PART ONE
1. December 1985, Boston
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN
I always feel cold. Even in summer at the beach with the sun blazing down there is a coldness in my spine. I guess it’s because I was born in winter in a forest and spent the first months of my life in a sleeve of my mother’s winter coat. I was not expected to live, so if life is a gift for anyone, it truly is for me. I’m just not entirely sure it is a present I really wanted.
Some people’s memory of themselves switches on very early. Mine starts with the Catholic orphanage when I was two. I always really wanted to find out what happened to me and my parents during the years I don’t remember at all. I learned a few things from my elder brother, Witek, but he was too little then and the memories he passed down to me don’t really fill in the picture. When he was in the hospital he filled up half a school exercise book and told me everything he could remember. We didn’t know at that time that our mother was still alive. He died of sepsis when he was sixteen, before she came back from the labor camps.
My identity documents give my place of birth as Emsk, but in fact that is only where I was conceived. My mother fled from the Emsk ghetto in August 1942 when she was six months pregnant, and took with her my six-year-old brother, Witek. I was actually born about one hundred kilometers from Emsk in impenetrable forest, in a secret colony of Jews who had escaped the ghetto and hid there right until Belorussia was liberated in August 1944. It was a partisan unit, although in reality it was just three hundred Jews trying to survive in an area occupied by the Germans. I imagine the men were more concerned to use their weapons to protect this dug-out town of women, old people, and the few children who survived than to fight Germans.
Many years later my mother told me my father stayed in the ghetto and died there. A few days after my mother’s escape, all the people still there were shot. She told me that he refused to leave. He believed an attempt to escape would only anger the Germans and bring forward the showdown, so my pregnant mother took Witek and left without him. Of the eight hundred people in the ghetto only three hundred decided to escape.
The Germans had herded Jews from Emsk and the surrounding villages into the ghetto. My mother was not a local woman, but she was there for a reason. She was a fanatical Communist and had been sent from Lwów as an agent. She had given birth to Witek in a Lwów prison in 1936. The father was a party comrade. My own father was someone she met in the ghetto. I have never in my life met a woman less suited to motherhood than my mother. I am quite sure my brother and I were born solely because of a lack of prophylactics and abortion facilities. When I was young I hated her, then for many years I viewed her with alienated amazement. To this day I can scarcely bear to be with her. Thank God I see her very rarely.
Any time I ask her about the past, she bristles and starts yelling at me. To her I have always been an apolitical bourgeoise. She is absolutely right about that, but I have had a baby myself and I know for a fact that when a child comes into the world, a woman’s life, to a greater or lesser extent, is subordinated to that fact. Not in her case, though. She is a maniacal Communist Party member.
A month ago I made the acquaintance of Esther Gantman. She is a charming, transparent old lady, very white and with a blue-rinsed head of gray hair. She is a friend of Karin. They worked together for some charity and Karin had been telling me about her for a long time, but I took no interest. Shortly before Christmas, Karin arranged a party for her fiftieth birthday, and I immediately noticed Esther. She just somehow stood out among all these people I half-knew. The party was far more heartfelt and sincere than is usual in America. There were a lot of Poles, a few Russians, and a couple of Yugoslavs. The Slavic presence made itself pleasantly felt at this American celebration and you heard snatches of Polish conversation.
I speak Russian and Polish fluently, but I have a Polish accent when I speak English. Esther noticed that when we exchanged a few words. “You’re from Poland?” she asked. I always have trouble with that question. It is difficult to give a quick reply, and you can hardly embark on a long explanation that my mother was born in Warsaw but I was born in Belorussia, don’t know who my father was, spent my childhood in Russia, and went to Poland only in 1954, went back to Russia to study, moved from there to the GDR, and then on to America.
This time, however, I said something I never normally say. “I was born in Emsk. More precisely, in Czarna Puszcza.” The old lady gasped and then asked, “When were you born?” I told her, “In 1942”. I never try to conceal my age because I know I look young. People never guess I am forty-three. She gave me a little hug and the blue rinse wobbled as her old head trembled. “My God! My God! So you did survive! That madwoman gave birth to you in a dugout and my husband delivered you. And then within a month, I suppose, she took you children and went off who knows where. Everybody urged her to stay but she wouldn’t listen. Everybody was sure she would be caught on the road or in the first village you came to. Glory be—you survived!”
We went out to the hallway and just couldn’t be separated. When we took our coats off the hangers it was so funny. They were both the same, heavy fox fur, which is almost improper in America. I found out later that Esther suffered from the cold, too.
We drove to her house. She lives in the center of Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue, a marvelous district just ten minutes away from me. As we were driving, I was at the wheel with Esther sitting next to me, I had such a strange feeling. All my life I have longed for somebody older and wiser, someone who could guide me and whom I could obey and joyfully do what they told me to. I always felt the lack of that. In the orphanage, of course, the discipline was strict but it was quite a different matter. All through my life I have played the role of the senior person. My mother, my husbands, my friends—none of them were ever really grown up. There was just something about this old lady that made me want to agree in advance with everything she said.
We went into her house and she turned on the lights. The bookcases started in the hallway and went all the way back into the depths of the apartment. She saw me looking at them. “This is my late husband’s library. He could read five languages and there are masses of books about art. I need to find a good home to leave all this to.”
I remember Karin had told me that Esther was a widow with no children, quite rich but very lonely. Almost all her family were killed during the war.
Here is what Esther told me. She first saw my mother in the ghetto in Emsk, when people who lived in the surrounding countryside started being forced to move in there. Before that only Jews from the town lived there. They had apparently moved voluntarily, because shortly before they went to the ghetto there had been a terrible slaughter of Jews in the town. They had been assembled in the town square between the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the local people set about killing them. They killed fifteen hundred Jews, and those who were not killed took refuge in the ghetto.
It was not a ghetto in the customary sense of one or more districts where Jews had lived since the Middle Ages. In Emsk, people abandoned their houses in town and moved into a half-ruined castle that had belonged to a prince of some description. They put barbed wire around it and posted guards. At first it wasn’t altogether clear who was keeping whom away from whom. The police were the local Belorussian police because the Germans considered that sort of work beneath them. Relations with the Belorussians were, needless to say, based on bribery. They were paid for everything and could even be bribed to supply guns.