The Woman from Hamburg (22 page)

Your body “or any of its parts” was not used for transplants because it was diseased.

Your London girlfriend kept the urn with your ashes in her house for a couple of years.

A while ago she took it to the riverside meadow where your best thoughts used to come to you.

It was a sunny, windy day.

She opened the lid of the urn and waited for the wind to carry off its contents.

English became your language. Except for your letters to Halina S., you wrote everything in English. Even your childhood memories, in which your grandmother, Aunt Dorota, your mother, and you appear—you all speak English. Even your diaries.

With the exception of four words in Caracas, written in Polish in block letters in the middle of the page:

BOŻE, BĄDŹ WOLA TWOJA
. LORD, THY WILL BE DONE.

You told your psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, in English, about the wardrobe and the Aryan side.

I cannot believe that they understood.

You were walking around with an undiagnosed illness. It is called “survivor’s syndrome.” In Toronto I witnessed an attempt at curing it—group psychotherapy for a couple of people your age. It was based on narration without an ending, so one woman told about her little brother whom she “had not kept an eye on” in Auschwitz, and the other told about the wardrobe she had tried to enter in the presence of strangers. They had been telling these stories for thirty years, always with terror and weeping.

A year ago the sickness claimed Bogdan Wojdowski, whose book,
Bread for the Departed
, you were reading in Jerusalem. His wife opened the door to his room in order to call him to dinner, and saw him hanging from the window frame. “We both survived, but not completely,” Henryk Grynberg wrote after his death. “… we paid a price for our survival—a very high price. So high that sooner or later our resources are exhausted.”
⁴

You also wrote down your conversation with your mother in English.

Apparently, a Polish original existed. It came into being shortly after the war, the day before Mother’s Day. Your school assignment was to write an appropriate poem. You had no ideas. Your grandmother was sitting near you, knitting.

She said, “It’s simple. Begin with ‘Mother, where are you? Why aren’t you here?’ ”

You began, “Mother, where are you? …”

You wrote the rest at one go, not lifting your pen from the notebook.

No one knows what happened to the original. I know the version re-created by you, a grown man, thirty years later.

I was afraid to translate it into Polish. I asked Piotr Sommer, a poet and translator of English poetry into Polish, to help me. I wanted to soften the terrible, obscene words, but he wouldn’t agree. This is what you screamed at her, and that’s how it should remain; these are your words.

This is what you screamed …

Even had I not known what you wanted done with your skull, I would have thought that it was a cry of Hamlet’s.

Hamlet screams at Gertrude—a son crazed with jealousy and yearning.

Hamlet after Treblinka …

“Mother, where are you?”

You wrote the rest in a single breath, without lifting your pen from your notebook.

You knew why she wasn’t with you. She had stayed in the ghetto. She had stayed with Albert, her beloved. She preferred to die with him than to survive with you, her son. The poem was a conversation with your mother, so you allowed her to explain herself. “Darling,” she said to you, “it was easier to hide a child than a grown woman. I wanted you to be saved.…” You started screaming at her. You didn’t need her sacrifice. You needed her! You had as much right to death as she had. She deceived you. (“And you lied to me like a slut,” you screamed.) You knew, you knew it instantly, that she was lying. She said, “Mummy will be with you in a few days.” You knew that she was lying! She begged you to stop screaming. To stop yearning. Your yearning hurts you and it doesn’t help her. You exploded in a burst of fury:

She tried to calm you down: “Men and women died in separate chambers.” She assumed that you knew very little
about Treblinka. She was mistaken. You knew a great deal! You knew that sometimes the flow of gas was weak, and it took many hours for people to die. You hoped that there had been enough gas for her.

That’s how you talked with your mother.

That’s how you screamed!

I think that you were talking with her and screaming throughout your entire life.

Even if she didn’t know the arrangements you’d made for your skull, she still would have thought that this was Hamlet’s scream.

Hamlet screams at Gertrude—mad with jealousy and a son’s yearning.

Hamlet after Treblinka.

I spent a day with Peter Schok. I didn’t like him. This was in Amsterdam; Benjamin G., a translator of Polish literature and a theater director, introduced us. He loved Peter Schok. He said that he had a beautiful, melodious voice. He said that all of him was beautiful, that he was covered with soft, raven-black hair. “Tender violence,” Benjamin G. called it in English—a combination of tenderness, masculinity, and strength. This was embarrassing for me, because I liked the previous boy with whom Benjamin G. was still living even though he no longer loved him. I especially
liked his photographs. He was particularly fond of photographing interiors without people, with a couple of simple objects: a flower in a vase, peeling paint on a door frame, threadbare tapestry. These things, as is often the case with details, were a metaphor for the eternal questions; they symbolized loneliness and transience.

Peter Schok turned out to be short, pale, and uncommunicative. Everything he wore was black and made of leather. We went out for a walk. He was a Jew, so first he took me to the Portuguese synagogue. He assured me in his melodious voice that it was modeled on the Temple of Solomon and rivaled it in beauty. He came to life in the Jewish museum. He had recently quit his job at a hotel reception desk and accepted a position as a masseur in a sauna, but he looked intently at the portraits of diamond cutters, physicians, publishers, thinkers, and bankers, their wives and children, their rings, tiaras, and strings of pearls, with the pride of someone who was an heir to all of this.

We walked along the canals, which Peter Schok liked; we stopped talking and it became more enjoyable. We drank his favorite wine and ate Indonesian pancakes with seaweed sauce. In the evening he escorted me back to Benjamin G.’s house and said goodbye. He didn’t come inside; he didn’t want to upset the boy with whom Benjamin G. was still living although he had stopped loving him.

“AIDS is a problem for your neighbors,” Benjamin G. wrote me in a letter. “At most, you know the people who are dying by sight. But one day someone whose address is in your address book will die. Then someone with whom you once slept. Then someone who is really close to you.…”

I have the telephone numbers of some of Benjamin G.’s friends in my address book. They lived in Berlin. Konrad was a pastor and Wolfgang Max Faust, an art critic. I had taken a long walk with the pastor, just as with Peter Schok. For some reason, people who have a life-threatening disease set aside time for me, even though they have so little of it. Perhaps they want to enjoy their world by showing it off? Perhaps they wish to make a gift to other people of the place that is dear to them?

On a hot spring morning, the pastor gave me the gift of the Havel River and the meadows bordering the Havel. We visited the Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference was held (enormous strapping fellows, two meters tall, dressed like soldiers of Frederick the Great’s guard, were performing drills in the courtyard), and the nineteenth-century Russian settlement, with little wooden houses that looked like they came from Irkutsk. We were accompanied by the smell of prematurely dried grasses and the steaming river. It turned out that Wolfgang Max Faust,
the pastor’s friend who had AIDS, recorded each of those days in his journal.

“It was a little too loud,” he wrote.

Or, “To do what needs doing and remain without desires.”

Or, “Death is an experience of the body. I think about it with my body, not with my head. Everyone should open himself up to welcoming the death within him.”

Or, “In art it’s no longer a question of art. It’s a question of our life.…”

And so forth.

He published these notes in a book with the subtitle
The Quotidian. Art. AIDS
, and then he hanged himself in the cellar with a radio cable. Pastor Konrad felt he didn’t have the strength to conduct a funeral service. He asked another pastor who was suffering from AIDS to do it. That pastor got permission for the funeral from the hospital. They buried Wolfgang Max Faust in the loveliest Berlin cemetery, not far from Marlene Dietrich.

“If I had to die now, I would say ‘Was that all?’,” Wolfgang Max Faust observed one day.
¹

Yes, as Benjamin G. predicted, I, too, have people with AIDS in my address book.

A stupid feeling.

Peter Schok was the next to get sick. He already had a new lover. Benjamin G. explained their breakup to me as Peter Schok’s fear of true love. The fear might be the consequence of Peter Schok’s Jewish ancestry, Benjamin G. said. The link between his ancestry and his fear was unclear, because Peter Schok was born ten years after the war, and his mother had spent the war years in Great Britain, but this explanation gave the affair the stamp of tragedy and brought Benjamin G. some relief.

The virus settled in his brain. After his surgery, the doctor said the patient had one year to live.

It was January.

Peter Schok visited a woman artist whom he was friends with and asked for a pleasing picture. He selected a lithograph titled
Only So Far, No Farther
.

He looked through volumes of contemporary Dutch poetry. He selected a fragment of a song by Ivo De Vijs: “When I die, come all of you/Be strong or weep, everything will be permitted on that day/All right, let it be crowded and noisy with talk,/On that day I will be in charge of silence.”

He listened to several recordings of Jewish songs and also the music from the film
The Rose
.

He ordered an obituary notice from the printer’s, such as families send out to their acquaintances to notify them
of a death. They are usually decorated with a black frame, but Peter Schok asked to have the cheerful lithograph on the first page. Inside there was to be Ivo de Vijs’s song and four words: “Peter Schok died on …” and an empty space for the date.

In the spring, the premiere of
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
, directed by Benjamin G., took place, and although they each had a new partner, Benjamin personally accompanied Peter Schok to the theater.

Peter Schok, already emaciated and weak, sat in his wheelchair repeating, “Look around; everyone is looking at us.” Which was true. In Amsterdam, when one man is in a wheelchair and another is pushing him, every passerby looks at them. Everyone knows that it is a gay man pushing his friend who is sick with AIDS.

The performance was very pleasant. It combined Molière’s text with the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV’s court composer. The guests sat among the musicians, drank wine, and had the impression that they were guests of the gentleman at a concert in his home. Peter Schok sat in the first row. Black spots, the mark of AIDS, had come out on his feet but had not touched his face. Listening intently in his
elegant suit, Peter Schok was beautiful, as in the distant good days.

They had bought the suit in Poland, when he and Benjamin G. were still together. They were on vacation in Zakopane. On the last day they were supposed to go to Kasprowy Wierch, but Peter Schok had returned the hard-won reserved-seat ticket and gone instead to Krupówki, to a jewelry store.

“Why are you doing this? You don’t even love her,” Benjamin G. marveled, when Peter Schok chose the prettiest string of pearls for his mother.

The next day, they left for Wrocław to see Tadeusz Różewicz’s
Death in Old Scenery
and before the performance they bought Peter that suit—elegant, a dark blue with a discreet gray stripe.

During the summer the suit had become so loose that he needed new trousers. They again went by wheelchair and asked for the smallest size in the C&A department store. They were waited on by a nice, sturdy, fifty-ish woman. They loved her. Salespeople usually speak with the man who pushes the wheelchair and avoid looking at the one who is sitting in it, but this woman addressed Peter Schok every time.

In October, Peter Schok and his friend Gerrit asked the doctor what they should expect.

“The end,” the doctor answered. “Were you expecting anything else?”

Peter Schok named the day: Monday, at 8:00 p.m.

He informed the doctor.

He invited his mother.

Gerrit bought smoked salmon and a bottle of French champagne.

The doctor brought a small bag; the mother, a raven-haired woman with thick eyeglasses and the string of Zakopane pearls on her short neck, brought a bouquet of flowers.

Peter was sitting in an ordinary armchair, with a blanket on his knees.

They ate the salmon, drank the champagne, listened to Beethoven’s
Eroica
Symphony. When the music stopped, the doctor turned to Peter Schok.