In Hala’s next letter from Łódź, sent in March, the reticence is explained:
My beloved Dawidek!
Don’t be surprised at such a start to my letter. After yours of March 7, 1946, I feel I can safely express myself that way. Please don’t think your words aroused any other sort of feeling in me, my feelings were the same as yours.
The letter of January 18 was the first one I sent to you, before I even knew your address. Dawidek, it was no mistake. I was very careful with my words, in case … I didn’t want to hurt you, but neither did I want to risk my position as a woman.
Anyway, I wasn’t sure until the moment I got your letter, which reawakened some of my old feelings. And now perhaps you understand me?
So if everything could work out the way we’ve been thinking it would be wonderful, Dawidek!
You must now write a very affectionate letter where you sort of hint that I’m your wife, then perhaps I can take it to the Consulate.
On March 27, Hala receives a letter from Alingsås. It says:
You can’t imagine how much I was longing for your letter. I had reckoned on it coming much sooner, but obviously the postal service isn’t working normally yet over there. Every day after work I hurried home (so to speak), thinking to myself that there might be a letter from Hala waiting. I didn’t know what could have happened, why there was no word from you. Hadn’t my letter got through to you? Had you moved to a different place?
Hala replies from Łódź on April 8:
I’m ready to risk everything to be with you.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to come to you. As I told you, it’s difficult for a young girl like me to use one of the illegal routes. I’ve already explained the reasons. It’s not just cowardice.
I have a sister, friends, acquaintances, but still no peace of mind. I feel dreadfully lonely.
Dawidek! Can you imagine the moment when we meet? The time seems like a century to me.
Don’t worry! Everything will work out. Look on the bright side.
Everything does work out in the end, but not in accordance with any of their plans. Not the plan for Hala to go to Gdansk or Gdynia to get smuggled on board a ship to Sweden. Nor the plan for David to join the crew of a ship to Poland and smuggle Hala aboard. Nor the plan to find a Swedish citizen who will stand surety of ten thousand kronor for Hala.
Everything works out by dint of two lies.
She gets herself from Poland to Germany as a Polish citizen of German ethnic origins, and she gets herself from Germany to Sweden as Hella Cwaighaft.
Perhaps no more needs to be said about how the woman who is to be my mother comes into the picture.
THE PROJECT
Bertil drags his left leg along after him. It’s withered and stunted and a few inches shorter than his other leg and firmly encased in a metal and leather splint. Without the splint, Bertil wouldn’t be able to walk, at least not without crutches. As it is, he gets along by twitching his left hip to propel his left leg forward to a point even with his right and then supporting himself on the splint as he throws his right leg forward. His body lurches wildly with each step. Forward and back. Up and down. The cage around his left leg rattles and squeaks.
I’ve grown used to the way Bertil walks, he walks as fast as I do, anyway, but I haven’t grown used to his stunted leg. I try not to stare at it, and not to listen to the thumping and rattling, but Bertil’s leg pains me. I never see that it pains him, and we never talk about it, but it pains me because it looks so painful. But then we read more than we talk, Bertil and I. Bertil’s two years older and lives on the first floor in the house next to ours along the rowanberry avenue, and he has his own room, full of books and comics. Bertil reads a lot and doesn’t go out to play all that much, which suits me fine.
But every now and then we do go out. One day we go to the swings in the playground under the pines, behind the Co-op. Bertil likes swinging on the swings. He swings a bit the way he walks, twitching and lurching, as if the upper part of his body can’t adapt to a weightless state.
There’s an elderly man sitting on a bench in the park, staring at Bertil’s leg. “Go home and have some bilberry soup so you’ll grow strong and healthy,” the man says.
Bertil doesn’t reply, just keeps on swinging, perhaps a bit more jerkily.
“I suppose you’ve heard that bilberry soup cures polio? It takes a lot of soup, though. At least two bowls a day.”
Bertil pretends not to hear but my ears prick up, because I know Bertil’s stunted leg is caused by polio. Polio’s an incurable disease you can die of. There’s nothing to say about polio because there’s nothing to be done. We both know that.
Bilberry soup! And no one thought of that before, imagine.
I rush over and grab Bertil’s swing.
“Did you hear that?”
Yes, Bertil has heard.
We walk back home.
We say no more about bilberry soup.
Neither of us says anything at all.
The only sound is the thump of his shoe, the creak of the splint, and, I seem to recall, a faint sighing in the pines.
For a long time I remain convinced that bilberry soup must be tried. Could I get a few bowls of bilberry soup into Bertil without him noticing? Could Mom give Bertil some bilberry soup and call it something else? After all, cabbage soup is called kapusta in our home, and chicken soup is rossu. I fantasize about how one day Bertil, filled with bilberry soup called by another name, gets up from our kitchen table and slowly takes off his splint and looks at me with astonishment and gratitude in his gray-blue eyes.
I still have a child’s incapacity to distinguish between what’s possible and what’s not.
I’m also the child of a time when so much that only recently was said to be impossible is now said to be possible, almost a matter of course, in fact.
So why not bilberry soup?
In that respect, it’s a bright time to be a child.
So much darkness that will soon be dispelled.
The light shining in polio’s darkness is a bright, pinkish-red liquid. The syringe for the polio injections is big and terrifying, but the color’s inviting and comforting. The polio vaccine won’t do anything for Bertil’s leg, I realize, but the mystery of polio has been solved, so they say. There are many mysteries that are soon to be solved in the years when I’m making the world my own. Once the polio mystery is solved, the cancer mystery will be, too. “Cancer” is one of those words of darkness, like “polio.” The demons of polio thrive in piles of earth and unboiled water. The polio virus is killed by a pinkish-red liquid injected into your body. In the newly built school of pale yellow brick, the school nurse’s room is an antiseptic temple of white plastic and shiny stainless steel. We’re sent there one class at a time for a resolute jab in the tops of our bared arms, meant to bless us with a future from which darkness has been banished.
It’s not only polio and cancer that will soon be eradicated, but malaria and tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, and the common cold.
Perhaps pain, too.
Perhaps even war, but that seems a taller order.
“Exterminate” is a word of light, strangely enough. Until very recently, the extermination of human beings was literally darkening the skies, which should have made the very word a word of darkness, should in fact have rendered it all but unusable, but in the world of polio injections there are still things that can and should be exterminated, like weeds or pests. Poor hygiene also needs eradicating, which is merely a matter of time in the apartment blocks by the rowan avenue, where all the apartments have bathtubs and flushing toilets and the garbage trucks have mechanisms for spill-free emptying and the people are starting to perfume their underarms with something they call deodorant, which goes by the name of Mum. “Mumming,” they call it. I don’t start mumming until much later, when I realize that the smell of sweaty armpits is a sign of poor hygiene.