fatherly love; Jessica is radiant. Monika stands in front of the painting and stares at it intently. Her eyes are large and wide open. They blaze with such intensity that other features emerge slowly, as if advancing from the shadows. She is plump and wears a cotton dress with fading floral patterns. It hangs down loosely to her ankles and verges on shabbiness. Her face is a balloon, the cheeks tinted with rose patches which flare into fiery blotches when she becomes excited. At moments she relaxes into a childlike smile, and the permanent dimples in her cheeks deepen into rounded troughs. But most of the time she remains taut, alert, with her eyes taking on an existence of their own as they flit nervously between fear and extravagant hope.

I am never quite sure whether the story she is telling is true or the fantastic fabrication of a disintegrating mind. It does not seem to matter either way. The core of what she is recounting burns with something that extends beyond fact and fantasy. It is the myth by which she lives, the obsession which induced her to study the Hebrew language and scriptures, and to acquire a passion for a people who had almost vanished from the soil of her native land. Her passion had been disciplined into a vocation and had provided her with this temporary niche in life as an assistant in the Krakow Jewish museum.

The room in which we are talking is a garret in the museum, which in turn is housed in the Alte Shul. It sits above a narrow wooden staircase that spirals up from a cold, cavernous prayer-hall in what had been, for over five hundred years, a house of worship.

Construction had begun in the late fourteenth century, and the Shul was completed in 1407. It is a low building, squatting intact off Szeroka Square; and, from a distance of a mere fifty metres or so, it seems perched on the edge of the horizon, about to sink out of sight. On an adjacent side of the square stands the Rema, where I had first met Monika on Shabbat. She was swaying in the courtyard in her shabby dress, her eyes glowing, while the men were praying inside. ‘She is a meshugene', Feigl Wasserman had whispered. ‘There are enough lunatics here to make up their own minyan. Their heads are full of wild dreams and phantoms. Some of them claim to be Messiahs but can't even do up their shoelaces.'

She was twelve years old at the time, Monika tells me, living in a village on the outskirts of Katowice. She had been taken on a school excursion to the Auschwitz camp museum.

‘There were no Jews in my village, although I had heard stories about a time, not so long ago, when they had lived crammed together in a neighbourhood by the stream. In the museum I saw Jews for the first time, in photos. For months I could not shake off the image of naked women running in fright towards death, trying to protect their dignity with their hands. Not long after, I became aware of the rumours. Whispers echoed through the streets of the village. “Your mother is one of them. You are the daughter of a Yid.”

‘Father laughed when I told him. He could not understand what had led me to imagine such a story. Mother remained silent. I felt they were both concealing the truth. I detected a fear in their eyes. When I persisted they became angry, especially father. Yet there were people in the village who told a very different tale, and my soul burned.

‘Mother died when I was sixteen. I followed the Jewish custom I had read about in books. I tore my garments, and for seven days I sat on a low stool in mourning. By the seventh day I felt so light, like a child, an embryo in my mother's womb.'

Monika tells her story with a fervour which betrays a relentless compulsion. She fluctuates feverishly in mood, one moment caught up in a fear, naked and naive in its transparency; the next, swept along by a longing so overwhelming that she breaks beyond fear into a state of exaltation. As her story unfolds, her passion assumes an hallucinating quality which draws me into a private world of shadows and luminous visions. Before me, in a garret where the elders of the kehilla once discussed the affairs of their people, stands a woman who walks a tightrope between revelation and despair.