The Girl from Krakow (10 page)

At about five thirty, Gil and Rita returned from tea. They would still have time together before her nine o’clock train. Facing another week apart, they both knew that the languid afternoon had not sated them.

Waiting at the building’s entry arch was a porter from the hospital Gil recognized. The man looked relieved when he saw Gil. Stepping toward him, the porter drew up to something like attention and said, “A message for you, Doctor, from the hospital. I am to wait in case there is an answer.”

Gil took the envelope, opened it, read the note, and passed it to Rita.

Pan Dr. Romero,

The emergency department has admitted a physician. His name is Guildenstern. Your address was found among his effects. The police are here as it is a case of attempted self-murder. The orderly is instructed to await any message you wish to send.

It was signed by an emergency room physician Gil knew. Rita gasped. Gil turned to the porter. “Let’s go.” All three began to walk quickly to the hospital.

At the entry to the Urgent Care stood a man wearing the cap-and-badge livery of Lvov cabdrivers, along with a policeman and a young man in doctor’s whites. Gil went directly to them. Rita followed. He addressed the doctor. “Geretski, what happened?”

“It’s a doctor from out of town. Tried to drown himself. Lucky for him the cabbie here had the presence of mind to fish him out of the drink.”

Gil and Rita turned toward the driver. Now they noticed his clothes were damp in spots and completely wet below the waist. Without prompting and with relish, the taxi driver repeated a narrative he had already given twice. “This guy asked to go all the way out to the reservoir at Yanovs’kyi Stav. Paid me off when we got there and told me he wouldn’t need me to take him back. Well, it was getting dark, and there’s never anyone there this time of year. I thought he was acting funny, so I drove away a few hundred meters, turned off my lights, and turned around. Then I just watched. The guy started walking along the shore picking up the largest stones he could find and put them in his pockets, overcoat, jacket, trousers, inside his waistcoat so they bulged. Didn’t care if he was ripping the clothing either. Well, you don’t have to be a doctor, pardon, to figure out what he was going to do. So I started the cab and drove back as close as I could. By the time I got to the shore, he was up to his neck.”

“Thank you for saving my husband,” Rita heard herself saying.

The policeman looked at her. “Does your husband know how to swim?”

Rita caught the tense of the verb. “He’s all right?”

“He’s out of danger now,” said the physician.

“No, he can’t swim, Officer.” Turning back to the doctor, she asked, “Can I see him?”

“Follow me.” The doctor turned, and Rita followed him.

“Officer.” Gil cleared his throat. “I’ll vouch for my colleague. No need to trouble yourself. Thank you.” He tried to say it with authority.

It seemed to work. “Very well, sir. I suppose there’s no need to take this further.” The policeman clicked his heels, bent slightly at the waist, and left.

There was only the cabby left to deal with. “What did your passenger owe?”

“Well, he paid for the journey out. But there is the fare back.”

“How much?” Gil found the money and added several zloty. “For your trouble and your wet clothes.”

Darkness descended, and then the streetlight came on, a sphere of white surrounded by purple. Gil could see his breath as he stood beneath it, waiting, smoking.

Rita was in Urs’s hospital room for over an hour. She emerged shriven. Seeing Gil, she walked over to him. “It’s finished.”

He had realized as much. Had she returned to him in only a few minutes, he would have known that they could remain together. The longer he waited, the vainer grew this hope. Well before the hour was past, he was beginning to prepare himself for the end of their idyll.

“I am going back to Karpatyn with him tomorrow morning,” she said. She bit her lower lip to stop the tremble. Once in control again, she continued, “He’s completely in command of himself. He said he would find a way to finish it
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
so coolly, no bravura
 
.
 
.
 
.” Gil did not speak. Rita continued, “I couldn’t live with that. I told him I’d go back with him.”

“So, it’s you or nothing for him? I can’t think of Urs as driven by love.”

“I’m afraid it’s not love. It’s shame. Mostly he talked about what people would say, what people would think. His parents, his patients, the whole town. When I said I’d go back with him, it was as though a coffin lid had been pried open. He started living again.”

Now Gil knew what he was dealing with. His counterattack was ready. “So, he doesn’t love you; it’s
amour propre
that nearly killed him. Well, is that a reason for you to go back with him? Is it for his self-esteem that I
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
that we have to sacrifice our happiness? I can’t say I care much for how a market-town doctor deals with his personal misfortune, even if I did grow up in the same market town. I don’t live there anymore. You don’t have to either.” The words subsided. Gil waited a moment, gauging their effect on Rita. She was evidently not ready to reply. Perhaps it was moving her from her resolve.

Gil continued, “And what about you? What do you really owe him? Don’t you have a right to a life? Why should he be able to trump your happiness just by threatening to throw himself into a reservoir? Rita, we need to break with this petit bourgeois morality.”

Now Rita finally interrupted. The words came almost with contempt. “Stop lecturing. Listen to yourself. What you are saying is sheer hypocrisy, selfishness dressed up as moral philosophy.” Before he could reply, she started again, now calm. “Remember what you said this morning? Doing right means nothing more than minimizing human misery. Well, that’s what I am going to do.”

“What about my suffering? What about yours? There are two of us. He is just one.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not adding up his misery on one side and our happiness on the other, and then seeing which way they balance out. That’s no better than bourgeoisie morality.”

“Then why are you going to do this to us?” Now there was resignation in Gil’s voice. He took out a packet of cigarettes, slid it open, put two in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to Rita. He wanted the aroma always to remind them of the afternoon they had just spent together.

Rita drew deeply, and the smoke emerged in streams from her nostrils. Gil was standing close enough to see the dust motes in the light of the streetlamp.

“I’m doing this to us because I can’t do anything else. I won’t dress it up as sacrifice, decency, obligation, doing what’s right in anybody’s book. I could live with the burden of his misery. But not his death. I’d be walking around the rest of my life trying to rid myself of the guilt. There is nothing I’d be able to enjoy
 
.
 
.
 
.” She looked at him and reached for his lapel, smiling a little. “There’s nothing I’d be able to take pleasure in with that thought forever oppressing me.” She decided she had to make it concrete for Gil. “The image of Urs swinging somewhere from a noose, putting a gun barrel in his mouth, throwing himself in front of an express, taking an overdose of Seconal. I couldn’t bear it. And that’s flat.” Her hand dropped from his coat.

The next morning Rita took Urs home. His clothes had been cleaned and pressed. He had a new collar and cuffs. His tie was straight and pinned with a pearl stick just above the waistcoat. No one would ever be the wiser. They rode the train talking inconsequentially, as if nothing had happened. Urs was calm; Rita was relieved. Really she was. At least she could live with herself.

Five months later, in the late summer of 1939, she realized she was finally pregnant. The child would arrive early in 1940. She was calm when she told him and watched him mentally count the month back to June and then smile. The child would be his.

PART II

DURING

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
t was a series of repeated blows to the head, so swift and so hard you couldn’t recover before the next one. First the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Soviet Communists making common cause with Nazis? Then, almost immediately, the Germans put an end to Poland. They did it so quickly the newsreels didn’t have time to cover the campaign. Where, everyone wondered, were the French and the Brits? Two weeks later the Soviet Army moved into Poland from the east. The Germans even withdrew from parts they had already overrun, leaving almost half the country for the Russians.

Rita gave birth three months after Soviets marched in. They had decided to call the boy Stefan. She was unable to present her child to his maternal grandparents, however. There was now a border between them. It was the frontier between the western part of the Ukrainian SSR and German-occupied Poland. The mails remained efficient, however, and Rita was able to send pictures.

Leaving the hospital with a baby in her arms, Rita walked into an entirely new experience. Urs handed her a new identity card. She was no longer a Pole. She was a Ukrainian now, a Soviet citizen, the wife of the director of a government polyclinic, open to all. His privilege to practice medicine had turned into a right, no, a duty to socialism’s future. The social order had been completely reversed. It was at least initially a rough meritocracy. The Russians demanded that things work. That took the ability to count, to read, to work a lathe or a telephone switchboard. If you could do those things, you were needed, and you were rewarded. The Soviet Union, she knew, was powerful but backward. Life would get harder, but not in every way worse, and in a few ways perhaps better.

Urs’s unqualified enthusiasm for the new dispensation sometimes grated. Only once did they argue about it. “They want me to join the party.” He said it proudly one day in February as he returned from the clinic.

“You aren’t going to?” It came out as something between a question and a protest.

“Why not?” He drew himself up. “I’m director of a government facility. They won’t really trust me unless I am in the party. As a party member, I can get what the clinic needs. I owe it to my patients.”

“Urs. Think. Once you are in the party, you’re subject to the whim of anyone above you. And you’ll be their scapegoat whenever a conspiracy is needed to explain away failure.”

“What do you mean?” The question was sincere. Could it be that Urs had not been reading newspapers or listening to the radio for the last five years? Of course, Rita suddenly realized, this wasn’t hyperbole. Medicine had been the only thing that had absorbed him all that time.

“Do you remember the little terror of ’37 and the great terror of ’38? Do you know what I am talking about? Stalin’s show trials in Moscow?”

“Those were Trotskyite wreckers and German agents.”

“They were loyal old Bolsheviks. Urs, this is the government that sealed a pact with Hitler to divide and conquer. You can’t get their blood on your hands.” That was the end of the matter. Rita was relieved. There was one more reason Rita could give, though it would cause Urs pain—something she had learned only the day before.

Pushing her son in his pram a few streets beyond the market square, they had found themselves before what had been Jastrob’s Bookshop. She had scrupulously avoided it since the day she and Urs had returned from Lvov sixteen months before. The urge to ask about Gil would have been too great. The temptation to tell them about Gil would have been overwhelming. She had no idea whether, living only one hundred kilometers away, their son had ever divulged his whereabouts. She missed browsing the shelves, changing a library book, scanning the glossy magazines, but she would not be tempted to visit. She told herself the baby gave her no time for reading anyway.

Now she was standing before the shop for the first time in almost a year. The sign above the door was gone, and the two front windows were both broken. The door hung askew, held by a single hinge. Peering inside she saw the shelves not just empty, but akimbo, and not a stick of furniture left unbroken. Then she heard something stir in the rear. Pushing the baby carriage down the side of the house, she saw an urchin breaking wood off what had been a coal shed behind the house. He stopped, expecting to be reproved by the posh lady with the pram. Rita remained silent, so he spoke. “Family’s cold. Can’t afford coal even when there is any.”

Rita nodded as if to say, Go on. She looked at the back door of the house. “Where did they go? Do you know?”

“Week ago, some Russian police came. I was watching from my window that morning.” His eyes indicated a small house just visible across the street. “Big black car, not Polish. Would’ve recognized the mark. Took them both away. Then they started in on the store. Burned the newspapers in the back. Hauled off all the books.” He stopped, then remembered something. “My dad said they were
 
.
 
.
 
.” He searched for the word and found it. “
Chekists
.” Now Rita understood. The NKVD, the people’s commissariat for internal affairs, the security police. Probably not smart even to hang around this place either, unless you were doing something innocent, like stealing firewood.

But she wasn’t going to tell Urs anything that might remind him of Tadeusz Sommermann. Not even to warn him against joining the party.

Things changed gradually. Polish staples disappeared. Soviet ones replaced them, cruder but cheaper. People learned the etiquette of queuing. The farmers’ market persisted, and even Rita’s mother-in-law surrendered her qualms about making use of it. Very soon Karpatyn was crowded with refugees from the Nazi occupation. Demand pushed up prices. The Polish zloty was for the moment still in use. It didn’t matter to Rita. Urs was paid in rubles.

None of this was important to Rita. Only her child mattered. She had not expected to find herself besotted by a helpless, inarticulate infant whose needs and wants you had constantly to guess at. He was no worse and no better than other babies, but he was hers, and he was enough to set aside all her vexations, all her disappointments. Rita was almost shocked by how love for her child just crowded out everything else that had absorbed her thoughts, how it blotted out her regrets, even the end of her affair with Gil. All she ever wondered about the affair now was how to label it—a dalliance, a lapse, a brief, purely sensual adventure? Surely not the beginning of a real love, just something cut short by mature reflection, a cooler head, caution, loyalty, guilt
 
.
 
.
 
.

By a year Stefan was walking. A month later he began babbling distinct sounds, and his grandmother pointed out to Rita that he was talking. How stupid of her not to have noticed!

As he grew Stefan took after his father—dark curly hair, a widow’s peak, a cleft in his chin, though not yet Urs’s long, thin nose. Looking at Stefan, no one could doubt he was Urs’s son. He was also quiet and serious like his father, given to long periods of sustained play. Urs began to wonder when he could teach the boy chess.

By June Stefan was a year and five months old. It was hardly possible any longer to keep him in his pram. Midmorning that Saturday, the 21st, Stefan was padding along between Rita and her mother-in-law on the bank of the Dniester River as they noticed a dozen or more twin-engine Soviet planes flying low toward the west. It was unusual to see military aviation moving toward German-occupied Poland. A half hour later as they came toward the
rynek
—the central square—they observed the head of the local NKVD and three subordinates get in a military staff car and drive off at speed.

At one o’clock Rita and Stefan were surprised to see Urs at the door. Normally he ate lunch at the polyclinic canteen. Besides, Saturday afternoon was Urs’s busiest day. Most people couldn’t afford to miss work. Stefan had recognized the sound of his father’s tread coming down the hallway to the apartment. “Pappy!” There was evident delight in his voice. Urs came directly into the kitchen. He looked at her. “You haven’t heard?” She shook her head. “Turn on the radio.”

“It will take a minute or more to warm up,” Rita replied. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“Germans attacked, at four a.m., all along the border.”

“How long will it take them to get here?” She resisted the urge to pick up her child.

“It’s not the Poles they’ve picked on this time, or the French. The Red Army will stop them cold.”

“With soldiers like the ones we’ve seen in Karpatyn?” Rita’s tone was mocking. “The ones with felt wrapped around their feet instead of boots, scrounging garbage cans for food, while their officers get drunk on Polish vodka?” She caught her breath. “The army that has only one rifle between every two men?” He couldn’t stop her. “The same ones who couldn’t beat the Finns in ’39?” Her voice was steely. “When will the Germans be here?”

Urs could only shrug.

Rita looked around, beginning to calculate what they should carry away with them. “Can we evacuate?”

“I’ll try to find out.” Urs rose. “I’ll see what they know at the town administration.” The next moment he was descending the stairs.