The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma—that's the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma. But behind this faith in the diploma there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children.
True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price.
Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.
Sometimes I see on television, sometimes I see even here, from my balcony, how young couples after a day's work do everything together—wash the clothes, hang them out, change diapers, cook, once I even heard in the grocer's a young man saying that the next day he and his wife were going—that's what he said, tomorrow we're going—for an amniocentesis. When I heard him say that, I felt a lump in my throat: maybe the world is changing a little after all?
It's certain that malice, rishes, hasn't lost ground in politics, between religions, nations, or classes, but maybe it's receding a little in couples? In young families? Or maybe I'm just deceiving myself. Maybe it's all just play-acting, and in fact the world carries on as before—the mother cat suckles her kittens, while Mr. Puss-in-Boots licks himself all over, twitches his whiskers, and goes off in search of pleasures in the yard?
Do you still remember what is written in the book of Proverbs? A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother! If the son turns out wise, then the father rejoices, boasts of his son, and scores full marks. But if, heaven forbid, the son turns out unsuccessful, or stupid, or problematic, or deformed, or a criminal—nu, then it's bound to be the mother's fault, and all the care and suffering falls on her. Once your mother said to me: Sonia, there are just two things—no, I've got a lump in my throat again. We'll talk about this another time. Let's talk about something else.
Sometimes I'm not quite sure that I remember correctly whether that princess, Lyubov Nikitichna, who lived behind the curtain in our house with her two girls, Tasia and Nina, and slept with them in the same antique bed, I'm not quite sure: was she really their mother? Or was she just the gouvernantka, the governess, of the two girls? Who apparently had two different fathers? Because Tasia was Anastasia Ser-geyevna, while Nina was Antonina Boleslavovna. There was something a bit foggy. Something we didn't talk about much, and when we did, it was an awkward subject. I remember that the two girls both called the Princess "Mama" or "Maman," but it might have been because they couldn't remember their real mother. I can't tell you for certain, either way, because the cover-up already existed. There were many cover-ups in life two or three generations ago. Today perhaps there are fewer. Or have they just changed? Have new ones been invented?
Whether the cover-up is a good thing or a bad thing I really don't know. I am not qualified to judge today's habits because I may well have been brainwashed, like all the girls of my generation. Still, I sometimes think that "between him and her," as they say, perhaps in these times it has all become simpler. When I was a girl, when I was what they called a young lady from a good home, it was full of knives, poison, terrifying darkness. Like walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. We were completely in the dark. It simply wasn't talked about.
But they did talk all the time—chatter, jealousy, and rishes, malicious gossip—they talked about money, about diseases, they talked about success, about a good family versus who knows what sort of family, this was an endless topic, and about character they talked endlessly too, this one has such and such a character and that one has such and such a character. And how much they talked about ideas! It's unimaginable today! They talked about Judaism, Zionism, the Bund, Communism, they talked about anarchism and nihilism, they talked about America, they talked about Lenin, they even talked about the "woman question," women's emancipation. Your aunt Haya was the most daring of the three of us about women's emancipation—but only when it came to talking and arguing, naturally—Fania was a bit of a suffragette too, but she had some doubts. And I was the silly little girl who is always being told, Sonia don't talk, Sonia don't interrupt, you wait till you grow up, then you'll understand. So I closed my mouth and listened.
All young people in those days bandied notions of freedom about: this kind of freedom, that kind of freedom, another kind of freedom. But when it came to "between him and her" there was no freedom: there was just walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. Not a week went by without our hearing horrifying rumors about a young girl who experienced what happens to girls who aren't careful; or a respectable woman who fell in love and went out of her mind; or a maid who was seduced; or a cook who ran off with her employer's son and came back alone with a baby; or a respectable woman who fell in love and threw herself at her beloved's feet only to be cast out and scoffed at. Do you say scoffed? No? When we were girls, chastity was both a cage and the only railing between you and the abyss. It lay on a girl's chest like a thirty-kilo stone. Even in the dreams she dreamed at night, chastity stayed awake and stood beside the bed and watched over her, so she could be very ashamed when she woke up in the morning, even if nobody knew.
All that business "between him and her" may be a bit less in the dark nowadays. A bit simpler. In the darkness that covered things then, it was much easier for men to abuse women. On the other hand, the fact that it's so much simpler and less mysterioius now—is that a good thing? Doesn't it turn out too ugly?
I'm surprised at myself that I'm talking to you about this at all. When I was still a girl, we would sometimes whisper to one another. But with a boy? Never in my life have I talked about such things with a boy. Not even with Buma, and we've been married now for nearly sixty years. How did we end up here? We were talking about Lyubov Nikitichna and her Tasia and Nina. If you go to Rovno someday, you can have a detective adventure. Maybe you could try to check if they still have in the town hall any documents that can shed light on that cover-up. Discover whether that countess, or princess, was or wasn't the mother of her two daughters. And whether she really was a princess or a countess. Or maybe whether Lebedevski, the mayor, was also the father of Tasia and Nina, just as he was said to be the father of poor Dora.
But on second thought, any documents there must have been burned by now ten times over, when we were conquered by the Poles, by the Red Army, and then by the Nazis, when they simply took us all and shot us in ditches and covered us with earth. Then there was Stalin again, with the NKVD, Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia-Poland-Russia-Germany-Russia. And now it doesn't belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine, or is it Belarus? Or some local gangs? I don't know myself who it belongs to now
. And I don't even really care: what there was doesn't exist anymore, and what there is now will in a few more years also turn to nothing.
The whole world, if you just look at it from a distance, will not go on forever. They say one day the sun will go out and everything will return to darkness. So why do men slaughter one another throughout history? What does it matter so much, who rules Kashmir or the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron? Instead of eating the apple from the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, it seems we ate the apple from the tree of rishes, and we ate it with pleasure. That's how paradise came to an end and this hell began.
There's so much either-or: you know so little even about people who live under the same roof as you do. You think you know a lot—and it turns out you know nothing at all. Your mother, for example—no, I'm sorry, I simply can't talk about her directly. Only in a roundabout way. Otherwise the wound starts to hurt. I won't talk about Fania. Only about what there was around her. What there was around Fania is also maybe a little bit Fania. We used to have a kind of proverb, that when you really love someone, then you love even their handkerchief. It loses something in translation. But you can see what I'm getting at.
Take a look at this, please: I've got something here that I can show you and you can feel it with your fingers, so you'll know that everything I've told you isn't just stories. Look at this please—no, it's not a tablecloth, it's a pillowcase, embroidered the way young ladies from good homes learned to embroider in the old days. It was embroidered for me as a present by the Princess—or Countess?—Lyubov Nikitichna. The head that's embroidered here, she told me herself, is the silhouette of the head of Cardinal Richelieu. Who he was, that Cardinal Richelieu, I don't remember anymore. Perhaps I never knew, I'm not clever like Haya and Fania: they were sent off to get their matriculation, and then to Prague, to study at the university. I was a bit thick. People always said about me: that Sonichka, she is so cute but she's a bit thick. I was sent to the Polish military hospital to learn how to be a qualified nurse. But still I remember very well, before I left home, that the princess told me it was the head of Cardinal Richelieu.
Perhaps you know who Cardinal Richelieu was? Never mind. Tell me another time, or don't bother. At my age, it's not so important to me if I end my days without the honor of knowing who Cardinal Richelieu was. There are plenty of cardinals, and most of them are none too fond of our people.
Deep down in my heart I'm a bit of an anarchist. Like Papa. Your mother was also an anarchist at heart. Of course, among the Klausners she could never express it: they thought her pretty strange as it was, although they always behaved politely toward her. In general with the Klausners manners were always the most important thing. Your other grandfather, Grandpa Alexander, if I didn't snatch my hand away quickly, would have kissed it. There's a children's story about Puss-in-Boots. In the Klausner family your mother was like a captive bird in a cage hanging in Puss-in-Boots's drawing room.
I'm an anarchist for the very simple reason that nothing good ever came from any Cardinal Richelieu. Only Ivanuchka Durachok, do you remember, the village idiot in our maid Xenyuchka's story who took pity on the ordinary people and didn't begrudge the little bread he had to eat, but used it to stop the hole in the bridge and because of that he was made king—only someone like him might take pity on us, too, occasionally. All the rest, the kings and rulers, have no pity on anyone. In fact, we ordinary people don't have much pity for each other either: we didn't exactly have pity for the little Arab girl who died at the road block on the way to the hospital because apparently there was some Cardinal Richelieu of a soldier there, without a heart. A Jewish soldier—but still a Cardinal Richelieu! All he wanted was to lock up and go home, and so that little girl died, whose eyes should be piercing our souls so none of us can sleep at night, though I didn't even see her eyes because in the papers they only show pictures of our victims, never theirs.
Do you think ordinary people are so wonderful? Far from it! They are just as stupid and cruel as their rulers. That's the real moral of Hans Christian Andersen's story about the emperor's new clothes, that ordinary people are just as stupid as the king and the courtiers and Cardinal Richelieu. But Ivanuchka Durachok didn't care if they laughed at him; all that mattered to him was that they should stay alive. He had compassion for people, all of whom without exception need some compassion. Even Cardinal Richelieu. Even the Pope, and you must have seen on television how sick and feeble he is, and here we were so lacking in compassion, we made him stand for hours in the sun on those sick legs of his. They had no pity on an old, very sick man, who you could see even on TV could stand upright only with terrible pain, but he made a supreme effort and stood in front of us saying nothing at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial) for half an hour without a break, in a heat wave, just so as not to bring us dishonor. It was quite hard for me to watch. I felt sorry for him.
Nina was a very good friend of your mother Fania, they were exactly the same age, and I made friends with the little one, Tasia. For many years they lived in our house with the princess, Maman they called her. Maman is the French for Mama, but who knows if she was really their Mama? Or just their nanny? They were very poor, I don't think they paid us even a kopek in rent. They were allowed to come into the house not through the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod, but through the main entrance, which was called paradny khod. They were so poor that the princess, the Maman, used to sit at night by the lamp sewing paper skirts for rich girls who were learning ballet. It was a kind of corrugated paper, and she glued lots of glittering stars on, made from golden paper.
Until one fine day that princess, or countess, Lyubov Nikitichna, left her two girls and suddenly went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for some long-lost relative called Yelizaveta Franzovna. And now just look how my memory is making an idiot of me! Where have I put my watch? I can't remember. But the name of some Yelizaveta Franzovna that I've never seen in my life, some Yelizaveta Franzovna that maybe eighty years ago our Princess Lyubov Nikitichna went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for, that I can remember as clear as the sun in the sky! Perhaps I lost my watch in Tunis, too?
In our dining room hung a picture in a gilded frame by some very expensive khudozhnik (artist): I remember that in the picture you could see a good-looking boy with fair hair, all disheveled, looking more like a spoiled girl than a boy, like something between a boy and a girl. I can't remember his face but I do remember very well that he was wearing a kind of embroidered shirt with puffy sleeves, a big yellow hat hanging by a string on her shoulder—perhaps it was a little girl after all—and you could see her three skirts, one under the other, because one side was raised a little and the lace peeped out from underneath, first a yellow underskirt, a very strong yellow like in a Van Gogh, then under that a white lace underskirt, and the bottom one—her legs were covered apparently by a third underskirt in sky blue. A picture like that, it seemed modest but it wasn't really. It was a life-size picture. And that girl who looked so much like a boy was standing there in the middle of the field, surrounded by pasture and white sheep, there were some light clouds in the sky, and in the distance you could see a strip of forest.
I remember once Haya said that a beauty like that shouldn't go out herding sheep but should stay inside the walls of the palace, and I said that the bottommost skirt was painted the same color as the sky, as though the skirt had been cut straight from the sky. And suddenly Fania burst out in fury against us and said, Be quiet, both of you, why are you talking such nonsense, it's a lying painting that is covering a very great moral decay. She used more or less these words, but not exactly, I can't repeat your mother's way of speaking, nobody could—can you still remember a little how Fania spoke?
I can't forget that outburst of hers, or her face at that moment. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time. I remember it all precisely because it was so unlike her: Fania never raised her voice, ever, even when she was hurt, she would just withdraw inward. And anyway, with her you always had to gues
s what she was feeling, what she didn't like. And here suddenly—I remember it was Saturday night or the end of some festival, maybe Sukkot? or Shavuot?—she suddenly burst out and shouted at us. Never mind me, all my life I've been just the silly little one, but to shout at Haya! Our big sister! The leader of the youth group! With her charisma! Haya, who was admired by the whole school!
But your mother, as though suddenly rebelling, started to pour scorn on that artistic painting that had been hanging there in our dining room all those years. She ridiculed it for sweetening reality! For lying! She said that in real life, shepherdesses are dressed in rags, not in silk, and they have faces scarred by cold and hunger, not angelic faces, and dirty hair with lice and fleas, not golden locks. And that to ignore suffering is almost as bad as inflicting it, and that the picture turned real life into some kind of Swiss chocolate box scene.
Maybe the reason your mother was in such a rage about the picture in the dining room was that the khudozhnik who painted it had made it seem as if there were no more disasters in the world. I think that's what made her angry. At the time of this outburst she must have been more miserable than anyone could have imagined. Forgive me for crying. She was my sister and she loved me a lot and she's been ravaged by scorpions. That's enough: I've finished crying now. Sorry. Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry.
25
SO THE eighteen-year-old Fania, following in the footsteps of her elder sister Haya, was sent in 1931 to study at the university in Prague, because in Poland the universities were virtually closed to Jews. Mother studied history and philosophy. Her parents, Hertz and Itta, like all the Jews of Rovno, were witnesses and victims of the anti-Semitism that was growing among their Polish neighbors and among the Ukrainians and Germans, Catholic and Orthodox Christians—acts of violence by Ukrainian hooligans and increasingly discriminatory measures by the Polish authorities. And, like the rumble of distant thunder, echoes reached Rovno of deadly incitement to violence and the persecution of Jews in Hitler's Germany.