The Clarinet Polka (42 page)

There's a little pause, and then Czesław comes in, catching them up with his part of the story. Near the end of the war, he says, the fighting in the forest just got stupid and crazy. The peasants suffered the most. Everyone was hitting them up for food. The Soviet partisans were being supplied by the Red Army, and pretty soon they were the heaviest dudes going. They offered amnesty to the Polish partisans. To Czesław, the Soviets were foreign invaders just like the Germans, and he was ready to die before he gave up to them, but nearly half his unit—including the Kestin boys—decided to throw in their lot with those bastards.

Heniek Kestin came sneaking back secretly—and he really hung his ass out on a limb to do it—just so he could tell Czesław, “You were right. They accepted us—all the Jews. But they shot the Poles. I'm sorry.”

What was left of that AK unit disbanded, and Czesław headed west. The underground had kept them informed of everything that had been going down in Krajne Podlaski, so he knew he had to get to Germany somehow if he wanted to find Marysia. Crossing Poland, he said, was like crossing hell. The Soviets were going after anybody who'd fought in the Polish resistance, shooting them or sending them to camps in the Soviet Union or calling them fascists and putting them through these big public trials—you know, for the propaganda.

The underground slipped Czesław onto a convoy of French prisoners from a German prison camp. His French wasn't that hot, but it must have done the trick, and he crossed the border into the part of Czechoslovakia occupied by the Allies.

Czesław served with the American army as an interpreter, and the Americans helped him find Marysia. He found his little sister Helena first. The women in the munitions factory had been liberated by the Americans, and she was in a DP camp. “Don't go back to Poland,” he told her. “The Polish soil is soaked in blood, and the Russians are everywhere.”

Rachela Kestin was in that DP camp too. She told Czesław that she'd been Krystyna for so long that when the Americans liberated them, Rachela hardly existed anymore—all that was left of her was just this tiny spark deep inside. She kept hearing the names of the American officers, and one of them gave her a strange feeling. He was called Major Rosenbloom. She couldn't stop thinking about him. She saw him talking to some other Americans, and she walked up to him. She couldn't help herself. She began speaking to him in Polish. Of course he didn't speak Polish, but he smiled at her. He had, she said, the kindest eyes.

She didn't know a word of English. She was so stupid, she said. She stood there and thought, no, I must not speak to him in German, or in Russian either. Oh, maybe he speaks French. She still remembered a little French. But then she finally realized that there was a language that maybe they both knew, and she was right. She started to cry, and she said to him in Yiddish, “I'm a Jew.”

“Rachela lives in New York now,” Czesław said. “She has four children and two grandchildren.”

Then Czesław and Marysia started telling their kids what'd happened to all those other people. Like some of the Markowskis who'd been deported to Kazakhstan died, and some joined the Polish army and went to Iran—of all crazy places—and ended up in England. And Czesław's brother got killed in some dumb skirmish, and his sister ended up married to a Polish soldier and was living in England, and some of the Markowskis got back to Poland—like Krystyna who's still living in Krajne Podlaski and has a daughter the same age as Janice. And Janice and her brothers are going, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. We'll never remember all these people,” and their parents said they'd write it all down for them.

But the story's still not over yet. It took Czesław months to find Marysia. When Czesław found her, she was in a British DP camp with her baby.

“Imagine our joy when we saw each other again,” Czesław said, “alive after all those years.” They were married right away.

What baby? Janice and Mark are looking at their brother John. Everybody had always said he was the spitting image of his mom, and he didn't look a thing like their dad. They all got the message at pretty much the same time, but they didn't dare open their mouths. Janice's mom said, “He wasn't a bad man. He never hurt me.”

“His name was Wolfgang Heiber,” Czesław said. “He was from Aschersleben. We never knew what happened to him.”

It seemed like nobody was ever going to say it—you know, straight out in so many words. Then John just started yelling. “I don't give a damn what happened to him. Why the hell do you think I'd care what happened to him?” And he said to Czesław,
“Ty jesteś moim ojcem.”
That means in English, “You're my father.”

That really got to Czesław, and for a couple seconds he looked like he was going to break down. Janice and her mother had been crying off and on all afternoon, but Czesław and the boys had been holding it all in. Janice thought it was incredible that John and her father didn't hug each other. That's what she wanted them to do, but it didn't seem to occur to either one of them. After a minute Czesław got up and went in the other room, and their mother followed him.

John jumped up and started pacing up and down. He looked like he wanted to murder somebody. “I don't give a damn what his name was,” he yelled at Janice and Mark. “Wolfgang Heiber—what a goddamn ridiculous name. I don't care where he was from. Why the hell would I care where he was from? It was the Nazis who believed in blood and all that racial bullshit. It doesn't mean a goddamn thing. I'm still me.” Janice had never seen him that angry, and she just felt sick and scared.

FIFTEEN

Janice didn't tell me her parents' story straight through like I've just told it to you. There was lots of it she had trouble getting out, and sometimes she just had to stop. The first time she did that, it kind of took me by surprise. We're sitting on top of the hill with our backs against the same tree, and I've got sucked into what she's telling me, and I want to hear what's coming next, but she stops dead, right in the middle of a sentence.

I'm waiting for her to go on, but she doesn't. I look over at her, and she's staring down the hill like she's frozen. The park's packed with people. Families with little kids running around, teenagers—the boys flirting with the girls—and other people just strolling, taking it easy, having a beer, laying on towels, catching a few rays, doing exactly what you'd expect for a Saturday afternoon on a beautiful day like that.

Janice takes a breath. Real deep. And then she exhales real slow. And then she takes another breath. And I'm just watching her breathe. I see her throat move a couple times like she's swallowing. I don't know why it was so important to her not to cry in front of me, but it was. Hell, I figured she had the right to cry as much as she wanted to, but she never did. So what do you say? Nothing is what you say. I reached over and took her hand and held it and waited for her to get to where she could talk again.

After her parents left the room, she was afraid her brother John was going to break something he was so mad. He yelled at Mark and Janice—all about how it didn't matter a damn and why the hell hadn't they told him about it before—and then he jumped in his car and drove away. They didn't know if he was going back to Columbus or just around the block.

Her parents were, I guess you could say, shattered. They couldn't do much of anything, so Mark and Janice finished making the dinner their mom had started, but when they tried to eat it, none of them had much luck. John came back around midnight a little worse for a few gallons of beer—I could sympathize with the guy—and he wanted to start in again, you know, and hash everything out to the bitter end, but their parents said they just couldn't hack it anymore that night. They'd be glad to try tomorrow.

The next morning they get up—all of them awake at some horrible hour like five-thirty because they'd had a rough night—and John must have had the worst night of all because he'd packed his things and taken off for Columbus. He left them a little note saying he'd come back after he had a chance to digest everything. Since then, they hadn't heard from him.

Janice went down to St. Stans that day and did the Stations of the Cross, and while she was doing that, it hit her that she had to learn everything there was to know about Poland in the Second World War—like somehow it was her religious duty to do that—so when she got home, she looked at all her dad's books and picked out one called
Hitlerowski terror na wsi polskiej
. After she'd been reading it for a few minutes, she had to go back and get the big Polish-English dictionary because her Polish wasn't quite as good as she'd thought it was. And she'd been slogging away at that damn book ever since. She could only read a little bit at a time, and that wasn't just because she was having trouble with the Polish.

“I don't know, kid,” I said. “I don't know if that's the best thing for you to be doing right now.”

We'd been sitting there holding hands for—oh, I don't know, over an hour, and that whole time it'd never crossed my mind what we might look like to somebody else. But then I thought, hey, that's all we'd need—to have somebody from South Raysburg see us. So I gave her hand a little squeeze and let it go, and she turned and looked right into my eyes with those absolutely huge blue eyes of hers. “What do we do now?” she said.

Good question. We walked around the park. She told me she'd been to see the priest. Yep, Father Obinski sure earned his money that week. The first thing he told her was that she should quit blaming herself. Because she was still thinking that it was all her fault. She'd been pushing her dad to tell her all that stuff, and seeing her in the polka band had given him the last push over the edge. But she thought maybe it would have been better if things had just gone on the way they were before, with nobody knowing the whole story.

Father Obinski told her that the truth had to come out. If you keep secrets, they turn poisonous on you. She said, well then, maybe her father should have told them years ago. He said, yes, he probably should have, but can you blame him? Can you imagine how hard it was to take that baby and raise it as his own? And what a perfect example of Christian love. Yes, she said, she'd thought of that.

She asked him how people could do such terrible things to each other as what went on, you know, on a regular basis in the war. Well, he's a priest, right? So what do you expect him to say? He said human nature was naturally sinful, and people will do evil things like that when they turn their backs on God and on his Church. And she should remember that her mother and father never lost their faith, and that's what brought them through.

She asked him why the Holy Father had sat there in the Vatican and not done much of anything. That's not quite the way Czesław had put it. What he always said was, “sat there on his
dupa
in the Vatican twiddling his thumbs,” but she didn't think that Father Obinski would want to hear it put that way.

He said, “Those were terrible times, Janice. Just thank God that we'll never have to make the decisions the Holy Father had to make.”

She didn't like that answer much, but she didn't say so.

She said she felt terrible for her brother. Knowing that he was only her half brother and that he was half German didn't change anything for her, but she was afraid it'd change something for him. She didn't know what she was going to say to him when she saw him again. And Father Obinski quoted to her from the Bible where it says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

She knew that verse, and she'd always liked it, but now she thought something else that she didn't say to Father Obinski. What about those millions of dead Jews who were not in Christ Jesus?

“God didn't care that they weren't Christians,” I said. “If God was with all the Poles who got killed, he was with all the Jews too.” I had a pretty good idea that might not be standard-issue Catholic doctrine, but to tell you the truth, I didn't really care. It was kind of obvious to me.

Well, we walked around the park talking for maybe another hour, and it was getting close to dinnertime, and I figured maybe she ought to go home. “I can't stand to be at home,” she said. “I walk in the door, and it's like walking into a funeral.”

It was driving her brother Mark nuts too, she said. He was spending all his time with his girlfriend. Their parents hadn't said a word about anything serious since their big talk. They had to be thinking about John, but they never mentioned him. They kept trying to act like everything was normal—you know, the stiff upper lip that Poles are so good at—except nothing was normal, and there was this huge, ugly, dark cloud hanging over the house.

“After everything they went through,” she said, “I keep telling myself I shouldn't get mad at them, but I still get mad at them. I keep tiptoeing around them like they're—I don't know, something fragile. Made out of glass. I can't stand it— And I don't know if I can ever play in the polka band again. I don't know if I'd ever feel right about it.”

Oh, Linda's going to just love hearing that, I thought.

So anyhow, Janice called home and said she was going to my house for dinner, and that was cool with them. She said her mom even sounded relieved she wasn't coming home. So we went back to our place. Saturday nights, you know, Mom and Old Bullet Head usually go out, but Linda was there, and naturally she knew something was up, but I gave her the significant look so she didn't ask any questions. The three of us made ourselves this homey little dinner out of some leftovers and toast and scrambled eggs. It was fun in a quiet sad kind of way. And then we just sat around watching the tube. Janice seemed real tired by then. Hell, I guess she had every right to be.