Wartime lies - Louis Begley [4]
A cardiologist specializing in children heard an irregularity in my heartbeat. Another specialist confirmed it. A third disagreed. My father could not hear the offending noise himself but thought it wrong to disregard the views of two eminent professors. It was obvious to all that I was scrawny and nervous. The nightmare of the giant recurred with increasing frequency. I filled the house with shrieks. No nurse proved equal for more than a few months to contending with both Tania and me during the day and then with me at night. These nurses all were called Panny, spectacle-wearing young ladies, daughters of impecunious but relatively assimilated Jewish families, earning their way to a place of higher learning. Tania would give them scarves and hats and advise them on makeup and permanent waves that would bring out the best in their looks and yet were suitably modest. She scolded them about runs in their stockings and corrected them at the piano. Mousy, high-strung, these young women were good at reading to me and teaching me to read. They were grateful to Tania, pitied her (such an extraordinary person wasting her life in T. out of love for her family!), and left with letters of reference from my father.
Then Zosia arrived, on the recommendation of the Catholic surgeon. He had lanced a boil on my thigh and returned several times to rebandage the wound. What Maciek needs, he told my father, is to touch our holy Polish earth. I know that no Jew loves our country more than you and our adorable Panna Tania, or has a truer national character. Still, to have a fine boy like yours educated by these city Jewesses is an error, a scandal. Give him one of our own. Salt of the earth. He will drink strength from her.
My father could not be indifferent to this line of reasoning or to his colleague’s hierarchal position. Romantic nationalism was ascendant. My father’s fine baritone voice could be heard singing marching songs commemorating the exploits of Piłsudski’s brigade as often as Verdi arias. Such compliments as I received, when he took me for an evening stroll, were apt to be on my Polish, truly blond Sarmatian look. The Aryan look had not yet come into fashion in T. Nostalgia was directed to the Black Sea, whence came the Sarmatian warrior hordes, swords in hand, to settle our sainted Poland. Besides, the nurse’s position was vacant again, and the surgeon had a candidate ready to start immediately.
Zosia was the oldest daughter of the assistant station-master in Drohobycz, a town some fifty kilometers from T. This functionary had been a corporal in the surgeon’s battalion and later his patient. Having finished the first classes of gimnazjum, Zosia was helping out in a pastry shop. She needed to be placed.
Her golden beauty filled me with wonder; I think that something literally moved in my heart. To be sure, Tania was taller, her hair almost the same amber color. I loved the smell of Tania’s perfume and powder, her furs that she was always happy to explain to me and let me play with and the softness of her hands that ended in long pale fingernails. But Zosia was soft and hard all at once and laughed with her head thrown back at everything that she or anyone else said. As soon as we were left alone—her interview must have been conducted days before she arrived, since it turned out that her little suitcase and bundles were already installed in her room—she swung me onto her shoulders, told me to hang on to her pigtails and set off at a run to inspect our garden. The raspberry bushes were heavy with fruit. She stuffed her mouth full and then mine and told me they were the sweetest she had eaten that summer. She thought the birds must be very respectful of my father to leave such fine berries alone and laughed her silver laugh when I informed her that they were covered with muslin except when the cook was ready to pick them.
From then on, it was understood that I would ride on her shoulders and hold her pigtails, which she would let down for me from the coil around her head as a reward for certain good actions. These