The Old Brown Suitcase (6 page)

We walk quickly now. The beggar boy is left behind, but I feel that the whole world is staring at us. We rush into a train station. Agnes shows the conductor our tickets and we climb into one of the cars. It is almost empty. A few minutes later the train pulls out of the station.

Agnes sits next to me. She is wearing a grey hat to match her suit. Her eyes are grey too, but large and bright. She is fair-haired. I wonder if she is Jewish. But then, I am fair-haired too.

It is my first train ride in two years. I sit on the wooden bench, taking in things I haven’t seen for so long. We pass by open fields and forests, peasants on carts filled with straw, cows grazing in the pastures, and farm houses with white curtains in the windows. The Ghetto wall is behind me. But I wish my parents and my sister were here. God knows when I will see them again.

As sleepiness overcomes me, I rest my head against the shoulder of the woman in a grey suit. It seems only an instant later that I hear someone say, “Wake up, Slava, we are almost there.”

The voice is unfamiliar. Whose is it? Where am I? I open my eyes and see Agnes. Oh yes, I remember now. We are on the train going to Babushka. Agnes takes something out of her bag and hands it to me. A piece of bread and sausage. I almost swallow the food without chewing. It’s so good.

The sun shines brightly as the train moves through the peaceful countryside.

“You’ve slept for an hour and a half. We should be arriving soon,” says Agnes. She tidies my hair and straightens my dress. “You want to look pretty for your grandmother,” she says.

The train slows down and passes a white sign that says ZALESIE, then stops. Agnes takes my suitcase and we get off. The station is deserted. We walk to a wooden hut set back from the tracks, almost hidden by trees. Agnes slowly opens a door that squeaks.

It’s a general store. An old woman sits half asleep in a rocking chair, a floral shawl around her shoulders and a kerchief on her head. She sees us and gets up with difficulty.

“What do you want?” she asks in rural Polish, eyeing us suspiciously. Her mouth is toothless and her voice harsh.

“Could you please direct us to Spokojna Street?” says Agnes.

“Who are you seeing there?” asks the woman.

“A friend,” replies Agnes.

The old woman stares us up and down, then gives us instructions, pointing her bony finger out the window.

We come to a road with small wooden houses on either side. As we pass by, curtains are pulled aside and faces look out at us. Yet there is no one to be seen on the road. No little kids play outside the houses. Only the occasional dog barks as we pass.

I am not afraid. I compare this peaceful village with the Ghetto, and I happily breathe in the fresh country air. Then I think of my parents and my happiness ebbs.

We turn into Spokojna Street and stop at a white house with a white wood fence around it.

A curtain is swept to one side, and a face looks out for a moment. Then the door of the house opens and Babushka runs out. “Slava,” she says, smiling and pecking me on the cheek. “My dear little Slava.” Then she raises a finger to her lips and draws us inside. There, in the privacy of drawn curtains, Babushka hugs me tearfully and sighs.

“The neighbours mustn’t suspect anything,” she says. “I told them that I had promised to take in a friend’s daughter.”

Agnes stays for tea and gives Babushka my papers.

A man comes in. He is bald, heftily built, with a red face, and he is wearing black round-rimmed glasses. He is Babushka’s husband, whom I have never met. His name is Vlad. He smiles in greeting and takes his tea.

Agnes says that she must leave.

“You are a very brave lady,” says Babushka. “How will we ever thank you for bringing Slava to us?” She gives Agnes a jar of preserved pears for the road. The tall woman thanks her and kisses me goodbye.

“I hope to see you after the war is over,” she says to me. “You are a brave little girl.”

After Agnes is gone, Babushka takes my hand and leads me to my room. She beckons me to sit beside her on the bed. “Now, Slavenka, I want you to understand that we are in a very dangerous situation. I am Jewish and so are you, but no one must know, or they will report us to the Germans. Vlad is a Catholic and because we are married, they won’t suspect him or me.”

She strokes my blond braids. “You look anything but Jewish, but you must still be careful whom you talk to. Say nothing about who you are or where you come from. As far as anyone here is concerned, you are just a visitor. People around here are so afraid of the Germans that if they suspect one little thing they’ll report it. And then we are as good as dead. All three of us.”

The room has a mirror on the wall. I look at myself and see a skinny runt with long blond braids and a tattered navy-blue dress. Surely that face isn’t mine. It is a grey face, with sunken cheeks and black circles under its round green eyes. Babushka’s hand gently strokes my hair. I close my eyes and turn weeping into her arms.

Babushka, who comes from Russia, often calls me Slavenka, the Russian diminutive of my name. I love her Russian accent when she speaks Polish, particularly the way she pronounces my name. The sound is like no other. It is soft and melodious. The love she feels for me sounds in the way she says it.

Babushka is short, with very round hips, and large breasts. Her hair is a rusty gold because, I discover, she uses henna once a month. Already in her sixties, she does much physical work around the house and garden, and even carries home large branches from the forest for firewood. She has closets full of silk dresses, but never wears them, because they are too good for Zalesie. Besides, she says, she is saving them for when the war is over. Then she plans to return to Warsaw, to her lovely apartment.

Babushka has a big silver samovar, from which we drink our tea.

In the months that follow, I help Babushka with her chores, and she teaches me Russian. We begin with poems by Alexander Pushkin, the great poet of Russia’s golden age of literature. She also reads to me, while translating into Polish, from the Russian novel for young people,
Princess Dzavacha.
I am fascinated with the heroine whose name is Nina. She also had to part with her father and leave her home. She is a very brave girl.

Babushka also teaches me Russian folk songs. I learn to sing “Karobushka” and “Kalinka.” We sing and dance together, while Vlad looks on and smokes his pipe. Then, when it is time for bed, she helps me wash up and tucks me in, singing a lullaby.

Even though I go to sleep calm and happy, there are many nights when I have terrible nightmares. I wake up screaming. Babushka comes and takes me to her bed, where I fall asleep while she hums.

There are days, especially rainy autumn days, when I sit at home and just stare down the country road, aching for my parents. The look on Babushka’s face tells me she understands.

Sometimes we go shopping. Food is scarce, so we line up for hours to get our ration of bread, one loaf for three days. We usually line up in front of the bakery, and the baker hands out the bread through the window. While in line, Babushka chats with her neighbours about the weather, and putting up preserves. They pay little attention to me, although from time to time some of them eye me with suspicion.

Our meals are simple and meagre. We eat what Babushka and Vlad grow in their garden: vegetables and fruit in the summer; and in the winter, potatoes topped with cracklings. But we must ration ourselves carefully, or there will not be enough for the three of us. I sit down to each meal only to feel still hungry afterwards. Most of the food is given to Vlad, because Babushka says he is the master of the house. Winter comes bringing ice and snow. Somewhere I had lost my mittens, and my hands become red and chapped from frost. I sit by the frozen window, behind a curtain of snow, fingering the jagged flower patterns of ice. There has been no word from my parents.

Spring arrives and still we hear nothing from my parents. We wonder whether they are still in the Ghetto.

Then comes the terrible month of May, when night after night the sky glows red in the direction of Warsaw. Vlad tells us that the Ghetto is on fire. A handful of Jews refused to be taken away in cattle cars like animals; they are resisting with a few guns and home-made weapons. In retaliation, the Germans are burning the Ghetto block by block.

One night, the sky is so red that the people of our village gather outside their homes to watch.

A neighbour comments, “Look there, the Yids are frying,”

and laughs. I look at Babushka and see the horror in her eyes. Here in this peaceful village, I feel on this night as frightened as I had felt in the Ghetto.

Later, I lie in bed and think about the way the neighbour laughed at the suffering Jews. I picture the Jewish fighters shooting down the enemy: they fall one by one, and the ignorant neighbour is among them. I can go to sleep now, feeling proud that a handful of Jews had the courage to spit at the devil.

(ROCKVILLE, ONTARIO, 1947)

AT THE END OF THE
summer, we moved again, this time to a small town in Ontario so that we could all learn English. I was sorry to leave Marie, my first Canadian friend.

The trip from Ste. Adèle to Rockville was long and noisy. We passed immense stretches of farm land, pastures with grazing cows and grass fields filled with wild flowers. The air blowing in through the open windows was hot and scented with the grassy smell of earth. An hour after leaving Ste. Adèle, Father, who consulted the map regularly, announced that we were in the province of Ontario.

I thought that being in another province would change the landscape, but it continued on as before. Our bus stopped briefly in the town of Cornwall, let some people off and drove on to Rockville.

After getting off at the bus terminal in the centre of town, we found a taxi to take us to our lodgings. The downtown area was small, with rows of low buildings on either side of a main street. We passed by a movie theatre, a large food market called Schmidt’s and Woolworth’s department store. We were out of the downtown in three minutes, and that included a long stop at a red light. It was only a few more minutes until we arrived at a rundown section of town, and stopped in front of our new address.

This was very different from the Westmount house, or the
pension
in Ste. Adèle.

The house was painted three different colours. The bottom part was a faded blue, the top part a dirty white and the porch was brown. There were different coloured curtains in each window. Some were half-closed, some all the way. The windows were open, and someone was shouting in French.

We gathered our belongings and walked up the sagging stairs to the door.

When Father knocked, a stout woman with frizzy hair came out and invited us in. The front room reeked of fried onions and burned grease. Father introduced us in his careful European French. The woman, who in turn introduced herself as Madame Gilbert, smiled pleasantly, and offered to show us the part of the house we were to rent.

She led us outside through an unkempt lawn to a door on the side of the house. It opened onto five stairs descending to a kitchen, which had a hot plate, small fridge, table and four chairs. Next to a small dirty window was a narrow bed with a table and a lamp. The adjoining room was furnished as a bed-sitting room, and had a crib in it as well. Finally there was a small washroom, with a yellowed bathtub, sink and a grimy toilet.

Madame Gilbert excused herself and returned to her part of the house. My parents didn’t like our lodgings, but it was only to be for a short while, and we had survived worse than this. So they decided that I would sleep on the bed in the kitchen, while they and Pyza would take the bedroom.

I looked out the kitchen window, and saw a creek bordered by tall grass and cattails. I liked the view.

After we settled in, Father bought the English
Rockville Daily
and found an advertisement for English language instruction. Both he and Mother began their twice-a-week, two-hour English lesson, while I watched over Pyza.

As the final days of summer passed, I spent a lot of time on my own. In the evenings I listened to both the French and the English radio programs, and found that I was beginning to understand English a whole lot better. Also, Father made me learn the vocabularies of his lessons.

Outside the house, just at the beginning of the grassy area, near the creek, I found a curious hole in the ground, similar to the one in Babushka’s garden where Vlad had tried to grow tobacco. It was deep and overgrown with weeds that grew around a stunted tree whose gnarled branches spread out over the opening. The hole was deep enough for a small person to hide in. With the branches for protection, it felt cosy and safe. I went there everyday to write in my diary, which I kept buried in a box in the sand.

Occasionally, Mother sent me to the grocery, two blocks down the street. One day the grocery had a “closed” sign on the door so I decided to walk to another store. I turned into the street, along which our taxi rode that first day, and walked and walked without any luck.

After half an hour I came to the downtown area, where the main intersection was busy with Saturday shoppers. There was a bank on each of the three corners. The movie house was showing “Night and Day,” and I wished I had enough money to see it. But I just had enough for a loaf of bread, butter and tea, so I kept walking till I came to Schmidt’s supermarket. It had rows upon rows of grocery-packed shelves, and it took a while to find what I wanted.

The store buzzed with people who spoke mostly English. I felt conspicuous. Did the people around me notice I was a foreigner? I was nervous when the time came to pay. Would I understand what the cashier said? At the checkout I showed her the money and she gave me change. We exchanged no words. I walked back through the side streets near the supermarket. The houses here looked much nicer than the ones in our area. They looked freshly painted and their lawns were like green velvet. I looked into the windows wondering about the lives inside.

When I got home, Mother was upset with me because I’d been gone longer than ever before. Father told me never to disappear for so long without letting them know, at least by telephone.

I asked Mother if I would have to be called “Elizabeth” in school.

“Yes,” she replied, “it’s a very nice name.”

But it wasn’t. I hated it. I would feel strange as Elizabeth, and not Slava. I was beginning to feel a split in myself already. Slava on one side, and the wretched Elizabeth on the other.

Monday morning. I felt the old growl of fear in my stomach as I stood with my father in line at the principal’s office. I looked down my sweater, skirt and shoes. They were far from new. I didn’t have many clothes, and none that were pretty.

Just as our turn came, the shrill bell rang. The secretary looked up at us from her papers and said, “It is nine o’clock This girl will be late for class. What grade is she in?”

Father had prepared some English phrases on a piece of paper, and tried to explain that this was why we had come to see the principal.

“We do not know what grade Elizabeth is in,” he answered the secretary.

It was the first time I’d heard Father call me Elizabeth. It sounded so unnatural.

At this point, the principal came out of his office and motioned us in. He was grey-haired, with a long thin nose and round glasses.

“My name is Dunshill,” he said jovially. “What can I do for you folks?”

“I am Stefan Lenski,” replied Father. “And this is my daughter, Elizabeth. She is fourteen years old, and has not been to school because of the war in Poland, except for six months afterwards. She can read, speak and write some Polish and French but not much English.” He spoke with difficulty, but confidently. I almost understood all he said.

Mr. Dunshill took a sip of coffee.

“I will try to place Elizabeth in grade nine,” he said slowly, “but I don’t expect that she will pass into grade ten, considering what you have told me. It is already late; I will take your daughter up to her classroom now.”

Father thanked him.

“You’re in good hands now,” he said to me in Polish, and left.

While I sat quietly, dreading the trip to the classroom, Mr. Dunshill wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he picked up his coffee, which he slurped all the way upstairs. In front of the door to a classroom, he handed me the piece of paper.

“Give this note to the teacher,” he said, still gulping his coffee, and left me standing alone by the closed door.

I opened the door very slowly and stepped just inside. There I stood for a long time until the teacher finished what she was saying. She beckoned me to the front of the room. I gave her the note, all the while feeling miserable standing in front of the silent class while she read it.

“Elizabeth is a new girl to our school. She has come from Poland and doesn’t speak much English, but we hope with our help she will soon learn, don’t we? Class, meet Elizabeth Lenski. She will sit over there,” said the teacher, pointing to a desk.

A murmur swept the room, followed by a shuffling of papers and the swish of bodies turning as I walked to my desk. I lowered my head unable to meet anyone’s eye, and stared at the first page of an empty notebook.

The teacher resumed the lesson and everyone else took notes. I listened but understood nothing. Although I knew a few of the words, I could make no sense of the teacher’s sentences.

The bell rang, and the teacher stopped talking. For a moment all eyes turned in my direction. I was being examined. A few of the boys and girls came up to my desk with an inquisitive look. They tried to explain that right now was “recess,” a morning break.

I understood some of the questions they asked.

“What did you do in Poland?” asked a pretty girl with dark curly hair.

“I go ballet school,” I answered, trying to sound important.

“What did your father do there?” asked another.

“He is important man in government. We … family of Russian aristocratic,” I managed.

They looked intrigued.

One said, “Aristocratic! What’s that?”

Another said, “You know, kings and queens and princesses and counts, stupid.”

A blond girl poked her face into mine, jeering, “A princess, eh?”

All I could do was nod.

“When I know English, I tell you,” I answered, amazed that I could have said this much.

“You aren’t dressed like a princess,” said a tall boy eating a chocolate bar.

“Where do you live?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

The group started to laugh and ran out of the room, following the boy with the chocolate bar. I was left alone in the classroom, trying to hold back the oncoming tears.

“Don’t cry,” spoke a gentle voice.

I looked up and saw a tall, dark-haired boy standing beside me. His dark brown sweater matched his eyes.

“Would you like me to help you with these notes?” he asked, pointing to his notebook. “You can have them to copy, if you like. By the way, my name is Joshua.” He seemed very kind.

“Thank you, I want notes,” I said.

He placed them on my desk. “You can work on them at lunch or take them home. Come on, I’ll show you the playground,” he said cheerfully. Thankful, I followed Joshua outside.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of teachers, students and English sentences. I went home with a pile of new textbooks and notebooks. Math, biology, English grammar, history and French. It seemed impossible to learn so much.

After dinner I told Father that I knew nothing about math. There was homework assigned, and I was panicking.

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you,” he promised.

Father explained the math problems, then told me to go ahead and try the exercises on my own. I couldn’t do them. I understood nothing. I bit off the entire end of my pencil in despair.

A little later, Father looked at the exercises I had tried to do.

“You didn’t understand a word I said,” he shouted impatiently. I ran into the bathroom, locked the door and cried in utter humiliation. After I quieted down, I realized that I had cried twice in one day. What was happening to me?

When I came out, Father apologized.

“You can’t be expected to learn everything in one day,” he said.

I tried to copy Joshua’s notes, and do some reading. I couldn’t understand much, and working with the dictionary took hours. Finally I attempted some French grammar, and had more success.

At night I kept waking and dreaming. English words echoed in my head.

I woke in the morning feeling tired and cold, despite the warmth of the apartment. As the routine of dressing and eating breakfast progressed, thoughts of school became more and more terrifying. I walked to school slowly but arrived at class on time, slipping quietly into my seat. I didn’t dare look at anyone, until I heard a voice calling “Hi, Liz.”

I turned around and saw Joshua walking towards me. I didn’t answer until he said it again, and then realized that “Liz” must be short for Elizabeth. I liked it better.

I returned his notes, and the bell rang. Lessons went on, and I struggled to understand. At lunch time Joshua helped me again with his English notes. When the bell rang and the French lesson began, I felt happier. I looked over at Joshua. He smiled at me, and I smiled back.

Turning away, I met the eyes of the blond girl who had questioned me yesterday. Later on, she came over and introduced herself as Eva Schmidt. It was hard to talk, and I could see her growing impatient with my inability to understand what she was saying.

I couldn’t carry on an English conversation with anyone at school except Joshua. He patiently continued to help me with English grammar. I practised my daily English conversation with him, and was getting better. But every time Joshua and I were together, I would see a peculiar look on Eva’s face as her eyes followed our every move.

After a month of struggle, I gave up on my school work in all other subjects but French and English. Not that I didn’t listen to lessons and try to participate in class activities, but I gave up worrying about passing into other grades. My parents were preoccupied with other matters and left me alone.