The Girl from Krakow (3 page)

“Nice to your money. Or maybe nice to your blonde hair. Besides, what if you get something that isn’t kosher?”

Rita blurted out, “I’m not keeping particularly kosher.”

“Not keeping particularly kosher?” Her mockery turned to anger. “Why don’t you get slightly pregnant while you’re not keeping particularly kosher?” With that, Mother Guildenstern strode out the door.

Willing herself to be unperturbed, Rita sat down again. She picked up the book she had hidden under a cushion when her mother-in-law had turned up. It was Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents
, an easy read in the original German. The aroma of a cigarette, the slight sting in her nostrils as smoke emerged in two dissipating clouds, might help transport her back to her bedsit in Krakow. Putting down the book, she lit one.

After a few minutes, she realized it wasn’t going to work this time.
Pani
Doctor’s words kept intruding. But it wasn’t Rita’s fault. Urs seemed to have little more interest in sex after they married than before. That last year in Krakow, she had been ready enough to fend him off when he brought her back to the bedsit or collected her for a walk, a film, or dinner, but it hadn’t been necessary. He never advanced beyond holding her hand in the movies, a chaste kiss on the cheek when they met, and squeezing her when she had agreed to marry him. He wasn’t anything like the students who argued politics and advocated free love.

She thought it was just his strict upbringing—saving himself. He was certainly no prude. Once they decided to marry, Urs demonstrated a thorough (if clinical) enough understanding of sex. He owned a
Marriage Manual
translated from the French that advocated foreplay to ensure the woman was prepared and satisfied. Urs put it at her disposal a few weeks before the ceremony with no evident sign of discomfort. She made a point of returning it dog-eared at the page on the subject of the woman’s pleasure.

On their wedding night, both parties’ homework with the
Marriage Manual
had paid off, at least to the extent of provoking no embarrassment. But thereafter Urs was not inclined to importune his new wife for sex. He seemed satisfied with no more of it than once a week, typically Friday evenings. On other nights Rita sent out signals that she would not repel advances—parading through the flat in nightgowns of low décolletage—yet Urs rarely even loosened a tie much before bedtime.

He was prepared to leave pregnancy to the coincidence between Friday nights and the peak of her cycle of fertility. But now it had been almost a year since their marriage.

Beyond the farmers’ market lay the other main attraction of Karpatyn, Jastrob’s bookstore. Rita was there at least twice a week, once to change her book at the lending library Jastrob’s operated, and again to look at the latest magazines and newspapers from Warsaw and Krakow that were available nowhere else in town.
Mr.
Jastrob was nowhere to be seen, but Mrs. Jastrob didn’t seem to mind her browsing.

One afternoon in June 1937, almost a year after her arrival in town, Rita was just leaving the bookshop when her glance directed at the magazine rack. Distracted, she ran right into a rather short, dapper young man. His smile raised a pencil mustache above his upper lip. It was black, like his pomaded hair, and he was rather fashionably dressed for a Polish market town on a weekday afternoon: two-tone Italian summer shoes, a houndstooth coat over tan trousers, and no tie and the shirt collar spreading over the jacket lapels, like the American crooners you could see in the movies. Or maybe he looked like one of those French film stars—Pierre Fresnay? A thinner Marcel Dalio?

“Excuse me.” He grinned. But he didn’t move on.

“My fault. I was not looking where I was going.” She smiled back.

“Where were you going?”

Rather forward
, she thought. “Out. Good-bye.” She was already a few meters down the footpath when he caught up with her. This was really rather cheeky. “I am a married woman.” She waved her left hand at him.

“My interests are literary, not romantic. I just noticed you were carrying my favorite novel out of the shop.”

“What’s that?

He looked down at the book in her hand. “It’s Remarque,
Three Comrades
.”

“But it just arrived.” Rita held it toward him. “As you can see, it’s so new the pages haven’t been cut. I’m the first one in town to read it. So it can hardly be your favorite already.” Having put him in his place, she started to walk away. The book was due back in a week, and she wanted to make a start on it.

The young man replied to her back. “I didn’t get it from my mother’s bookstore. I read the French translation in Barcelona last year.” Rita turned back. “Permit me to introduce myself. Tadeusz Sommermann. Jastrob was my mother’s maiden name. Her parents started the bookshop.” He offered his hand. She took it. He held it just slightly too long.

“What were you doing in Barcelona?” Not every day she met someone who had been in Spain.

“I am a medical officer in one of the International Brigades.”

Rita let out a slight gasp. Here was someone worth talking to.

“I go back soon,” he said. “May I buy you a coffee?” Somehow his imminent departure made the invitation a little less brash.

“No, but you may call on my husband, Dr. Guildenstern, and me for tea, and tell us about Spain. We would be very interested.”

“Your husband is Urs! I have been gone a long time! He gave me this once playing soccer.” Tadeusz pointed at the break across his nose. “I’ll be only too glad to come.”

They fixed a date, and he turned back to the store. Instantly Rita noticed how much more alive she felt, part of Europe again.

The phone rang. Urs rose, carefully placed his cup of tea on the sideboard, and went to the hall. After a moment he returned and said, “I’m on call, and it’s a burst appendix. I’ll probably be the night at the clinic. So sorry.” He turned to Tadeusz. “No reason for you to go. I am so sorry you leave tomorrow. How long before you will be back again from Spain?” Urs asked the question as he pulled a woolen scarf around his neck and headed for the door.

“No idea. It depends on how well the Loyalists can fight. Everyone expects an offensive on the Ebro this summer. The better they fight, the longer I’ll be able to stay.”

Urs nodded, mulling over this bit of analysis. Then he left. But Rita was interested.

“I will worry about you.” She did look concerned. The news from Spain had been bad for the Republic steadily now for months.

Tadeusz realized he was going to have to tell her something approximating the truth at some point. He liked her far too much to keep lying. “Don’t concern yourself about me. I am leaving the brigades soon. I have an offer to work in a women’s hospital in Barcelona.” This he thought of as more a transformation into truth than another lie. He had never gone near the front and had been at the hospital for more than a year.

“I’m so glad. Will you take the offer?”

“Should I?”

“Yes, you must,” she replied a little too eagerly, surprised that she would already care.

“I’ll tell you about it if you will allow me to write to you
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Rita felt she should frown at this suggestion, but she didn’t.

Tadeusz had spent the afternoon answering their questions about six years in Paris, then the south of France, now Cataluña at war, while trying to learn what he could about her. The past year living in the predominantly women’s world of a maternity hospital had taught him how to listen to women. He waited for Rita to say something.

She sat opposite him, drawing a long breath on her cigarette. The afternoon had transported Rita back to days in Krakow, sitting, slouching, sometimes sprawled across a bed, among other students in someone’s rooms, feeling languid and lazy after a week’s lectures, knowing one could sleep in, contemplating—but only contemplating—temptation. Why had she ever given up Krakow?

Suddenly, in the silence, there was a slightly electric atmosphere in the room. Both were asking themselves the same question: when would they ever be alone like this again? Knowing the answer they began mutually to explore the possibility before them, trying to measure it without risking a rebuff. Together they began a little pas de deux, dancing in what would turn out to be the same direction, but neither taking an irrevocable step.

“Well, you’ve told us your adventures.” She paused. “What are you looking forward to?”

He thought for a moment and began, “Working in a women’s clinic will be very different. Of course, the Spanish Republic is rather like the Soviet Union. Women have all the same rights as men. They reach high in politics, even serve in the army. Contraception and abortion are allowed in Barcelona. Doctors are expected to discuss marital relations with their patients. These are things I will have to do at the women’s clinic—providing contraceptives, performing abortions.”

Contraception was one thing, abortion another. Rita wanted to signal she had no trouble with the former. “It’s hard to see how you can agree to carry out abortions. It’s against all the teachings of all the religions—ours, the Catholic church, the reformed denominations, everyone. It must be wrong.”

“I agree, it’s difficult to reconcile oneself to it. But so far as the scruples of religion go, they won’t stop me.”

“So, you are an atheist?” Rita’s observation was obvious, but it was also another test of the possibilities.

“Yes, but even if I wasn’t, religion wouldn’t help me with this problem.”

“Why not?” Suddenly she was focused on what he was saying, not what he might be signaling.

“Here’s an argument I heard in Paris that I can’t shake. Take the prohibition of abortion. God forbids it, right? So, is that why it’s wrong, just because he forbids it? Or did God forbid abortion because it’s wrong? Which is it?”

Rita thought she knew what was coming. Should she cut him short? No, he wouldn’t like that. At least he was talking about something interesting. It made a change from Urs. She replied, “So, wrong because forbidden by God, or forbidden by God because wrong? It’s obvious. Forbidden by God because it’s wrong.”

Tadeusz nodded. “Right. Now, if abortion is really wrong, there must be something about it that makes it wrong, something besides the fact that God forbids it. What could that be?”

“Well. It’s wrong. It’s killing; it’s murdering innocent lives.”

“Rita, you haven’t answered the question. Why is it wrong? It can’t be just because God forbids it. We’ve ruled that answer out. It must be something about killing itself that makes it wrong, bad, evil.” He stopped to secure her assent. Then he continued, “That’s presumably what God has figured out about killing—what makes it wrong. That’s why he imposed the rule against it. But what is it about abortion that he’s figured out? Something about abortion itself that makes it wrong, not just God’s rule against it.”

It was a version of a subversive argument Rita remembered from Plato, but she wasn’t going to mention it now. “So, what is the answer—what is it about abortion that makes it wrong?”

“I don’t know. But the point is, God’s saying it’s wrong can’t be what makes it wrong. When it comes to right and wrong, we have to think for ourselves.” Tadeusz thought,
Will she see the argument works just as well for “Thou shalt not commit adultery”?

Rita rose. “Somewhere Dostoyevsky writes, ‘If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.’ ” She walked out of the sitting room and turned down the darkened hallway to the bedroom.

When she came back, four or five minutes later, she was wearing a dark blue silk dressing gown, the white tassel inscribing a soft curve as she walked past Tadeusz, went to the front door, locked it, and threw the bolt. Slowly Rita turned around and walked through the apartment, methodically turning off every light in the house. In the twilight she stood, looked down at him, still in a chair, while their eyes adjusted. Crooking a finger, she led him back down the corridor to the darkened bedroom.

He found himself sitting back on the bed, with Rita looming above him astride his legs. He could hear the rustle of the slightly stiff dressing gown as it moved over her stockings. At thigh height, the rising hem revealed garters holding stockings, then a belt, but no panties. A tuft of fur no darker than the blonde above made a triangle between the belts. She had obviously left all but the panties to be removed. Slowly he did so, unclipping each fastener from its form-fitted holder, and rolling down the hose, as she continued to hold up the gown. Now she opened the robe to reveal the belt floating loosely at her waist, the ribboned fasteners no longer moored to the stockings but black against her white thighs. He decided on an approach Rita would remember. It was one of several things he had learned in Paris years before.