The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [85]
The older man asked, ‘Are you really a rabbi?’
‘Now is not the time to pretend to be a rabbi,’ said the young man with the faintest smile. ‘Besides, that would be a sin.’
The older man looked down at the woman leaning against him, asleep.
‘We would like to be married,’ he said. ‘Could you do this? Here and now?’
Here and now. My childhood was full of those little words – zrób to w tej chwili.
‘Even in the dark,’ the rabbi said, ‘you need a canopy.’
The man took off his coat and asked me to hold it over their heads. Under his coat was nothing. His bare skin, his black hair. ‘But you can't be married without a shirt,’ I said. What a stupid thing to say, I don't know why I said it. The man looked at me with surprise and laughed. ‘I think God knows what I look like without my shirt.’
Until then, the woman had said nothing. Then she said, ‘You'll be cold without your coat.’
Everyone except the woman looked at his ghastly upper body, white as paper. The hair on his chest looked like black threads sewing his skin together. He handed me the coat and I held it as best I could over their heads.
Afterwards, there was nothing to eat or say or do. The woman was crying. The man put his arm around her. After a while, I fell asleep.
I remember thinking that I had fallen asleep many times to the sound of crying. I tried, as a method of falling asleep, but I could not count them all.
Within days of the Red Army's occupation of Warsaw, people returned. At their first sight of the city, many sat down at the edge of the rubble, simply sat down, as if suddenly forgetting how to walk.
I was hidden outside the ghetto when it was emptied, and when Warsaw fell I was running for the Home Army, and for Professor S., in and out of any situation where I could eat. In the end I left the city with the others, and returned with the first to return, days after the Soviets moved in.
I'd helped rescue fragments of Polish culture, architectural slag. Now I worked to rebuild the city, stone by stone. I was a child and a Jew: you could say it was not my city, not my culture, and yet you could say it was. When your arm is in the water, you are part of it; when you pull it out, there is no trace of you left behind.
We lived in the ruins and hauled the rubble with our bare hands, loading trucks and filling holes. The city was a cemetery wired with explosives – thirty-five thousand mines were dismantled in the first weeks. And in the first months, seven bridges were constructed, and hundreds of thousands of trees were planted. Every Sunday, wagonloads of volunteers, whole families, came to the city to help with the digging and the carrying. And every July 22, the authorities staged a public celebration to officially open a newly constructed section of the city, to ensure we understood this miracle was not an achievement of Polish muscle and sweat but a feat of Soviet socialism. I went to every one of those July spectacles: the opening of the Poniatowski Bridge, the opening of the East-West Thoroughfare, the replication of the Old Town … and the inauguration of the Palace of Culture – for which the Soviets had torn down the only buildings that had survived the war.
One day I saw, sitting amid the rubble, the chemist who used to run the dispensary behind his high marble counter on Nalewki Street; I recognized him because I used to go there with my mother when she bought her headache tablets and her hand creams. Now he was crouched on his small suitcase on the mountain of destruction, still wearing his white coat, the angel who had always cared whether you took your vapours or dissolved your digestive powder, or used the right-sized spoon for your cough syrup, or mixed the paste to the proper consistency for your poultice – always so courteous and concerned about every particular, the size and pressure of the dressing, each small ache. Always he seemed to know just what to say to the man with a toothache or sore joints or bronchitis … and now there he