A Delayed Life Page 6

  I began attending fifth grade at the local school. I liked the school. The girls in my class were nice, and a few of them became my good friends. In fact, I had become their model—I was the girl from the capital city Prague. If I tied a ribbon in my hair or combed a lock into the middle of my forehead, they would copy me, believing that it must be the latest fashion from the big city. The teacher was kind, and I felt accepted and well treated. They never made me feel that I was different because I was Jewish.

  Once a week there was religious instruction. The priest, called katecheta, taught the New Testament and spoke about Jesus Christ. I was exempt, of course, but allowed to stay in class. I would sit in the back and draw in my notebook. But each time I lifted my eyes, I saw the priest looking at me, as if he were talking over the children’s heads directly at me. I believe he wanted to convert me, to make me a Christian.

  We had a drawing teacher, Mr. Večeřa. I liked him. Once he stood over me, giving some advice about my picture, and stroked my hair. It felt most pleasant. But at home I told Mrs. Weinreb that the teacher pulled my hair. She went to the headmistress to complain. I don’t remember what the result was.

  I remember the year in Žd’ár as a tranquil and lovely time. Yet in some way I could not have been entirely happy.

  One night I woke up from a strange noise. I heard a thump on the flat roof over my head, as if some heavy object had fallen from the sky. An airplane, I decided.

  I jumped out of my bed in the kitchen and crept to Mr. and Mrs. Weinreb’s bedroom, through the room where the two girls were peacefully sleeping. Breathlessly I whispered, “An airplane has fallen on our house.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Mrs. Weinreb, unperturbed. “Perhaps Mr. Marek downstairs slammed the door as he went to work.”

  But I didn’t believe her. My heart was pounding in my throat; I was scared to return to my bed. I stood there, yet no help was offered. I felt that for her the matter was closed; she wanted to go back to sleep. I felt shamed, humiliated. Mr. Weinreb’s back was turned to me; he was fast asleep. Clutching my blanket and expecting the ceiling to cave in on me, I lay awake till morning.

  Soon after this incident, my mother came for a visit. To her I confided that I felt pains in my stomach; sometimes they became really bad cramps. With Mrs. Weinreb, who was an experienced nurse, they decided on a light diet for me, and after some time I was better. It was comforting to have my mother with me, but she stayed only a few days. She returned to Prague, and I was left in Žd’ár.

  My stomach troubles returned sometimes, but I liked being in Žd’ár. I became accustomed to the pains and accepted them as an inevitable part of life. I had many friends, and as usual I was in love with one of the local boys, Pepík Pelikán. It didn’t matter that he more or less ignored me. I wrote him little notes, which I pushed into a crack in the stone wall near our house. Sometimes I found an answer there, and that made me happy. Hanna and Eva knew of my infatuation and always reported to me when they met him, told me what he was wearing or whether he was kicking his football. However, they kept a secret from me, which they revealed only years later, when I came for a visit after the war.

  “You know,” they said, laughing, “who wrote you the little notes you found in the crack in the wall? Not Pepík Pelikán, but Zdeněk Šiler.”

  Zdeněk was the older brother of a girl on our street with whom we used to play. He secretly fancied me. His sister was a tomboy, extremely daring and fearless. There was a half-constructed house on our street; the owners, it was rumored, had run out of money. It was our favorite place for games of hide and seek. We ran up to and down from the upper floor on wooden planks, as there was no stairway.

  One day the girl stepped on a nail, which protruded from a plank, and it went all the way through, sticking out of her foot. She was literally nailed to the board. We were horrified and wanted to call her mother. But Zdeněk pulled her foot out and ordered her not to say a word at home. He knew their strict disciplinarian mother would punish them for playing where it was forbidden. He rinsed her bleeding foot with the watering hose, and she didn’t even shed a tear.

  In winter my father also came to visit me. He loved nature and took me for long walks. Once when it was snowing outside, he and I stood by the window. In the street below I saw Pepík walking along, and I told my father that I was mad about this boy. He inspected him as he passed and then said, “A sturdy fellow.” And he was indeed—Pepík had broad shoulders and a wide chest at the advanced age of ten or eleven—but I sensed that my father did not really understand me, even though he tried.

  * * *

  One day in Žd’ár, I had a wonderful experience that I have never forgotten. On my way to school I had stopped near a flower bed. The sun was shining, nobody was around, and I was alone with all this marvelous glory. Suddenly I was overcome by a feeling that the world was absolutely perfect; it was pure bliss. I was surrounded by beauty that filled my whole being with happiness. It was a moment of grace, of indescribable joy.

  There was a second such moment, later, when I was back in Prague. But this time it was not so profound. I was standing near the window in our living room. It was winter, the street outside was covered with fresh virgin snow, the room was pleasantly warm and smelled of the wood burning in the stove. The glass in the window was half covered with beautiful intricate star patterns made by the frost, and no sound could be heard; all around was silence. And I felt happy, just happy.

  These two moments lasted only seconds, but they had a special quality. They were like drops separated from the stream of life, permanently fixed outside time, unforgettable.

  * * *

  Žd’ár was a very small market town, surrounded by farmland and villages scattered on the hilly plateau, called Českomoravská Vysočina. In the center of the town was a large square, with the church at its lower end and in the middle a fountain with stone figures, blackened by age, commemorating the Great Plague of the seventeenth century. Three sides of the square were formed by old, one-story houses of the well-to-do. But if you passed through any of the wide entrances, you were suddenly in a yard full of geese and chickens and a pig in a pen, and beyond them, fields and meadows stretched into the distance.

  I became friendly with several of my schoolmates and played with them in the afternoons. One was Věra Šlerková, whose widowed mother owned a shop just off the square, where she sold household utensils and farm tools. Věra and I liked to climb through their loft onto the roof and watch the people below. Her mother kept goats in a pen in the yard and often sent Věra to their meadow to cut fresh grass for them. The path led across the railway tracks and through the fields. When Věra finished cutting the grass with her sickle, we lay down among the daisies and poppies and watched the clouds float by in the sky. Sometimes the train passed, and we waved to the passengers in the windows. Then I helped her heave the basket with the shoulder straps onto her back and we walked home.

  Another friend lived quite a long way from the town. Such pupils were called přespolní, meaning they lived beyond the fields. She was so poor that she had no shoes and walked to school barefoot, always wearing the same old, loose dress. Once she invited me to her home. It was a long walk, perhaps three quarters of an hour. The small house stood alone and consisted of only one room. Nobody was at home. The girl was very excited at my visit and wanted to make me feel like an honored guest. On a shelf above the bare table was a loaf of bread wrapped in a white cloth. She cut a big slice and served it to me on a plate. They had no butter, no jam, just the bread. For the first time I understood the meaning of the word poverty. I felt guilty and wanted to apologize.

  But in Žd’ár I also saw a rich farm. One day our class went with our botany teacher to collect herbs along the field paths. She showed us how to pick chamomile, wild thyme, lavender, and other plants, which we dried in class, and then we learned about their medicinal properties. When we were already quite far from the town, we saw dark clouds rising from the horizon. In a field ne
arby, several people were hurrying to load bundles of dried hay onto their horse-drawn cart. We called out to them the local blessing—“May the Lord help you”—and they answered, “May the Lord grant it.” The clouds were approaching fast, and we saw that they wouldn’t finish before the rain started and they would lose the fodder for their animals for the next year. The entire class of forty-two girls with the teacher joined the workers, and we were just entering the large farmyard when the first drops began to fall. There was a main building with a spacious kitchen downstairs and several rooms upstairs, flanked by a barn and cowshed and many storerooms. The grateful farmer’s wife invited us to the huge kitchen table, poured each of us a mug with cool buttermilk, and put before us dishes piled high with koláče, the round, flat yeast cakes filled with poppy seeds and raisins. Outside the storm was raging with lightning, and at each roar of thunder, the girls ducked their heads and crossed themselves. But it was soon over, and we took our leave. The entire episode was probably nothing significant for the local children, but for me it has remained an indelible memory.

  * * *

  A year later the war had not ended and the situation was deteriorating. I had to return to Prague, to the unknown section and unfamiliar streets of Smíchov, to the strange and much older apartment house where my parents had moved during my absence. We now had a large flat with high stucco ceilings. Two rooms were occupied by my grandparents, and two rooms were ours. The building did not have central heating, and we had to use the tall tiled stoves in every room, filling them with coal and scraping out the ashes every morning. The coal was stored in the cellar, and we fetched it in pails, bringing it up in the lift. The grandparents still employed a maid, Bláža, who did the heavy chores. Since Grandfather’s accident a few years earlier, he was never left alone. However, the Germans soon forbade the gentiles to work for Jews, and Bláža had to leave.

  * * *

  I missed Žd’ár terribly. I was so homesick for Žd’ár that I would often have dreams in which I was back there, and a wave of happiness would fill my whole being. Then I would wake and find I was in my bed in the living room next to my parents’ bedroom, staring at the stucco flower pattern on the ceiling above me. The disappointment would make me cry. Again and again the dream returned, each time a little differently, and each awakening sharpened the longing. And then one day I dreamed again and awoke, and it was true: I was in Žd’ár! I was so happy, so happy; at long last it was not only a dream, I was really in Žd’ár. But then I opened my eyes and understood that the first awakening had been only a part of the first dream, which came in answer to my fervent wish not to awake to another disappointment. I was not to see Žd’ár again until after the war.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Maturing

  I was now eleven years old, and I began to sense stirrings in my body. Gerta was developing tiny hillocks in front, and I was watching my chest for similar signs. I thought there were two swellings, but Gerta dismissed them as invisible. We met less frequently now because it was quite a long way to her place. Formerly we had met almost every afternoon, as she lived just around the corner. Now I lived in Smíchov, and she too had moved to another suburb, called Břevnov. It was an hour away by tram. At that time Jews were still allowed to use public transportation.

  Our games changed, too. We no longer pretended to be dancing on ice or to be ballerinas on the stage. Gerta now loved to put on her mother’s silk stockings and high heels, to powder her face and paint her lips red, and she talked a lot about boys. Many older boys followed her and wanted to date her, she said. When she accompanied me to the tram stop, she would point out one or another, riding a bicycle and glancing in her direction. I couldn’t be sure if some of her claims weren’t only fantasies; still, I was always a bit jealous.

  I am incredulous myself when I remember how ignorant I was. I knew that women gave birth to babies, but I had no idea how they became pregnant. A few years previously, my mother had told me that if a man and a woman loved each other very, very much, they would have a child if they wanted it. Up to now I had been satisfied with this rather vague knowledge.

  One Sunday morning, when my parents were still in bed reading the newspaper, I came into their bedroom and said, “Mama, how does a woman become pregnant, and from where exactly does the baby emerge?”

  My mother glanced at my father, then said to me, “Go back to your bed, and I’ll come over to explain it to you.”

  “But why can’t you tell me here?”

  “It will take a while, and it is better if we women speak about it alone.”

  And so I heard how a man’s organ becomes stiff and enters into the woman’s vagina to leave a seed inside, which combines with a tiny egg in the womb. The egg then starts growing inside the woman’s womb for nine months and then the baby is ready to be born. It sounded rather disgusting that the male appendage with which he urinated should come into such intimate contact with this most private woman’s part. I don’t remember if my mother mentioned an element of pleasure in this act. At least, for a long time I believed that making babies was a one-time affair, just for the purpose of getting the woman pregnant. It never occurred to me that I must have come into being in the same way. I lay in my bed for a long time, thinking about the newly acquired information. I had the notion that somewhere deep inside I had always known it.

  That afternoon Gerta came to see me. I was excited and eager to share my new knowledge. All the time one sentence kept repeating itself in my head: I know the world’s secret. I know the world’s secret.

  I told Gerta everything my mother had said. I was sure she would be surprised and astonished, but she remained unperturbed and said, “You didn’t know this until now? I have known it for ages.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ludvík and Manya

  While we were living in Smíchov, a previously unknown uncle and aunt appeared on the scene. Uncle Ludvík, a cousin of my father, was a high school teacher, and Aunt Manya a qualified teacher for children with hearing problems.

  I loved both of them instantly. Uncle Ludvík wore thick glasses and had a nose like a small potato. He was definitely ugly, but his was a lovely personality. He was always in good spirits, cracking witty jokes, full of kindness. I am sure he must have been beloved by all his pupils. Manya, who was not Jewish, was quite a pretty blond woman. She was shy and talked little. She used to sit and quietly watch Ludvík, when we were gathered around the dining-room table, with an expression of love in her eyes. They both could have been in their early thirties at that time.

  The reason I had not met them before was that they had lived in a remote area on the eastern border of Czechoslovakia, in a town called Užhorod. They’d had to flee from there when the area was ceded to Hungary at the beginning of the war, and they eventually settled in Prague. Ludvík and Manya were Communists, and there were heated discussions with my parents and grandparents, who were Social Democrats. I wanted to understand what the arguments were about, since all of them wanted a more equal society and more justice for the working class. My father explained that the Communists wanted a revolution immediately, while the Social Democrats wanted to achieve the same but gradually. To me the socialist plan seemed more humane, but on the whole I disliked politics.

  * * *

  I remember the day when distraught Uncle Ludvík announced his and Manya’s decision to get a divorce. They were both party members, he told us, and this in itself was dangerous: the Germans had outlawed the Communist Party and imprisoned many of the known members. His being a Jew made him doubly vulnerable, and Manya would be less endangered without a Jewish husband. What a fateful decision it was!

  Ludvík moved in with us. There was a small room for the maid next to the kitchen, formerly occupied by my grandparents’ household help. So Uncle Ludvík became a member of our household and Aunt Manya a very frequent visitor. She would peck a shy kiss on his cheek each time she arrived, and they would sit together holding hands.

  Their precaution d
id not work. Someone denounced Manya to the Germans, and she was arrested. Ludvík was devastated. He no longer joked, was withdrawn, and hardly spoke. Manya was held in the notorious prison called Bartolomějská (number four) but she managed to send Ludvík messages. They kept her there for a few months, trying unsuccessfully to make her confess and to denounce her comrades. In the end she was released. She immediately moved away from her former address, where she suspected the neighbors of being informers. She rented a flat in Podolí at the other end of the town. I loved to visit her; she had one room and a cozy kitchen, which was furnished like a living room.

  Aunt Manya had lots of books; many were about the lives of workers or miners, others about travels in foreign countries and poetry. She willingly lent them to me and then we would talk about them.

  It was some time later that Manya began postponing my visits. She made excuses and actually barred me from coming to her place. Again and again I tried, and each time she had another reason for rejecting me. I did not understand it; in our home she was as nice as always, but she definitely didn’t want me in hers. One day I just walked over and rang the bell. When she saw me she became very uneasy but let me in. There was another visitor, a man, sitting on the sofa, wearing slippers. I could see it was inconvenient and didn’t stay long. I didn’t speak about it, and it also didn’t bother me. I was so unshakably positive of her affection for Ludvík that I had no hint of suspicion.

  Years later I would learn that for many weeks Manya had been hiding a very prominent Communist leader, one of the Synek brothers, who was the Germans’ number one wanted man, and for her courageous act she was awarded high honors after the war. The man was later caught at another refuge and executed.