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By Root 347 0

say that our lives depended on it. But she was equally insistent on my controlling myself and being controlled by her at times when I thought it didn’t matter, when we were alone. It may be that she thought I needed to be in constant training. More likely, it was because of the effort she was making never to lose the complete hold she had on herself and because we were constantly together. Already in T., after we had moved to our new lodgings with Pan and Pani Kramer, we slept in the same room. That stopped when we went to the apartment in Lwów that Reinhard had found. Since the day of his death, however, we had spent each night in the same bed. Some of these beds were narrow, often narrower than the straw mattress we now shared in Kula’s kitchen, where Masia’s presence on her mattress diluted our intimacy, and the rooms were themselves exiguous, yet I had never seen Tania naked. Tania undressed was Tania in her slip or Tania in her long nightgown. Her bodily functions were private, even under the most constraining conditions. On the other hand, my nakedness and my bowel and bladder movements continued to be subject to question, inspection and comment.

Never being alone, always being with Tania, had begun in Lwów because Reinhard came only on weekends. The meals and discussions with our fellow lodgers at Pani Dumont’s were part of the joint performance we were required to give. Pani Bronicka occasionally insisted that Tania leave the room so that I would be, as she put it, less subject to telepathy, but most of the time she wouldn’t say anything and Tania would remain, her eyes on the pages of a book but in reality listening to every word that was said and noting each one of my gestures. The great exceptions were the hours we spent with my grandfather, when Tania’s attention and supervision weakened like a magnet shedding pins or nails, and the afternoons of catechism. With Father P. and his class, I was certainly putting on a show for which Tania had rehearsed me in detail, but still it was I who was putting it on, and my performance was unsupervised. Otherwise, for years it had been as Tania predicted: a day-and-night partnership of Tania and Maciek contra mundum, with the world against us. And I admired and loved my beautiful and brave aunt with increasing passion. Her body could never be close enough to mine; she was the fortress against danger and the well of all comfort; regardless of the circumstances, whether it was her nightgown not having dried or, as now at Kula’s, her no longer owning a nightgown, I waited impatiently for the nights when I knew she would come to bed wearing only a slip so that I could feel closer to her.

During those years, when each word that she said or that was said to her had to be examined for dangers it might provoke or portend, Tania’s speech and gestures, except to my grandfather and me, were never without purpose. That purpose was to conceal and please, to concentrate attention on what might gratify the listener and deflect it from us. I played the supporting role. With me she made no effort to be pleasant; that was natural enough, and I think I did not expect anything else. But for Tania, the distinction between lack of pretense and harshness scarcely existed. Each fault of my conduct or appearance, so long as we were alone, which as I have said was almost always, became the subject of unrestrained, precise and critical comment. In a way, it was as if one performer were speaking to another about their art. And if she found my reaction to her observations foolish, or if whatever she was commenting on had really given her cause for annoyance, Tania would fall silent; she had a face of dolorous stone. Her silence could last hours or days depending on the gravity of the offense she had perceived and my pleas for forgiveness. Of course, since we were performers, the show had to go on: an immediate truce would apply, and criticisms or silence were replaced by cloying sweetness as soon as we had an audience.

But now, at Piasowe and under Kula’s roof, we were differently situated. Every