Wartime lies - Louis Begley [2]
My mother’s older sister, even more beautiful and, now that she was the only child, much richer, was by common consent unlikely ever to marry—not even her widowed brother-in-law. In the closed world of wealthy Galician Jews, she was haunted by indistinct tales of a romance with a Catholic painter, a missed elopement, and a suspicion that the artist’s subsequent actions were strongly influenced first by the vision of her dowry, and then by the vision’s disappearance in the wake of my grandfather’s rage, directed with equal force at the religion and bohemianism of my aunt’s friend. With other women, such things might have been conveniently forgotten by more acceptable amateurs of good looks and money and their mothers and other female relations on the lookout for brides. But Tania, for that was my aunt’s name, could hope for no such indulgence. She was known as widely for her irreverence and implacably sharp tongue as for her stubbornness and bad temper. It was said that she was a female version of her father: a man whom anyone would want as a business partner but no thoughtful and well-informed person would have seriously considered acquiring as a husband or a son-in-law.
Besides, there was the shadow—family bad luck or bad blood—cast over both my mother and Tania by the suicide, some years earlier, of their younger brother. Refused admission to the university (this was at the beginning of the imposition of Jewish quotas in Poland), in love with a girl whose application had been accepted, he took to spending the days of the summer vacation on horseback, wandering through the forest that bordered my grandfather’s property. On one of his expeditions, he was surprised by a violent thunderstorm. He dismounted, took refuge under a tree, and, holding his horse by the reins, tried to calm him by stroking and kissing his nostrils. Lightning struck very close. The horse panicked and bit my uncle repeatedly on the face. The scars were very ugly. The girl seemed more distant; my uncle didn’t know whether to blame distractions of university life or revulsion. Which reason was worse? Efforts were made to find a place for him in a university abroad, but before the fall semester was over, he went one afternoon to the stable and killed his horse and himself with two rounds of shot.
So it happened that Tania came to live with us, to make a home for my father and to bring me up.
We continued to occupy the house where I was born, bought with my mother’s dowry directly after the marriage. The house stood in a garden on the principal street of T. Our family quarters and my father’s office filled the one-story wing that ran parallel to the street. In the other wing, at a right angle with ours, with its entrance in the courtyard, a gimnazjum teacher and his wife lived on the ground floor; the second-floor tenants were a stationery store owner, Pan Kramer, his wife, and their daughter Irena, who was two or three years older than I. Until the Germans came, Irena and I never played together: my father did not think it proper.
Like every male in Poland old enough to shave, father Kramer was addressed as Pan; only servants, peasants and manual laborers were denied that honorific syllable. Mother Kramer was Pani Kramerowa or Pani Renata to all but her family and intimate friends. Irena should in time have been known as Panna Kramerówna or Panna Irena or, because the Polish language loves diminutives for food, drink and names, Panna Irka.
Our living room was separated from my father’s study, where he received patients after their turn in the examination room, by a wide, padded, white door. Adjacent to the