Amandine (20 page)

K
RAKOW FELL IN FIVE DAYS. MORE A GENUFLECTION THAN A FALL
. The grand old medieval dame. The date was September 6, 1939. Five dementing days after nearly two million German troops stormed Polish borders from the north and from the west in tanks and planes, in trucks, on foot, all of them bent on obliterating the Polish army and, more, the Polish soul. But that had been tried before. Historical partitions and redrawings of borders, every nation that touched upon Polish land came to have its way with her, carving her up, bleeding her, trying to smother her
Polishness
, calling her Prussia or Germany or Russia or Austria. Invasions, dominions, police states, persecutions, puppet governments, change a border, change a name,
still we are Poland
. You see it wasn’t the Polish military machine—ragged, deficient—that terrified the Germans in 1939, nor was it the fierce daring of the bravehearts—the only army in all of Europe who fought from the first day to the final day of that war. No, not the military machine but the moral machine. Polish loyalty thrived not in the name of a
heinous butcher but in the name of the Poles’ own humanity. Yes, it was their
Polishness
, that inexorable
Polishness
, which rankled the Führer’s boys.

Unlike Warsaw, unlike Lwów, unlike the towns and villages along the pitiless way of the blitzkrieg, the blood and bones and bricks of Krakow suffered little. Less. No fire, no ravage, no slaughter ornamented the intrusion into what the Germans considered a city of their own.
Unser Krakau
. The Countess Czartoryska was there.

Forty-three now and perhaps more beautiful than she was on that day in Montpellier in 1931 when she brought her daughter’s five-month-old baby—consigned it irrevocably—to the convent of St.-Hilaire. Life for the Countess Czartoryska had proceeded much as she’d desired. Privileges, duties, pace, rhythm, tone, marcel waves, sable jackets, and Chanel trousers. Schiaparelli gowns and canary diamonds. The theater, the opera, a window table at Jama Januszika each morning at eleven for raspberry pastries and the exchange of darting glances with a silver-bearded cellist from the Krakow Philharmonic. Sojourns to the family estates for hunt parties and balls, firelit picnics in the Carpathian foothills laid by caravans of servants porting silver and linen and provisions, readied to await the arrival in luxury automobiles of nobles wrapped in good Scots cashmere. A month in Paris, a few weeks at Baden, a long-standing love affair with an inconsiderable Slav prince. Life for Countess Czartoryska—as it did for all the women of her set—drifted along much as it had for the aristocracy since the sixteenth century.

And, grand egoist that she was, the countess believed that all she’d done, all she’d thought, all she’d lived for was
others
. For Andzelika, of course. Her Andzelika. But more recently also for Janusz. Prince Janusz Rudski, with whom, two years earlier, Andzelika had stood in the Sigismond chapel of Wawel Cathedral—a glory of a bride in ice blue satin, her five-meter train rippling behind her, held barely aloft by eight page boys in white velvet breeches and damask waistcoats—to take the prince as her lawfully wedded husband. Sitting as the countess is now in the second from the last pew on the left side of the Mariacki, her brown and white toeless spectator pumps—revealing
perfectly enameled dark red nails—resting on the kneeler, her lighter brown silk dress kilted above bare, unsunned, perfectly taut knees, she recalls her triumph.

Truth be told, though, Janusz was all too willing to court Andzelika. Less than my wiles, it was Andzelika’s beauty. Her father’s ivory skin. But her eyes, black as Magyar grapes, I admit her eyes are mine. And all that hair, worn loose that day when Janusz first saw her, wasn’t it? Flying behind her as she rode past him with the others in the hunt. A long pink jacket buttoned up to her chin. He’d arrived late, Janusz had, too late to ride that first day, and I remember how he paced and paced, the long, lean frame of him striding the rooms, running his fingers through his white blond hair, waiting for them to return. For her to return. Foolish child, she thought him old at thirty-one, went sashaying about in league with the two Rolnicki brothers the whole week long, but Janusz was patient. It was the mazurka on that last evening. Reckless and nimble a dancer as she was, his hands turned palms up at his waist, he circled her tauntingly, chin high, hair falling in a fringe over his forehead with each stomp of his boot until Andzelika’s eyes narrowed, smiled at him, dared him. Everyone saw it. Janusz smiled back, and it was done. Were they ever apart after that for more than a day or two? I can’t recall
.

I feared she would tell him of her escapade, and so I begged her silence. We’d carried off the impossible feat, Andzelika and I, that of keeping a secret among our set. There were times when I began to think that even she didn’t recall it, so rarely, so very rarely did she address the child. How I’d feared her announcing one day her desire to visit the grave site in Switzerland, how I’d armed myself with reasons why such a journey would … But she never asked. When she heard that Droutskoy had married, she sulked for a few days. Asked me, was I certain that no one had ever informed him she’d given birth to his child? Wholly certain, I told her. And that was the last time she spoke of him, of the child. As though both were part of the same bad dream she’d willed herself to forget. I know they were real, though. I know that the child was real and I have been besieged by her every day and every night for all these nine years. By now I am expert in my war with
the agony of her. And then I think of Andzelika
, Princess
Andzelika, how her life would have been stained, not throttled, by the presence of the child. Who would have wanted her? Surely not Janusz
.

The countess always ends her reverie just at this point. With the same question. The same answer. Over and over again she must convince herself that her deed was in Andzelika’s name. If she thinks it one more time, perhaps the lie will change color, become a truth. It never does, though. In the deepest place in her heart, she understands that it was not to protect Andzelika that she abandoned the child but for her own vendetta. Her revenge against Antoni, against that one, that single act which demonstrated that his little baroness meant more than life to him. How could anyone expect that she, Valeska, would love and embrace a child of the same blood that flowed through Antoni’s own whore?

Any other man or boy, Andzelika, and I might have, I would have looked beyond my displeasure, but never to the issue of Droutskoy. And so my sins were not those of maternal ferocity but simply those of pride. My own. My only salvation is that, no matter how I try not to, I always tell myself the truth
.

Untying the white kerchief that covers her head, stuffing it into the string bag hanging from her wrist, she walks out through the south-facing doors of the Mariacki into the unusually sultry late May morning.

After nine months of occupation, Krakow appears astonishingly unchanged, its architectural glories whole, a semblance of normalcy everywhere about the nearly quiet streets. People work, go to mass, light candles, pray, shop, dine, sleep, hold tight to their heritage, their ideals, to the word of Polish allies. After all, would France betray them? Would England? This too shall pass. A short war. Until then, this half life, half familiar. One must submit to the illusion that Krakow center has been transformed into a film set on which hundreds of splendid-looking jackbooted boys and men parade about in uniform, yes,
a semblance of normalcy
wants only a flash or two of a small distorting mirror. To further the cheat, though, one must ignore the neat hand-lettered signs announcing
Nur für Deutsche
—for Germans
only—posted in the windows of the better restaurants and shops, choose not to hear the talk about the torturings in Montelupi Street, hurry away—head cast downward—during the
lapanki
, the random arrests that the jackbooted boys perform here and there, now and then. And at the dry, sharp crack of a pistol from the far side of the café, eyes forward and another jaded sip from the tiny crystal cup of slivovitz. Oh, one more thing. Keep far from the Podgórze, from the ghetto where the Jews have been herded. All the harum-scarum of the occupation of Krakow happens there. Mortification, hunger, the quick spray from an MG34 across the apartment doors facing onto an upper balcony just to rip the tedium of a quiet spring evening, the jackbooted boys rival one another for duty in that province beyond the pale. That place where the Jews are. Yes, by all means keep far from the Podgòrze.

The countess wanders into the Rynek Glowny, the main market square, to look at the occupiers’ leavings of the day, food for the
Untermenschen:
rotting vegetables, bruised and broken fruit, the less tempting parts of a pig. It matters little, though, she thinks, fondling a hill of small, hard brown pears, since hers is an exercise in habit, this morning perusal of the marketplace. Crates and boxes and sacks of exquisite food are punctually delivered to the back door of her palace each Tuesday and Saturday. Lake fish from the north on Fridays. She walks back down Franciszkanska Street past the Nazi Partei-Haus to the Czartoryski palace to leave her few findings with the cooks, to check the progress of lunch, and then to freshen up, to rest before her ritual presiding over the one o’clock meal.
They would be eight today, or was it to be nine?

Rather than friends or family, she will be dining with her German houseguests. Wehrmacht officers and their aides. Long-standing houseguests. You see, despite the desperate urgings of her daughter and other members of her family, the countess had stayed behind in Krakow when the others fled. The selfsame zeal with which she had
protected
Andzelika, she will employ to protect her home, her possessions, the pulse of her life. As though her presence could stay the very German army.

She’d waved from her bedroom window as Andzelika and Janusz, the white Bentley piled with valises, joined the nearly soundless dawn hegira from Krakow of the Rudski clan less than a day before the invasion. Hundreds, thousands had gone before them, exiting Krakow for the outlying villages and farms, for destinations beyond the borders into Romania and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, unaware they raced not toward freedom but into the vile embrace of the advancing Russians. But on that last day of August 1939, it was to Paris that Andzelika and Janusz and his family were headed. Just as threatened Poles of lesser and greater nobility had done in the nineteenth century and again during the Great War, Andzelika and Janusz and the others would establish a Polish court of sorts in several of the grand hotels, entrench themselves in much the same life they’d lived in Krakow. They would wait out the war as befitted those of their station. Though the opera house was closed and air raids interrupted late suppers and there were maddening shortages of preferred wines, there was consolation that the war was far away. Just as the Krakovians who stayed behind used the distorting mirror to survive, so did those who fled. On June 3, 1940, though, when German bombs first fell on Paris, even those mirrors were shattered. Meanwhile in Krakow, just as she had done always, the countess had
arranged
things to suit her.

In early October 1939, when the Wehrmacht colonel Dietmar von Karajan and his aides banged the lion’s-head knocker against its iron plate on the great carved doors of the Czartoryska palace, the countess was prepared. She’d wondered, in fact, why her home had been so long left unclaimed while, in nearly every other prestigious palace, SS and Wehrmacht officers and sometimes men of the Gestapo were already ensconced. What she didn’t know was this: The colonel had seen her three weeks before, on one of the first days of the occupation. She had been walking, hurrying over the stones back from mass at the Mariacki. As the colonel’s auto passed her, their eyes met. He told the driver to stop, to have her followed, to find out who she was. With
that intelligence, the colonel would secure lodgings and, perhaps, he thought, a woman. He had business in Warsaw, and when he returned, it was he himself, his aides surrounding him, who struck the lion’s head against the countess’s door.

She received the troupe as though she’d invited them, the colonel, a captain, and their respective entourages—nine Wehrmacht in all. Speaking easily, volubly in her convent school
Hochdeutsch
, she offered them 11:00
A.M
. silver cups of amontillado and hazelnut biscuits, stepped prettily in her white faille morning dress up the staircase to demonstrate the upper floors, the six sprawling suites where the troupe would sleep. The company of men had always suited Valeska. If there must be a war, if there must be an occupation of her city, a requisitioning of her home, let things be carried out with some modicum of dignity, she told the colonel with her eyes as he bent to light her cigarette.

In addition to the second and third floors, the colonel requested full use of the receiving rooms on the first floor, including the main drawing room, the dining salon, the library. It was the countess who, desiring to save the colonel’s having to ask it of her, offered to arrange herself in a small ground-floor suite—bedroom, sitting room, and small drawing room—once the domain of Antoni’s aged mother. Like any fine hostess, she then set about to explain the house rules: the punctuality of meals, the quality of her kitchen and her cellars, demeanor at table—
there would be no talk of war, she’d warned
—the prohibition of any female guests unless approved by her, a midnight curfew so as not to disturb the servants, one of whom had a new baby. Each caveat the countess delivered directly into the dark blue Tartar’s eyes of the colonel, and he, his hand held loosely over his mouth, fingers pulling his lips from an involuntary smile, listened as though to profound, unimagined truths. Sharp nods of the head then, from the troupe, hand kissing, assurances of the completion of their quiet, efficient encampment well before dinner. Yes, it had all suited the Countess Valeska.