Daniel Stein, Interpreter

All the other girls were deemed worthy of communion, and I was not. I walked out and left God and my faith behind in the church.

I lived in the orphanage for a year before my mother took me back. She tried one last time to make me into a family. She was going through a difficult time herself. The year 1956 saw the beginning of de-Stalinization. She fell out with all her friends, and only kindhearted Paweł Kociski came to visit her occasionally. Every time it ended with her shrieking and throwing him out. That year was the first time I felt sorry for her. She was as lonely and immovable as a rock.

I, however, was making my first friends. Actually, not friends. It was a romance with a guitarist, a real jazz musician. Those years were very difficult in Poland, but I remember 1958 as a year of great happiness. I had just turned 16. If anybody had brought me up, it was the Catholics. A conflict now arose: I had to choose between the Virgin Mary and the guitarist. Without a moment’s hesitation I chose in favor of him. Our romance was tempestuous and brief and followed by several more lovers. My mother said nothing. In my last year at school I decided that I absolutely must emigrate. There was only one way I could go, to Russia. My mother helped me for the first and only time in her life, using her contacts. I was sent to Moscow to study at the Academy of Agriculture. It was called the Timiryazevka. Nobody asked me what I wanted to study. There was a place for me there, and that is where I went.

I lived in a hostel for foreign students, who were mainly from the people’s democracies. I married Erich in my second year and never went back to Poland. My mother stayed there until 1968, when there were major disturbances throughout Europe, which spread to Poland. When the unrest was crushed, arrests began in Poland, dismissals. There was a movement in their Party against revisionists and Zionists. Gomulka expelled Jews, of whom there were still quite a lot in the Party, and all of them, as I recollect, pro-Soviet. My mother was expelled despite what she considered to be her great services to the cause. She fought to the last, writing appeals of some sort, and then she had a stroke.

She emigrated to Israel, a country for which at that time she had a deep loathing. She has lived in Haifa for 18 years now, in an old people’s home. She is considered a war hero and a victim of Stalin’s repressions, gets a pension and lives very decently. I visit her once a year. She is a wrinkled old woman with a limp, but her eyes burn with the old fire. I grit my teeth and spend three days with her. I don’t hate her now, but have not yet worked out how to love her. It is a pity, of course it is.

She never asks after her grandson. Once, when Alex was six, the same age as Witek when she gave us away to strangers, I took him there thinking she might melt a bit. She started telling him about what she did in the war. He asked her to show him her rifle but when she said she had handed her gun in when the war ended he lost interest in her. He’s a wonderful boy, very caring, and kind to animals.

In 1968, Paweł Kociski emigrated, too, but to Paris. He works at the Sorbonne in some institute for studying Jews. He left the Party, but my mother did not want to. She had to be expelled. Even in Israel she had the idea of sending a petition to be readmitted. She is mad.

I met Paweł some five years ago in Paris. He writes research papers on contemporary history and complains that his son has become a Trotskyite. How about that?

13. January 1986, Haifa

L

ETTER FROM

R

ITA

K

OWACZ TO

P

AWEŁ

KOCI

SKI

Dear Paweł,

In spite of everything I do want to let you know I’ve moved. My room number is now 507 not 201. Everything else is still the same, I’m in the same almshouse just in case you feel a sudden urge to write although what is there for us to write to each other about? When you were in Israel in 1971 you didn’t even bother to let me know let alone come to take a look at me although of course there’s not much to look at. I am lame, I’ve only got one eye and I am cantankerous as my daughter keeps reminding me, that’s what she says, why are you so cantankerous?

Last week one of the girls in the canteen here told me I was cantankerous too, she got fired on the spot but I’ve been thinking about it and decided I really am, it’s true and I ought to face up to it. Of course a lot of irritation has built up in me but Paweł tell me, you have witnessed my life, we have been friends for as long as I can remember, has life been fair to me? You are the only person who remembers my mother and how she gave all her love to my brother and could not stand me, you witnessed that and the whole street knew it. I was a pretty girl and my first man who I loved passionately betrayed me and left me for my one-time friend Helenka who hated me even before that happened and how sickening it was to be left for her, my enemy. Don’t you remember? The betrayals came one after another. When I was put in prison for the first time in 1928 do you think I don’t know who put us all in there? After the war when I was working in the special department they showed me documents. Szwarcman betrayed everyone, he was a plant, but he wrote about me separately and blamed everything on me. I took part in a demonstration and he made it seem like I was the main Communist, probably I really was. Now, when so many years have passed and so many of our people have died ask yourself who has stayed true. Only the ones who died and me. I won’t say anything about you, you left the Party, you betrayed it, you changed. You sit there in the Sorbonne writing about how wrong Communist ideas are instead of talking about the errors of the leaders at that time. I have stayed the same and nothing will change me, in my eyes you are just as much a traitor as all the others but you are the only one who can understand me, even my daughter understands nothing. You wouldn’t believe it, sometimes she says the same words to me that my mother used. Ewa never saw her but she too accuses me of “egotism” and “inflexibility,” word for word. What did I want for myself? I never had anything, I never needed anything, I lived my whole life only ever having one pair of shoes at a time. When I couldn’t wear them anymore I bought new ones. I had one dress and two pairs of knickers and I am accused of “egotism”! When we were living in Warsaw Ewa told me I was a dreadful mother and no other woman in the world would have behaved like I did when I sent them to the orphanage she meant. It broke my heart in pieces but I did it for their future, so they would live in a just society. I sent my children away to keep them safe because I knew if they stayed with me they would be killed.

For a long time I knew nothing about them at all, it was only when the war was over I heard they were alive and first I couldn’t go to get them then because I was working in a special NKVD department on secret work and later I was back in prison. I was betrayed again. I have been unlucky, always surrounded by traitors, you betrayed me too. My greatest misfortune was when you left me for Helenka, after that I never gave my heart to anybody. You were a double traitor because you left Helenka too and how many others you abandoned I have no idea. In that sense each and every man is a traitor, but by then that no longer bothered me, I kept love and physiology completely separate. Men do not deserve love, although admittedly neither do women. I gave my love not to men but to the cause. The Party too is not without sin, I understand now that the Party too made mistakes, but either it will recognize and correct its mistakes or it will cease to be the Party to which I gave my heart, my love, and my life. I will never regret saying “Yes.”