The Clarinet Polka (38 page)

And he's going on about Poland of Mickiewicz and Słowacki, Poland who sent her sons to die for freedom all over the world, Poland of Kościuszko and Pułaski. Poland lost and partitioned. Poland rising again like a phoenix. Piłsudski's dream—a free and democratic Poland where Poles and Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Jews could all live together in peace and harmony. He says, “You do understand what I'm saying, don't you?”

Well, she wasn't just playing dumb. She really wasn't getting it. “You taught us Polish history,
Tatusiu
,” she says.

He makes this exasperated gesture like, oh, for Christ's sake. “When Hitler invaded Poland,” he says, “what did our gallant allies do? There were a hundred and ten French and British divisions massed on the border with Germany. Did they come to Poland's aid? No. When the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw into rubble, did the British bomb Germany? No. Did anyone lift a finger to honor their commitments to Poland? No.”

They had a rule in their house that if anybody was in bed, you had to talk in whispers and just float around quiet as a ghost, but that rule had pretty well gone down the drain by then. He got more and more cranked up until he was yelling his head off. She just stood there and watched him lose it. “Do you understand Hitler's plan for us? While the war's on, we're slave labor for the Reich. After the war's won, we'll be exterminated like our Jewish brethren. Did you know that?”

She shakes her head because she didn't know that. He'd never told her that. And he's going at her full tilt, yelling right in her face. She said it was like being hit by a volcano.

“The Nazis butchered us. Three million Polish Christians dead. Three million Polish Jews dead. Bodies hanging from lamp posts. People shot in front of walls day after day. And the death factories— We too died at Auschwitz, at Treblinka. Death squads. Mass graves. And the Russians deported half a million of us. They starved us and worked us to death. Polish babies stolen from their mothers and sent off to be raised as Germans. Polish girls used as experiments—as
experiments
—by the Nazi doctors. Unspeakable tortures. My father, your grandfather— Did they spare a single one of your grandparents? No, not a single one was spared.

“The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto slaughtered— The Soviet Army at the Vistula—sent the message, ‘Rise up, rise up. Now is the time.' So Warsaw rose, and the Soviets stood by and watched while we were crushed utterly. Yes, they let the Nazis do their dirty work for them—the bastards—and then they marched into the city. Girls fought, did you know that? Girls as young as you. Girls younger than you. Dying, slaughtered. Raped, tortured. Poland betrayed again, sold out at Yalta. Crushed under the boot heels of the Soviets. My comrades-in-arms, my brothers and sisters, the flower of my generation— We who fought the Nazis. We who suffered and bled. The Soviets called us fascists. We were shot, deported, put on public trial. And to this day Polish children are told lies, lies, lies. Do you understand? Poland betrayed. Poland crucified. Poland the Christ of nations.
And you think being Polish is playing in a polka band?
”

She felt like he'd rolled right over her and squashed her down to nothing. Her eyes filled up with tears, and they ran down her face, and she just stood there like she was frozen.

Her dad had got himself so worked up he was panting. He pressed his hand against his chest and kept taking these big breaths until he pulled himself back together. It was like he'd gone somewhere else, but when he came back so he could really see her again, he got this terrible look on his face. Very gently he wiped her tears away with his fingertips.

“I'm sorry,
Janusiu
,” he says. “It's my fault.”

He reaches out for her. They weren't a very huggy family, you know what I mean? But he puts his arms around her. She says, “Oh, Daddy,” and just starts bawling. He keeps stroking her head, and he says, “My darling, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.”

*   *   *

Nobody had a good night. Janice went to bed and cried awhile, and drifted off, and then maybe two in the morning she heard her parents talking in their bedroom, and she never really got back to sleep after that. Every time she'd get about half asleep, she'd wake right up again with this awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. Then about four, she heard footsteps—real slow and deliberate—and she looked out her window and her dad was pacing up and down the sidewalk. He'd walk down to the end of the block and then turn around and walk back. Over and over. Smoking his pipe. And she thought, oh, it's all my fault.

The whole family went to Mass as usual, and her dad didn't have a good word to say. They came home, and he announced, “I think I'm going to go back down to the church and see the priest.” He didn't say about what.

Well, you don't just pop down on Sunday afternoon and see the priest. If he's one of these new-style priests like Father Obinski, you better make an appointment a week in advance. So Janice and her brothers figured the old man would be right back, but he didn't come back for a couple hours. Then he walked into the house and took his wife off into the bedroom. When they came out, he announced that they had something to say.

The whole family went into the living room and sat down. It wasn't unusual for Czesław to call a family meeting like that; it was something he'd done on a regular basis their whole lives. He said he'd been wrestling with himself all night long, and then he'd had a good talk with Father Obinski and now he saw things in a new light. He and his wife—“your dear mother”—had only been trying to do what they'd thought best. They'd wanted their children to be happy, to enjoy the benefits and advantages of America. They'd wanted their children to grow up to be ordinary Americans.

“We did not want to cast a shadow over your childhood,” their mother said.

“You have asked us to tell you about the war,” he said. “Each of you has asked—many times—but we have never told you. We were wrong. We understand that now. John, you have left us already, and you, Mark, and Janice will be leaving us soon, and there are things you need to know. Now we will tell you everything that you need to know.”

FOURTEEN

Janice and her brothers grew up on stories of Krajne Podlaski in Poland. I guess you could say they were just shoved into that place up to their eyeballs. “It was a real town to us,” she told me. “In some ways it was more real to me than Raysburg—but it was real like a fairy tale.” When she was little, it was all kind of blurred together in her mind, so she didn't know the difference between her parents' lives and the stories in those picture books her mom read to her.

The woods where Little Red Riding Hood had to walk to her grandmother's house, and where Hansel and Gretel got lost—well, those were the dark scary woods outside of Krajne Podlaski, and she knew that her daddy had escaped into those same dark woods and lived there like Robin Hood and fought against the bad Germans. There were some mines not too far from Krajne Podlaski, and that's where the Seven Dwarfs worked, and that's also where some of the partisans hid out near the end of the war. One of the Markowskis—some distant guy in her mom's family—was called Prince Markowski, and so naturally he was the prince in Rapunzel or Cinderella. And you know how many princesses they've got in fairy tales? Well, her mother, Marysia Markowska, and her mother's beautiful cousin, Krystyna Markowska, had to be real princesses because all they ever thought about was fancy balls and what they were going to wear to them, and going to Warsaw—which Janice was sure had to be a magical place with castles in it—and the clincher was Janice's mom used to say, “Krystyna really could feel the pea under all the mattresses—poor Krystyna.”

There's a river running right by Krajne Podlaski, and in the summer the river's like glass, and you could walk from the church right down to the river, so Janice thought it was the Ohio because she thought “like glass” only meant you could see your reflection in it, and you could walk from St. Stans down to the river, and it flooded sometimes in both Krajne Podlaski and South Raysburg, so of course it had to be the same river. If you went from Edgewood to South Raysburg—“That's a huge trip if you're five years old,” Janice said—you were going to a place where only the old people spoke Polish, but if you kept on going, you'd come to Krajne Podlaski in Poland where everyone spoke Polish. She used to say to her parents, “Let's go to Poland,” and they'd laugh and say, “Maybe someday, Janusiu.” She thought that when she was old enough to go to school with the nuns, they could go on down the river to Poland.

Every Sunday night their family read Polish poems and stories to each other, and some things they'd read over and over—like this long poem called
Pan Tadeusz
—and when Janice was little, it was just a bunch of big words flowing along that'd put her straight to sleep, and she'd always wake up in her bed and not know how she got there. But every year she looked forward to those same stories coming around again. All those people in those stories were like her old friends.

She got older, and she started sorting out what was real from what was just stories—although she said she wasn't sure she ever got it really straight—but Poland still had that strange sad feeling, “like an enchanted kingdom,” she said, but she knew it wasn't a place she could ever go visit because everything about it had changed, been destroyed by the war. That's what her parents kept saying. And all that was left was memory. But her whole life Janice dreamed of Krajne Podlaski in Poland.

“Even in the dream, I'll think, oh, I've come back again.” She dreamed the busy market and the town square and the peasant houses with their thatched roofs and the old Jewish quarter where the streets were narrow, just dirt, and buildings were packed in tight together. She never told her parents about these dreams because she was afraid they'd say, “No, it wasn't like that,” and she wanted it to be like that.

Janice's mom was Marysia Markowska and her grandad was Pan Piotr Markowski who owned the distillery. He also did a lot of heavy-duty business deals, so he went to Warsaw a lot, and some of Marysia's happiest memories were of getting to go to Warsaw with him. Janice's dad's dad was Dr. Dłuwiecki, and he had a little clinic—a
przychodnia
—and Czesław grew up sneaking in to look through the medical books, trying to figure out, he said, “the secrets of human reproduction.” He played cowboys and Indians, can you believe that? It's true. There were books in Polish for little boys all about that wild place called America, and Czesław read them by the dozen. He and a bunch of the other tough little boys would run off into the forest and pretend they were Iroquois Indians.

Janice and her brothers had a million details about Krajne Podlaski in their heads. When their dad was little, it was a really big deal to have indoor plumbing, and most people had outhouses. They had keys to them, and if you made the midnight dash on a winter's night and you'd forgot the key, boy, were you mad. Your water came from the water carrier. He showed up in a horse-drawn wagon and brought the water to you from barrels hanging on each end of a yoke over his shoulders. And the ice man brought you ice cut from the river in the winter, and you'd put it in the basement and cover it with sawdust, and that's how you preserved your food in the summer. And only the fancy section of town had sidewalks and streetlamps, and the lamps were still gas right up to the war. Janice used to imagine Lili Marlene, or anyhow some Polish girl like her—you know, in a trench coat—standing under one of those gas lamps.

So Janice and her brothers could have told you lots of things about Krajne Podlaski, this town in Poland they'd never seen and never would see—not the way it used to be—but all they knew about the war was that their father had been a partisan in the Home Army and that the Germans had put their mother into a labor camp. Just that much, and a few other little bits they'd overheard, and then it'd been, “Thank God you weren't there.”

But that day their father was asking them what they wanted to know. And what they wanted to know was
everything
. There was this long silence. They didn't even know the right questions to ask.

Her brother Mark, Janice said, has a very logical mind—always wanting to see things go from A to B to C in a straight line. “Start at the beginning,” he said. “Start when the war started.” So their parents started with the invasion of Poland and the bombing of Warsaw and like that, and the boys wanted to hear all about the
blitzkrieg
and the fighting, but Janice didn't.

“It was just like when we were growing up,” she told me. When they'd been reading all that Polish stuff to each other on Sunday nights, her brothers would get all excited in the parts about hunting or fighting, but Janice was mainly interested in the girls—what they were wearing and who was in love with who, and “in the little details of life,” she said. So Janice kept stopping them because she wanted to hear all those little details. “Where were you when you heard about it?” she asked them. “What did you see?” She wanted them to make it really real for her.

When the war started, Czesław said, he and his father had been driving back to Krajne Podlaski from Warsaw. The road was jammed with people going in both directions—fleeing to wherever they thought was safe, but the problem was, nowhere was safe. German planes flew in low and strafed the road. If Czesław and his dad hadn't run away from their car and jumped into a ditch, they would've been killed. They saw peasants in carts killed. They saw dead horses all along the road. They saw an entire family killed, even the children. A plane chased the children running and caught them with machine-gun bullets, even a little girl not more than six or seven.

Janice's mother was at the Markowski estate where her cousin Krystyna lived. The girls were out riding. “I was just your age, Janusiu,” her mother said. The girls heard a strange droning in the sky and so they reined in their horses and looked up. There was a formation of German planes going over, and the girls didn't even know enough to be afraid but just stared up like they were looking at a comet or an eclipse. “We watched the planes move across the blue bowl of the sky,” her mom said, and Janice loved the way her mom had said that—“the blue bowl of the sky”—and even when they couldn't see the planes anymore, they could still hear their engines, and then they heard the dark low thunder when the bombs began to fall.