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Pechora River Gulag Transport Ship, Soviet Union, January 1941
The giggles grew louder as Danuta gave me butterfly kisses, her feathery eyelashes fluttering against my forehead and cheeks. Now she showered my face with rose petals, laughing as she did so. The petals bounced lightly across my eyelids, then slid, burning, into my nostrils. I snorted reflexively, and they hit the back of my throat like pepper, causing me to sit up so rapidly that I banged my head on the bunk above. Still the petals crawled over my face.
I clawed at them blindly as they now mixed with blood from the fresh scalp wound, opened by the sharp steel beam that supported the bunk just half a meter above my supine body.
Lice shower!
The realization hit me even before the dream of Danuta completely evaporated.
Lice! The Ukri!
It was a common prank. The Ukri, the Ukrainian gang that ruled this netherworld that was the prison ship’s hold, had given me one of their infamous lice showers. They collected piles of them, each man contributing hundreds from his own plentiful stock. It took hours, but there was no shortage of time down here, where we eight hundred prisoners had been crammed these past three weeks with no room to even stand, and only limited access to the three on-deck toilets. The Ukri would gather them into a rag, sneak up on the unsuspecting victim, and shower them over his sleeping face. The panicked and hungry insects made quickly for any orifice available, invading eyes, ears, mouth and nose with equal vigor, to the uproarious entertainment of the bored spectators.
A revolting experience, by my old standards. Yet in this hell, as a ward of the Soviet NKVD—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—my standards had changed. Rumor had it they were sending me to build a work camp in some frozen wasteland near the Arctic Circle. I had last bathed over two weeks before, in freezing water. Despite the omnipresent cold, I wore thin cotton pants, a grey rag with arm holes that served as an undershirt, and a threadbare and filthy jacket that would not have even lined the cat’s bed back in Warsaw. My feet remained bare, save the rags I’d tied haphazardly around them. I had last eaten off a plate three months previously. This morning, I waited for three hours in a line of prisoners to climb the ladder to the deck, for the privilege of emptying my watery bowels into a hole through which the cold river spray stung my chapped buttocks. On the way back down, I filled my battered tin cup with a grey “soup” in which some unidentifiable vegetables floated like bloated grey corpses.
I ate it with relish. My standards, you see, had changed.
In this leaner, feral version of myself, I recognized the lice shower for what it was: a hazing—a good thing. The Ukri, despite my being a Jew, were taking me under their protection, likely because of the prisoner I’d killed.
Oleg, the Ukri second-in-command, clapped me on the shoulder as I climbed out of my bunk, blood still streaming from my throbbing head. I slipped in the filth that sloshed back and forth on the floor with the gentle pitching of the ship, and he steadied me with a powerful hand. He smiled, showing a gapped row of blackened teeth. “You’re okay. For a Zhid, that is.”
Despite myself, I smiled back.
***
If I were to write a scene of how I met Danuta, it would read like this:
SETTING: A late-night, smoke-filled bar. Around a long rough wooden table, center stage, sit a collection of raggedly clothed intellectuals. Books, cups, and full ashtrays cover the table, conveying a lengthy and intensive discussion. All are arguing, raising a cacophony of voices. Samuel, at the head of the table, stands, and a respectful hush falls.
SAMUEL: (He speaks with passion and authority, gesturing with his cigarette.) Yes, Misha, but can you not see that Schulz’s ontological issues clearly overshadow the epistemological? “There are no facts,” as Nietzsche says, “only interpretations.” This was Schulz’s view, too. (He smiles playfully.) Or perhaps when you’re in your cups, you have trouble grasping the finer implications of this? You see....
As Samuel continues making the motions of his passionate speech, his voice fades, and the audience hears only silence. The stage lights fade too, and two spotlights come up, one gently illuminating the gesticulating Samuel, and the other Danuta.
Danuta is seated halfway down the table, listening raptly to Samuel. His words are clearly moving her deeply. She nods her head and leans forward as if to better engage with his brilliance.
Samuel suddenly stops speaking and looks directly at Danuta. He’s intrigued by this new and beautiful face, so intrigued that he loses his chain of thought.
SAMUEL: (He speaks gently.) Hello, do I know you?
DANUTA: (She smiles sweetly.) Not yet, but you may.
“Not yet, but you may.” Yes, this is how I would write the scene. Unfortunately, it would be utterly inaccurate, because no one has ever listened to my words with rapture, nor has my brilliance ever struck anyone dumb. Nor have I ever addressed more than three people at once, except at family dinners, and then only when asking someone to pass the peas.
In fact, I met Danuta under circumstances that were, to say the least, dramatically less flattering—nearly personally injurious.
***
Warsaw, Poland, November 1937
I left Jacek, whistling to myself as I exited the narrow hallway from which heavy wooden doors led into numerous lecture halls, and came into the building’s foyer. The vast chamber sat nearly empty, it being near lunchtime. Only one boisterous group had gathered around one of the long wooden benches that lined the walls of the entranceway. I recognized them from afar as National Democrats—my political nemeses—and would have preferred to avoid being anywhere near them. Unfortunately, there was no other way out of the building.
Does one ever really learn to live with slurs? Does one eventually develop a “thick skin,” so epithets “roll off one’s back?” Or do the words work themselves slowly into the flesh—like microscopic cacti barbs, innocuous at the initial prick, but building to a critical mass of pain— that must eventually either scratch the soul or erupt violently? I’d been called every imaginable form, permutation, or slang of “Jew” from childhood. Somewhere along the way, I’d accepted it as a simple fact of life, and today should have been no different.
But it was.
Since the advent of the ghetto bench, I’d been volcanically on edge. I reached critical mass when the egalitarian future my father had dangled before me had been rudely yanked away—with a derisive laugh, at that. This anger, I found, felt liberating and empowering. I no longer feared the bullying, and I welcomed the chance to use my newfound linguistic courage to boldly fling barbs back at my attackers. Reckless? Perhaps, but I didn’t care.
When the National Democrat Cro-Magnons started in, I didn’t hesitate to answer back with vitriol, perhaps fueled by my humiliation in the lecture hall. What I didn’t take into account was the complete emptiness of the building, and my own relative distance from the safety of the exit. Before I’d even finished my opening diatribe about the size of their hooded genitalia being in direct proportion to the size of their clearly miniscule brains, the Cro-Magnons had me surrounded.
They literally backed me into a corner, holding my shoulders and legs tightly with their rough hands. The largest of the group, a brutish-looking fellow whose thick face was partially obscured by a flap of pomaded hair that had broken loose from his Hitler Youth haircut, pulled a closed switchblade knife from his back pocket. He clicked it open with a practiced flourish, its click echoing in the empty, silent hall. He sneered when he spoke, making his already unattractive, simian face even uglier.
I thought it wise not to point this out.
“It seems,” he said, “as though you have some phallic issues, my small friend. Let’s see if what they say about the size of you Jews is true. If it is, perhaps some trimming is in order—just so you don’t overshadow we under-endowed Poles, of course.” He nodded at a boy next to him who was not involved in controlling my increasingly violent struggles.
The boy undid my belt, and started to slide my pants down, to the delight of the onlookers, who hooted and jeered.
“What would your mothers say?”
The voice that rang out was so powerful in its matronly command that all intuitively stopped—myself included—and turned towards it. We Poles, gentile and Jew alike, shared a sympathetic nervous system that responded with Pavlovian reliability to the voice of any Polish female, especially mothers. This inborn response returned grown men instantly to the worst moment of their boyhood—when they were caught hitting a sibling, conducting a prank, masturbating in the bathroom, or concealing a piece of gristle in a napkin. The response turned knees weak, clenched bowels, froze arm or leg muscles, and created instant subconscious guilt from which only the most powerful could free themselves.
This voice wielded such power.
The hands released me and I caught my pants, which were already halfway to my knees.
The Cro-Magnon with the knife quickly concealed it, then he and rest of the group skulked away from me like chastised kittens from a half-finished saucer of cream. They left the building without another word.
I caught my first glimpse of my savior, like looking directly at the sun. The green-blue image would remain forever seared on my retinas.
The origin of the voice stood in front of me, as I clutched my pants at my waist and fumbled with my belt with as much dignity as I could muster. She stood half a head shorter than me, and two full heads smaller than the largest of my assailants. Her dark brown hair fell below her shoulders loosely, framing a round face with a perfectly even smile that created miraculous dimples in her smooth-skinned cheeks.
I cleared my throat. “Good thing you came along. I was just about to really let them have it.”
She pushed an itinerant strand of hair from her eyes, which smiled even as her face grew mockingly serious. “Yes, I could see that. I acted solely in the national interest, to prevent unnecessary Gentile bloodshed. Thank goodness I did so. Are you all right?”
I haphazardly finished arranging my pants, straightened my hair, and gathered the books that had scattered from my fallen bag. After regaining a semblance of composure, I straightened up to my full height and looked her in the eye.
With grave suavity, and using my most ceremonious and deeply baritone voice, I said, “I’m fine, thank you. Poland owes you a debt, madame.”
Her smile, returning in earnest this time, lit the foyer.
I began to feel more confident, relaxed, back in control.
This is really happening! This beautiful woman is standing here, and wants to hear what I have to say. She wants my philosophical explanation of the evil that has befallen me.
Images of our future together sped through my head—long conversations into the night over wine, a romantic walk along the Vistula, a candlelit dinner, her lips on my neck, the whiteness of her bare shoulders in the moonlight.
Then she spoke again. “Poland might be even better served by you fastening the buttons on your fly, kind sir. But only after you tuck in your... uh... you know.”
***
Thus, I developed a preference for my own fictional, yet infinitely more egotistically palatable, version of our first meeting.
