The Clarinet Polka (39 page)

The Germans occupied Krajne Podlaski for two weeks. The soldiers went from house to house and took anything they liked. From Janice's mom's house they took the silver and the paintings off the walls; from the clinic, they took surgical instruments and drugs. They burned down the new synagogue in the Jewish quarter, and they rounded up a few hundred Jews and carried them off in trucks, and nobody ever saw them again. Then the Germans went back across to their side of the line, and the Russians took over.

Czesław said to his kids again something they'd heard him say a million times before. Like the liturgy in the Mass, Janice said, the words never changed. I knew just what she was talking about because I'd heard him say it too. “Hitler and Stalin, those two devils, signed a pact, as one devil to another, and only God can decide which was more evil.” And those two devils divided up Poland between them.

*   *   *

It was a lot easier, Janice said, getting the little details of life out of her mom than out of her dad. Unless you pushed on him—you know, asked him a lot of direct questions—he just gave you a bunch of facts. Like the Russians occupied Krajne Podlaski for twenty-one months. There were approximately two thousand Jews in Krajne Podlaski, and they made up slightly over ten percent of the population. The Jews first began coming to Great Poland after Bolesław the Pious welcomed them about seven hundred years ago, and they'd been in Krajne Podlaski for at least five hundred years.

When the Red Army arrived in Krajne Podlaski in 1939, a bunch of people greeted them with flowers and songs and banners that said, “Long Live the People's Revolution,” and to Czesław those folks were traitors to Poland. There weren't a whole hell of a lot of Polish Communists in Krajne Podlaski—not more than a dozen—and naturally all those nutcases turned out. But some of those traitors to Poland out there waving red banners were Jewish.

Czesław knew most of the Jewish people who welcomed the Red Army, and some of them, the Kestin kids to be exact, he'd thought were friends of his. Their father, Jakob Kestin, was in the lumber business and he was a fairly rich guy. There was a small segment of the Jewish community that was up-do-date and not very religious—you know, that pretty much fit in with the Polish community—and the Kestins were part of that. Heniek Kestin had been one of those tough little boys Czesław had played Iroquois Indians with, and he'd been the first Jewish boy ever to go to the Polish high school, and Czesław had been for dinner at the Kestins' house lots of times, and Heniek had been to his house lots of times. So when he saw Heniek and Icchak and Rachela Kestin waving red banners at Russians in tanks, he felt personally hurt and betrayed. The Poles and the Russians had been enemies forever.

Over the years Czesław had mellowed out enough to try to be fair about things, and here's what he had to say, trying to be fair. Jakob Kestin was in the Bund—that's the Jewish Socialist party—and the Communist ideals of equality for all probably looked pretty good to the Kestin kids. And nobody in Krajne Podlaski had seen yet how those ideals had absolutely nothing to do with Stalin's brand of Communism—although they were about to see it, all right. But there was something else that was really the clincher. From the Jewish point of view, the main thing the Russians had going for them was that they weren't Germans.

*   *   *

The Russians were crazy—both Czesław and his wife said that. The Russians loved wristwatches and if you were wearing one, they'd rip it right off you. Some of those guys had three or four watches on each arm. You had to be careful because sometimes one of those Asiatic barbarians would get so drunk he'd chase you right into your house and stick you with his bayonet. All around Krajne Podlaski they put up pictures of Hitler and Stalin embracing, and they renamed everything—like all of a sudden there was a Stalin Street and an October Revolution Street and a Lenin Street—and the people who lived in Krajne Podlaski weren't Polish anymore, they were Byelorussians. They shut down all the religious institutions—the Catholic Church, and the little Orthodox church with its onion-shaped domes, and the synagogues—and put up signs in Russian on them that said God didn't exist and all religions were lies and superstitions.

Janice's mom and dad got to be friends in the Lenin Communist Youth Union of Byelorussia—all the youth in Krajne Podlaski joined up if they knew what was good for them—and they laughed at how weird that was. Of course they'd known each other their whole lives, because everybody in Krajne Podlaski knew everybody, but before that, Czesław had just seen Marysia as a pretty little girl—the stuck-up daughter of Piotr Markowski—and now all of a sudden she was sixteen, a beautiful young woman he kept running into at those boring youth meetings and maybe could even talk to if he got his courage up.

What were the Russians like? Their parents were kind of at a loss trying to figure out what to say about that. The Russians weren't all drunken assholes with five watches on each arm. The guys who ran things—the guys in the party and the NKVD—were like cats, they said, complicated and strange. In a million years you could never guess what they were thinking. They had spies, and spies spying on the spies, and even more spies spying on them. The old folks said it was worse than the time of the Czar.

The Russians had real clear memories of the Polish-Soviet War—which they'd lost—and they didn't trust the Poles much. So when they took over the administration of Krajne Podlaski and appointed new officials, lots of those new officials were Jewish. Czesław and his dad were in a small group of Poles who got along okay with the Russians. Most of the well-off Polish people were getting deported, but they needed Dr. Dłuwiecki to help them run their People's Health Collective, or whatever they called it. Czesław spoke pretty good Russian, and he'd been in some leftist organization in university, so he knew all the right things to say to the comrades. So for the time being, the Dłuwieckis were considered to be “progressive elements.”

The kids hadn't heard about the deportations, and they asked a lot of questions about that. The first people the Russians deported were the handful of Polish Communists. Does that make any sense to you? You'd think they'd welcome fellow Commies with open arms, but no. Stalin had dissolved the Polish Communist Party in 1938, so those guys went straight to Siberia. After that, they mainly deported Poles, and sometimes you could see why they picked who they did, but other times it didn't make any sense at all. They deported some Jews too, and sometimes they even deported each other.

The entire twenty-one months the Russians were in Krajne Podlaski, Czesław said, was like holding your breath. Why wasn't he deported? Or why wasn't he drafted into the Soviet Army? Was it because he was useful—he was doing his best, you know, to look useful—or were they just biding their time?

The Russians were sloppy and inefficient, and people had to eat. Even the Russians had to eat. And you could bribe the Russians—or maybe they just wanted it to seem that way—and the black market was going big time. The Kestin boys were what's called in Yiddish
machers
—they made things happen—and Heniek Kestin, Czesław's friend from high school, turned out to be a real friend after all and pulled Czesław into their operation. Czesław was useful to them because of his Polish connections. You want something illegal picked up here and delivered there, and maybe make a little profit on it, then the right person has to be paid off and a few words said to some official—and you've got to remember you owe him—and some other Russian gets a case of vodka. If you kept track of all these threads, then maybe you could make it through one more day.

Unless they were stupid, the Russians had to know exactly what was going on, and sometimes Czesław thought they really were that stupid, and other times he thought, no, they're waiting like cats—you know, with those blank evil eyes cats get when they're trying to give the mouse the impression they don't care if he tries to run or not. And to make things even more interesting, Czesław joined up with the Polish underground resistance that was starting up in Krajne Podlaski. “Do whatever the Russians say,” they told him, “just keep us informed.” Sometimes he'd lie in bed at night and think about what he'd been doing that day, and what he was going to be doing tomorrow, and he'd shake like a leaf.

*   *   *

Janice was fascinated by that Jewish family, the Kestins. She'd never heard about them before, and she kept asking about them. “Heniek was a little guy,” Czesław said, “wiry and tough as nails. He was a real survivor.” Right off the top, Heniek knew which way the wind was blowing. “Those Soviet bastards are a lot more Russian than they are Communist,” he said.

“Well, it was you out there waving red banners at them, not me,” Czesław said.

Heniek said to him the same thing he'd always said when they'd been friends back in high school—“You've read too much Romantic literature, Czesław. We've got to be realistic.”

Even then they were talking about running away into the forest. They'd got to know the forest really well when they'd been playing Iroquois Indians. In the summers when they were teenagers they used to take off into the forest for days at a time—and give their parents the fits—so Heniek was saying, “You know, if we had any sense, we'd cache some supplies out there just in case we might ever need them.” And that's exactly what they did.

Czesław had grown up hearing his father say, “Poland wouldn't be Poland without the Jews.” But Marysia's father didn't subscribe to that point of view. Remember those Endeks that Czesław used to duke it out with at the university? Well, Piotr Markowski was in their party, the
Narodowa Demokracja
. Polish politics doesn't really translate into anything outside Poland, Czesław said, and, yes, the Endeks were real right-wingers, but they weren't anything like the Nazis. No, they were real strong anti-German, and they didn't like the Russians either; what they believed in was Poland for the Poles. And they thought it might be better for all concerned if the Jews in Poland went to live somewhere else—like Palestine, for instance, which the Zionist Jews kept talking about.

Marysia told her kids that her head had been stuffed full of even more of that Romantic stuff than Czesław's was—like she could get all teary-eyed about the ancient warriors and priests and prophets and martyrs who'd fought for Poland's freedom for hundreds of years, but when it came to the political parties in her own day and age, she couldn't tell one from the other. Her father used to talk about the Jewish problem, and she didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about because to her there
was
no Jewish problem. You see, Rachela Kestin was in Marysia's class at the high school, and they'd got to be real good friends.

“She was so beautiful,” Marysia said. “She had auburn hair and sea blue eyes, and you should have seen how she dressed. She was so stylish!”

Marysia and Rachela got the highest marks in Polish in their class, and they used to walk along by the river and read Polish poetry to each other. Janice wanted to know exactly what poems they'd read, and it turned out they were a lot of the same poems that Janice and her family used to read to each other when she'd been growing up; she loved hearing about that, and she kept asking her mom about that Jewish girl.

Well, it was like they had their own generation gap back there in Poland. Rachela thought that her people were still living in the Middle Ages. Her father was an enlightened man, but when her brother Heniek had refused to keep on going to the Jewish school where all the boys went—you know, to study their religion—her father had nearly disowned him, and most of the Jews in Krajne Podlaski didn't consider Rachela and her brothers even to be Jewish anymore. But Marysia's dad, even though he was a kind, decent man—well, he never forgot that the Kestin kids were Jewish, and he wasn't real pleased that Marysia was hanging around so much with that Jewish girl.

“Wait a minute,” Janice said, “you always told us that the Poles and the Jews in Krajne Podlaski got along okay.”

“Well, they did,” both their parents said, “at least most of the time.” But the Jews pretty much stuck to themselves. A lot of the older generation didn't even speak any Polish. They just wanted to live together and practice their religion in peace—which is why the Jews had come to Poland in the first place, because Poland had always been one of the few places in Europe where they could do that—and the relationship between the Poles and the Jews had never been what you could call intimate, but it'd always been, like Czesław said, livable. Back in the old days under Piłsudski, the left-wing Jews and the left-wing Poles even used to have parties together sometimes. But then in the years leading up to the war, things had got kind of rough because of the Endeks, and especially their extreme right wing that had been doing anti-Jewish agitation, so there was a lot of tension building up.

Marysia and Rachela didn't care what other people thought. They figured—well, it's like the buck stops here. Any bad feelings, or prejudice, or whatever between the Poles and the Jews was going to end with them. Yep, the girls were going to fix it all, just between the two of them, and be an example to the whole world, and in the next generation everything would be different. “You should understand how idealistic we were, Janusiu,” Janice's mom said. “You're exactly the same way.”

It was Rachela and her brother Heniek who got Czesław and Marysia together. Because even though they saw each other in that Communist youth group, Czesław was too shy to even speak to Marysia. She was gentry, and she was as beautiful as an angel, and all he could do was admire her from afar, so Rachela and Heniek had to do their matchmaking thing—“Hey, she really likes you. Make your move, buddy,” and like that.