They stay until the rowanberries turn red and school starts and nothing can get between the boy and his world any longer.
The boy’s world and nobody else’s. Not even his parents’.
Least of all his parents’.
Occasionally something happens to thrust him back toward theirs, and their shadows momentarily penetrate him, and a sensation of darkness and cold lingers on.
One winter’s day, some children throw snowballs at their kitchen windows and shout “Jews.” It’s at number 45, where the apartment is on the ground floor, and the kitchen window faces the courtyard. The boy hears the snow thump on the window and sees his mother’s face go white. Utterly white and utterly silent. She says nothing. Not to the children outside, nor to the boy in the kitchen. Nor to his father when he gets home from the factory. At least, not in the boy’s hearing.
When the snow melts at the end of winter, the marbles come out. In the Place, marbles playing is the sign of spring. The monochrome stone marbles cost one öre apiece and you can buy them at the tobacconist’s and they make your trouser pockets droop and bulge. Some kids keep their marbles in a special cloth bag dangling from their belts, weighing against their thighs. There are shiny metal marbles and multicolored glass marbles too. They’re better for shooting than the stone marbles because they’re bigger and heavier, but they cost more and are therefore not so often put at risk. Some people always seem to lose their marbles and have to make do with watching or trying to beg money for more. There’s a lot at stake in a game of marbles, particularly the game where the object is to hit the pyramid. The pyramid consists of three marbles pressed into the ground and another one balanced on top. Whoever breaks up the pyramid gets to build it again and wins all the marbles that have rolled past it.
There are several ways of cheating at pyramid. The most insidious is to press the base of three marbles into the ground a bit too hard and a bit too deep, making the target area smaller, the pyramid more stable, and the top marble harder to dislodge.
Such a pyramid, the boy learns, is called a Jew pyramid.
He also discovers that there are marble Jews.
A marble Jew is someone who makes a Jew pyramid, or picks up more marbles than he has won, or collects his marbles in a pile rather than playing with them, or someone who just happens to get in the way of a player’s frustration or disappointment. “Marble Jew” is a general insult for the duration of the marble season. “You goddamned marble Jew,” usually.
The boy’s rarely called a marble Jew because he’s a useless marbles player, always losing his marbles, and rarely threatening or annoying anyone, but he goes ice-cold every time he hears the word “Jew” in one combination or another. He knows that Mom and Dad are Jews, and that he and his little sister are too, and the Klein family on the other side of the railroad bridge, and Auntie Ilonka at the other end of the rowanberry avenue. And even if he doesn’t know what it means, he knows it has something to do with the shadows.
I wish I could make contact with him and explain a few things. That the Place cannot become his if it doesn’t also become theirs. That he cannot make the Place his own if he doesn’t know where he comes from. That he has a certain responsibility, small though he is, for the success of the Project.
I’d also like to ask him a few things. About language, for instance. About those early words in Polish. Where did he hide them? Are they perching like lost birds in his memory, waiting to be discovered? There’s something about Polish that, much later, I don’t understand. The body recognizes the language, but the head does not.
Rudyard Kipling says in his autobiography that after eleven years at an English boarding school he returned to Bombay, city of his birth, and started to speak in whole, coherent sentences in a local Indian language he’d forgotten. The only catch was that he himself didn’t understand what he was saying.
Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put their world behind me, or if I’d gone back to it sooner, I too would have been able to unearth a forgotten language, or at least a few coherent sentences, not just in Polish but also in Yiddish, and perhaps over time even to understand them.
And not only the languages, but also the worlds that went with them.
But the boy’s far too small to be able to help me with such things and speaks too quietly for me to glean anything from what he says. Not like the twenty-year-old youth in a Jorge Luis Borges story who sits down beside the seventy-year-old Jorge Luis Borges one morning on a park bench outside Harvard and tells him loud and clear what it’s like to be twenty and Jorge Luis Borges.
I’ll have to make do with catching sight of him now and then. One evening in late summer I see him with the other children from our block by the swings at the Köpmansplan playground. He’s not quite six, it’s already starting to get dark, and he’s not allowed to be out this late, but on this one evening all the children are out late and the playground is full of adults standing around talking in groups and smoking and waiting for a film to be shown on the big screen the Social Democrats have put up between the sandpit and the swings. In the film, a man’s driving his car on fields and meadows instead of on the roads. It looks like hard work and feels a bit menacing and the man gets angry and everything seems to be going wrong. The film is called Tax-free Andersson. The boy doesn’t understand what it’s about, but he sees the grown-ups of the Place standing there in front of the screen contemplating the car as it bumps over the fields and sees the glowing ends of their cigarettes leave traces in the gathering darkness and senses how they all worry about having no roads for the cars to drive on, and how they’re all making a silent pact that in the Place where they live, cars will drive on roads and not on fields.
In my fourth school year I move from the yellow wooden house in Baltic to the school in the yellow-brick building in town, and from Miss Bergerman to Mr. Winqvist. It’s a big step and one train stop away. Miss Bergerman cries for us as if we were her lost children.
The boy is now me. Or at least, I can no longer keep him at arm’s length. I see him too clearly and recognize him too well and must take responsibility for the story he tells.
Mr. Winqvist the schoolmaster is gray-haired and extremely red-faced and scatters a few words of German into what he has to say, shouting Herein! whenever anybody knocks at the classroom door. For a brief period I’m Mr. Winqvist’s favorite, praised when I answer questions, entrusted with helping a classmate who has reading difficulties, and invited to tea and biscuits in Mr. Winqvist’s cigar-scented apartment, where he gives me a fine old book as a present. One day Mom tells me Mr. Winqvist is dropping in to see us that evening. I understand that this is a big thing, occasioned by the visit of a Polish colleague who wants to meet some compatriots and speak the language of his homeland.
I don’t believe Mr. Winqvist has understood that my parents are Polish Jews, which is not the same thing as Polish compatriots.
I think he understands after the visit.
After the visit, I am no longer Mr. Winqvist’s favorite. The reprimands and sarcastic remarks start raining down, and the blond twins take my place on the favorites’ stand.