The downpour hit us near Grandfather’s hut. We were soaked through by the time we got there. Grandfather wasn’t there. We sat in the hut, clinging to each other. Hannah dried my hands. She smelled of damp calico. She kept asking in a frightened voice: ‘Are you cold? Oh, what will I do if you get sick?’
I was shivering. I truly was cold. The look in Hannah’s eyes went from fear, to despair, to love. She clutched her throat and began coughing. I saw a vein on her neck bulge beneath her smooth, clear skin. I flung my arms around Hannah and buried my head in her wet shoulder. All of a sudden, I wished that my mother were as young and kind as Hannah.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, confused and still coughing as she stroked my head. ‘What is it? Don’t be frightened … The thunder can’t hurt us. I’m right here. Don’t be frightened.’
Then she gently pushed me away and pressed her mouth to her sleeve, which was embroidered with red oak leaves. When she took her mouth away, I saw a small patch of blood, similar in shape to those leaves, splattered on her sleeve.
‘I don’t need your oath!’ she whispered, looking up at me with a guilty smile. ‘I was only kidding.’
The thunder had moved off. The downpour had passed. There was nothing now but the sound of rain dripping from the trees. That night, I caught a fever. The next day young Dr Napelbaum rode out on his bicycle from Belaya Tserkov. He examined me and said I had pleurisy. Napelbaum left us to see Hannah in Pilipchi. When he returned, I overheard him talking in a low voice to my mother in the next room: ‘Maria Grigorievna, the girl has galloping consumption. She’ll be dead by spring.’
I burst into tears and shouted for Mama. I threw my arms around her, and at that moment I noticed she had the same sweet vein as Hannah. Then I cried even harder and for a long time couldn’t stop. Mama stroked my head and said: ‘What is it? I’m right here. Don’t be frightened.’
I got better, but Hannah died that winter, in February.
Mama and I went to visit her grave the following summer. I placed a bunch of daisies tied with a black ribbon on the small grassy mound. Hannah used to tuck daisies into her plaits. For some reason I felt uncomfortable standing there next to Mama with her red parasol. I should have come alone.
5
A Trip to Chenstokhov
My other grandmother, Vikentia Ivanovna, a tall, old Polish woman, lived in Cherkassy on the river Dnieper. She had many daughters, my aunts. One of these aunts, Yevfrosinia Grigorievna, was the headmistress of a girls’ school in Cherkassy. My grandmother lived with this aunt in a large wooden house. Vikentia Ivanovna always went around in mourning and a headdress. She first began to wear mourning clothes after the suppression of the Polish Rebellion of 1863 and from that day on never took them off. We were convinced that during the rebellion Grandmother’s fiancé had been killed. He must have been a proud Polish revolutionary, not at all like Grandmother’s morose husband, our grandfather, a retired notary public in Cherkassy.
I remember my grandfather poorly. He lived on a small mezzanine and rarely came downstairs. Grandmother sent him off to live there away from all the others given his intolerable smoking habit. Once in a while we’d go and visit him in his room, smelly and dense with smoke. On the table were great piles of tobacco that had spilled out of various pouches. Our grandfather, seated in his chair, would roll cigarette after cigarette with his shaking, gnarled hands. He didn’t talk to us but would ruffle the hair on the back of our heads and give us the shiny purple paper off his tobacco pouches.
We often came to visit Vikentia Ivanovna from Kiev. She had one strict habit. Every spring during Lent she undertook a pilgrimage to Catholic holy sites either in Warsaw, Vilnius or Chenstokhov. Sometimes she took it into her head to visit Orthodox shrines and would go to the Holy Trinity Monastery of St Sergius or to Pochaev. Her sons and daughters all laughed at her and said that if she kept this up, Vikentia Ivanovna would start paying visits to Jewish tsaddiks and end her days with a pilgrimage to Mohammed’s tomb in Mecca.
The biggest argument my father ever had with my grandmother was when she used the occasion of his travelling to Vienna for a convention of statisticians to take me with her on one of these religious journeys. I was happy to go and did not understand my father’s indignation. I was eight at the time. I remember the bright spring air in Vilnius and the chapel at the ‘Gate of Dawn’ where grandmother went to Mass. The whole town glistened with the pale green and goldish brilliance of the new leaves. At noon a cannon from the Napoleonic era fired a salute from atop Castle Hill.
Grandmother was an extremely well-read woman, and she was forever explaining things to me. She had a remarkable way of combining her religiosity with progressive ideas. She was infatuated with Herzen and at the same time with Henryk Sienkiewicz.fn1 In her bedroom portraits of Pushkin and Mickiewicz hung side-by-side with an icon of Our Lady of Chenstokhov. During the pogroms of the revolution of 1905, she hid revolutionary students and Jews in her home.
From Vilnius we left for Warsaw. I only recall the Copernicus monument and the cafés where grandmother treated me to ‘upside-down-coffee’ – more milk than coffee. She also treated me to meringues, which melted in my mouth with creamy cool sweetness. We were served by fidgety waitresses in pleated aprons. From Warsaw we travelled on to Chenstokhov and the famous Catholic monastery of Jasna Góra with its ‘miracle-working’ Black Madonna icon. This was my first encounter with religious fanaticism. It shocked and frightened me. Ever since I have been filled with fear and revulsion for fanaticism. For a long time, I could not lose the fear I felt that day.
Our train arrived in Chenstokhov early in the morning. It was far from the station to the monastery, which stood on a large green hill. The pilgrims – Polish peasants, men and women – exited the train, along with some city dwellers, all in sooty bowler hats. A portly old priest and some young deacons in lacy garments were waiting for the pilgrims at the station. The procession of pilgrims gathered on the dusty road in front of the station. The priest blessed them and muttered a prayer. The crowd dropped to its knees and began to crawl towards the monastery, chanting psalms as they went.
The throng crawled all the way to the cathedral. Taking the lead was a grey-haired woman with a white, ecstatic face. In her hand she held a black wooden crucifix. Ahead of them all the priest walked slowly and indifferently. It was hot and dusty, sweat was running down their faces. They panted and wheezed and shot reproachful glances at the pilgrims who were falling behind. I grabbed my grandmother by the hand.
‘Why are they doing this?’ I whispered.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Grandmother answered in Polish. ‘They’re penitents seeking forgiveness for their sins from Our Lord God.’
‘Let’s leave,’ I said to my grandmother, but she pretended not to hear me.
The monastery at Chenstokhov was a medieval castle. Rusty Swedish cannonballs were embedded in its walls, and mucky green water filled the moats. Large, thick trees rustled on the ramparts. The drawbridges had been lowered on their metal chains. We drove across one of them in a droshky into a tangle of courtyards, back streets and alleyways. A lay brother, a cord around his waist, led us to the monastery hotel. We were shown to a cold room with a vaulted ceiling. The inevitable crucifix hung on the wall. Someone had affixed a garland of paper flowers to the nails on Christ’s brass feet. The monk asked my grandmother whether she didn’t happen to be suffering from any illnesses requiring a cure. Grandmother had always been quite anxious about her health, and she immediately complained to him of heart pains. From the pocket of his brown habit the monk took out a handful of small silver hearts, arms, heads and even tiny babies and poured them in a heap on the table.