The Girl from Krakow Read online

  “But it just arrived.” Rita held it toward him. “As you can see, it’s so new the pages haven’t been cut. I’m the first one in town to read it. So it can hardly be your favorite already.” Having put him in his place, she started to walk away. The book was due back in a week, and she wanted to make a start on it.

  The young man replied to her back. “I didn’t get it from my mother’s bookstore. I read the French translation in Barcelona last year.” Rita turned back. “Permit me to introduce myself. Tadeusz Sommermann. Jastrob was my mother’s maiden name. Her parents started the bookshop.” He offered his hand. She took it. He held it just slightly too long.

  “What were you doing in Barcelona?” Not every day she met someone who had been in Spain.

  “I am a medical officer in one of the International Brigades.”

  Rita let out a slight gasp. Here was someone worth talking to.

  “I go back soon,” he said. “May I buy you a coffee?” Somehow his imminent departure made the invitation a little less brash.

  “No, but you may call on my husband, Dr. Guildenstern, and me for tea, and tell us about Spain. We would be very interested.”

  “Your husband is Urs! I have been gone a long time! He gave me this once playing soccer.” Tadeusz pointed at the break across his nose. “I’ll be only too glad to come.”

  They fixed a date, and he turned back to the store. Instantly Rita noticed how much more alive she felt, part of Europe again.

  The phone rang. Urs rose, carefully placed his cup of tea on the sideboard, and went to the hall. After a moment he returned and said, “I’m on call, and it’s a burst appendix. I’ll probably be the night at the clinic. So sorry.” He turned to Tadeusz. “No reason for you to go. I am so sorry you leave tomorrow. How long before you will be back again from Spain?” Urs asked the question as he pulled a woolen scarf around his neck and headed for the door.

  “No idea. It depends on how well the Loyalists can fight. Everyone expects an offensive on the Ebro this summer. The better they fight, the longer I’ll be able to stay.”

  Urs nodded, mulling over this bit of analysis. Then he left. But Rita was interested.

  “I will worry about you.” She did look concerned. The news from Spain had been bad for the Republic steadily now for months.

  Tadeusz realized he was going to have to tell her something approximating the truth at some point. He liked her far too much to keep lying. “Don’t concern yourself about me. I am leaving the brigades soon. I have an offer to work in a women’s hospital in Barcelona.” This he thought of as more a transformation into truth than another lie. He had never gone near the front and had been at the hospital for more than a year.

  “I’m so glad. Will you take the offer?”

  “Should I?”

  “Yes, you must,” she replied a little too eagerly, surprised that she would already care.

  “I’ll tell you about it if you will allow me to write to you . . .”

  Rita felt she should frown at this suggestion, but she didn’t.

  Tadeusz had spent the afternoon answering their questions about six years in Paris, then the south of France, now Cataluña at war, while trying to learn what he could about her. The past year living in the predominantly women’s world of a maternity hospital had taught him how to listen to women. He waited for Rita to say something.

  She sat opposite him, drawing a long breath on her cigarette. The afternoon had transported Rita back to days in Krakow, sitting, slouching, sometimes sprawled across a bed, among other students in someone’s rooms, feeling languid and lazy after a week’s lectures, knowing one could sleep in, contemplating—but only contemplating—temptation. Why had she ever given up Krakow?

  Suddenly, in the silence, there was a slightly electric atmosphere in the room. Both were asking themselves the same question: when would they ever be alone like this again? Knowing the answer they began mutually to explore the possibility before them, trying to measure it without risking a rebuff. Together they began a little pas de deux, dancing in what would turn out to be the same direction, but neither taking an irrevocable step.

  “Well, you’ve told us your adventures.” She paused. “What are you looking forward to?”

  He thought for a moment and began, “Working in a women’s clinic will be very different. Of course, the Spanish Republic is rather like the Soviet Union. Women have all the same rights as men. They reach high in politics, even serve in the army. Contraception and abortion are allowed in Barcelona. Doctors are expected to discuss marital relations with their patients. These are things I will have to do at the women’s clinic—providing contraceptives, performing abortions.”

  Contraception was one thing, abortion another. Rita wanted to signal she had no trouble with the former. “It’s hard to see how you can agree to carry out abortions. It’s against all the teachings of all the religions—ours, the Catholic church, the reformed denominations, everyone. It must be wrong.”

  “I agree, it’s difficult to reconcile oneself to it. But so far as the scruples of religion go, they won’t stop me.”

  “So, you are an atheist?” Rita’s observation was obvious, but it was also another test of the possibilities.

  “Yes, but even if I wasn’t, religion wouldn’t help me with this problem.”

  “Why not?” Suddenly she was focused on what he was saying, not what he might be signaling.

  “Here’s an argument I heard in Paris that I can’t shake. Take the prohibition of abortion. God forbids it, right? So, is that why it’s wrong, just because he forbids it? Or did God forbid abortion because it’s wrong? Which is it?”

  Rita thought she knew what was coming. Should she cut him short? No, he wouldn’t like that. At least he was talking about something interesting. It made a change from Urs. She replied, “So, wrong because forbidden by God, or forbidden by God because wrong? It’s obvious. Forbidden by God because it’s wrong.”

  Tadeusz nodded. “Right. Now, if abortion is really wrong, there must be something about it that makes it wrong, something besides the fact that God forbids it. What could that be?”

  “Well. It’s wrong. It’s killing; it’s murdering innocent lives.”

  “Rita, you haven’t answered the question. Why is it wrong? It can’t be just because God forbids it. We’ve ruled that answer out. It must be something about killing itself that makes it wrong, bad, evil.” He stopped to secure her assent. Then he continued, “That’s presumably what God has figured out about killing—what makes it wrong. That’s why he imposed the rule against it. But what is it about abortion that he’s figured out? Something about abortion itself that makes it wrong, not just God’s rule against it.”

  It was a version of a subversive argument Rita remembered from Plato, but she wasn’t going to mention it now. “So, what is the answer—what is it about abortion that makes it wrong?”

  “I don’t know. But the point is, God’s saying it’s wrong can’t be what makes it wrong. When it comes to right and wrong, we have to think for ourselves.” Tadeusz thought, Will she see the argument works just as well for “Thou shalt not commit adultery”?

  Rita rose. “Somewhere Dostoyevsky writes, ‘If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.’ ” She walked out of the sitting room and turned down the darkened hallway to the bedroom.

  When she came back, four or five minutes later, she was wearing a dark blue silk dressing gown, the white tassel inscribing a soft curve as she walked past Tadeusz, went to the front door, locked it, and threw the bolt. Slowly Rita turned around and walked through the apartment, methodically turning off every light in the house. In the twilight she stood, looked down at him, still in a chair, while their eyes adjusted. Crooking a finger, she led him back down the corridor to the darkened bedroom.

  He found himself sitting back on the bed, with Rita looming above him astride his legs. He could hear the rustle of the slightly stiff dressing gown as it moved over her stockings. At thigh height, the ri
sing hem revealed garters holding stockings, then a belt, but no panties. A tuft of fur no darker than the blonde above made a triangle between the belts. She had obviously left all but the panties to be removed. Slowly he did so, unclipping each fastener from its form-fitted holder, and rolling down the hose, as she continued to hold up the gown. Now she opened the robe to reveal the belt floating loosely at her waist, the ribboned fasteners no longer moored to the stockings but black against her white thighs. He decided on an approach Rita would remember. It was one of several things he had learned in Paris years before.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not everything Tadeusz Sommermann said that afternoon was a complete lie. He had been in Barcelona, and he was going back. He had treated a few combat casualties from the International Brigades. Remember that Englishman with the look-alike pencil mustache and the bullet wound in his throat? What a waste to be maimed like that. It was the Spaniards’ Civil War, not his. Of course, he knew what side he was on. The “Nationalists”—that’s what they called themselves—were just fascists, openly armed by Hitler and Mussolini. Their caudillo, their Führer, Franco, didn’t have any qualms about using Moroccan shock troops. Surely there was more useful work Tadeusz could do than stop a Moorish bullet while pumping morphine into some illiterate Republican foot soldier’s thigh. He would support the Spanish Republic. That it was supported by several different communist parties in Spain and by Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t trouble Tadeusz at all. But he was neither a Stalinist party hack nor a supporter of POUM, the Trotskyite party. Paris had made him “a plague on both your houses” leftist. He needed to preserve his freedom of action, even on the barricades of the Popular Front.

  The idea of going to Spain had come to him when he first heard about the International Brigades, after his final year of medical lectures in Marseille. Tadeusz had begun his medical degree in Paris. For two years he had allowed its distractions to seduce him. He needed to get away if he was ever to complete his medical qualification. Moving to Marseille, he enrolled in the faculty of tropical medicine. It was open to foreigners, and afterward posts in a French colony—Senegal or Guyana—were not hard to secure. Few French medical students really wanted to spend a half dozen years in Dakar or Cayenne. But the closer he came to climbing up the gangplank of some colonial paquebot, the more distasteful grew the prospect of serving as a colonial health officer. There had to be an alternative.

  There always had been. He had always found the intelligent alternative before—a way around obstacles, hardships, challenges—as far back as his childhood.

  From the time he was a small boy, Tadeusz knew that his mother’s bookshop was not for him. He loved reading: first the endless stream of Karl May westerns shelved behind the counter to reduce pilfering, then the histories—especially Napoleon, and finally the Marxian scholars who made sense of Napoleon and everything that came after him. History was intoxicating. But reading books was not the same as selling them. He couldn’t be tethered to Jastrob’s Bookshop.

  Tadeusz had been good at school, and better at chess, which was fortunate since he had neither the physique for heavy labor nor the temperament for poker. At fourteen or so, it was clear. The way out was a profession. That meant university abroad. He could never bring himself to study as hard as he’d need to for a chance in Poland.

  Tadeusz would have liked to study history. But there were problems. First, by the time he finished gymnasium, Tadeusz had already acquired a pretty tolerable understanding of the course of human events over the previous several centuries. There wasn’t much more to learn once he had discovered scientific socialism. Plekhanov’s Materialist Conception of History was really all you needed. At twenty, he’d read enough to see that history was an open book. He understood everything now.

  But even if there had been more to learn about history, there was no living in it. If he were to escape Jastrob’s Bookshop, Karpatyn, or Galicia, for that matter, it would have to be medicine, six years of it, and in another country.

  Italy would have been the best bet for medical school. With an Italian qualification, one could work in the British Empire. Entry was not difficult, the fees were manageable, and living was cheap. He’d have to learn Italian. No problem. Tadeusz was good at languages. But Italy was a fascist state, operated by a dictator who made Pilsudski seem like a democrat. France was a better choice. And besides, French was so much more useful a language than Italian. Most of all there was the allure of Paris. The Faculté de Médecine was on the Left Bank, a stone’s throw from the Latin Quarter.

  He had only to convince his mother. She held the purse strings.

  Paris didn’t make it easy to be a medical student. There was just too much to distract a young man with a world historical understanding.

  Tadeusz arrived in the early summer of 1932. Three months would be enough to learn the French he needed before the lectures began in the fall. He found a room on Monsieur le Prince, between the Boulevard St. Michel and the Place Odeon, at the back corner of the medical faculty. The first night he tried to treat himself to a meal at the Crémerie Polidor. The waitresses were famous for surly service to customers seated at communal tables. Frustrated trying to decipher the handwritten menu dropped casually before him at the table, he had to go back outside to study the posted printed one with his Polish-French dictionary in hand.

  Even through the language barrier, Paris was exactly what Tadeusz had hoped for. There were a few Polish medical students who eased his entry to the Fac’ while playing mild practical jokes on him. Sending him to a haberdashery for a capot—a condom—when he wanted a chapeau, a hat, for instance. As for the lectures at the Fac’, it didn’t take very long to see that they were not going to help much anyway. There would be an exam—the extern—at the end of two years, filtering those who were capable and serious from the rest. But these lectures wouldn’t help.

  Two years was a long way off that first fall. Of much more immediate interest were the risqué novels of André Gide and the work of a new author, Louis Aragon. They would help his French, which was just as important as anatomy or physiology. Even more seductive were the politics of the Third French Republic. The Socialist Party was led by Leon Blum; the Communists followed Thorez, who obeyed Stalin; the Trotskyites obeyed Trotsky (or tried to); and the anarchists followed no one at all.

  When he looked back on that time, it was smells he remembered most: acrid smoke from the blue cloud of a hundred Galois drifting below the ceiling of a café on a winter’s day, the smell of the ground coffee as he stood waiting for a morning express at the zinc, the ozone draft of a metro leaving the station at Châtelet while the portillon gates opened to a new scrum of passengers, the starch and bleach at a blanchisseur in the Rue de Vaugirard, all its windows thrown open on a hot day in May, and all the year round, the early morning aroma of boulangeries.

  The most permanent of these memories was the scent of Arpège perfume—an ineffable mixture of peach, iris, rose, geranium, and a dozen other hints he couldn’t identify. Anywhere, anytime, for the rest of his life, Arpège would instantly bring back the first time he encountered it, that second summer in Paris. It was wafting from the sloping shoulders of a young woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse loose enough you were sure it was about to fall below the breasts it clearly silhouetted. Her thick black hair was cut in a plain, almost Chinese style—bangs at the front, falling to a perfectly even length across her neck and shoulders. Her eye makeup suggested the Orient too, accentuating heavy lashes under dark eyebrows. Was it eye shadow she wore, or was it fatigue? He couldn’t tell. Below the thin muslin blouse, against which nipples visibly pushed, there was a dark peasant skirt, no stockings, and flat shoes. And the Arpège . . .

  She was plastering a poster for the ICL on a wall of the Rue Racine side of the Ecole de Médecine, blotting out the first word of the prominent notice—“Défense d’Afficher” (Post No Bills)—in black letters on the gray stone wall. One look from her, and Tadeusz was instantly inducted into her own
special cell of the ICL—the Trotskyite International Communist League. He stopped and pretended to read the poster.

  Her name was Lena, though he didn’t learn it till later. With almost the first words out of her mouth, it was evident that she too was Polish, though much more fluent in French. “Going to report me to a flic for defacement?”

  Tadeusz smiled. “Only if it’s a violation of revolutionary morality. You’re Polish, yes?”

  “My nationality is proletarian. But I was born in Warsaw.”

  “I’m from around Stanislava.” She didn’t seem to care, so he asked her about the bill she was posting.

  “It’s for a meeting. Read for yourself.” She turned and started down Monsieur le Prince, looking for more blank walls. He stayed and read through the hectoring prose until he found the time and place.

  The meeting was that very evening, in an amphitheater at the Sorbonne. Tadeusz was early, finding a seat back far enough to scan the room for her. The amphi was half full when she came in, and just a little later proceedings began. As the speaker began, Tadeusz realized the subject wasn’t French politics, but Germany. The speaker’s theme was the complicity of the German Communist Party in the election that had just brought Hitler to power. Following Stalin’s orders the German Communists had stood aside and let the Nazis win. Their slogan had been Nach Hitler Uns—After Hitler, it’s our turn. But the German Communists would never get a turn now, the speaker assured all, and Stalin’s Russia would reap the whirlwind. Employing all the tools of dialectic, he predicted an inevitable war between Nazism and Stalin’s state fascism that would usher in world revolution.

  It all made perfect sense, but Tadeusz was just waiting for the meeting to end. When it did after an hour or so, he managed his exit so that Lena found herself beside him in Place de la Sorbonne. She was fumbling in her purse for matches when he lit her cigarette. “Merci.” She looked up at him. “Oh, it’s you.” She smiled. She was still wearing that thin blouse, and it was still threatening to fall away from her shoulders.