The Fiftieth Gate Read online

  ‘Ruins, ruins,’ she muttered at the end of the tour. This time she was not talking about her possessions but herself. ‘What I could have been if I had your life.’

  So now, behind the camera, I looked at her, wondering what lay under the clothes which veiled her torment.

  ‘Who cares?’ she brushed aside her vanity. ‘I’ll be gone from this world when they look at this.’

  This, she was thinking, was the knitted skirt which fell below her knees, exposing her legs which reached into a pair of doggy pink slippers worn around the house to protect the carpet from wear and tear. More than anything else, she hated exposure. Her carpets had always been overlaid with theadbare pieces of cloth strategically placed in vulnerable spots. Even the fridge was layered with plastic doilies, the cans in the pantry piled in geometric heaps to affect a fresh and unused appearance.

  She was not quite so successful in maintaining her own appearance, although the beauty which had graced her youth was still discernible. ‘Wrinkles, wrinkles’, she casually dismissed the lines in her forehead as if she did not care. But she was careful to make her weekly visits to her hairdresser and an array of specialists whose tasks rolled off her tongue in a poetic cadence: ‘pedicure, manicure, hair-colour, facial, beautician’. Yet not even the combined efforts of the ‘shmanicures’, as my father labelled them, could iron out the inexorable signs of age against which she waged a personal war. There were the unlikely indicators of partial surrender—her bodily bulges, a capped tooth—but overall she comported herself like a victorious soldier displayed in full finery. Her medals, she knew, were her bold, dark eyes and delicately sculptured face, features which still connected her present mien to the image, dragged out of a drawer, of a child playing an accordion. ‘Have you ever seen such a beauty?’ she would ask us.

  The ruins, she often told her two sons, began then. Then, we knew, was the key to everything; the title she gave her story, the core that could not be clothed or cast away. How she would have loved to stretch one of those frayed carpet runners over her mind, if only for a few moments, to forget.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she read my thoughts, ‘sometimes I know how lucky I really am—with a husband who loves me, children, grandchildren. Sometimes I feel like a spoiled little child, but only sometimes, when I’m in control.’

  I was familiar with the other times. The times she lay in her bed, her face creased against a pile of pillows. My father would answer the phone calls from her adult children, reporting on her condition: ‘Sshh, sshh. Mummy’s asleep. Mummy’s asleep.’

  He was angry. Not about her sleeping, but that she was sleeping now, and would inevitably wake in the middle of the night to a dark time when only tablets could return her to silent repose. After a while I would stop inquiring, for I could no longer bear to listen to her groans and kvetches.

  ‘Don’t change your clothes,’ I told her. ‘See, I’m turning off the camera. No one can see now.’

  She buried her head in her hands and wept, her body convulsing to the rhythm of her sobs. I stood on my side of the room, not knowing how to bring comfort to a mother so haunted.

  Once before I had attempted to listen to her story. Together with my brother, we had asked her to record her life for the sake of our children.

  ‘Future generations,’ she reflected, ‘what can they know? Why will they care?’

  She told us anyway, the first chapter which extended into the second and third and on and on until she erupted. ‘To lose a mother, that was the worst. To bury the only person in the world who really cared for me, that was even worse than the ghettos and the hiding in darkness. Mameh, mameh, to lose a mother.’

  She wept, and in a moment of fraternal indecision, we responded as only we could: we laughed, first a suppressed chuckle, a smothered giggle, and then like two little children we laughed tears which the camera recorded alongside my mother’s wails.

  It’s there for posterity. Her story, and our inability to acknowledge its pain. Her pain. For that would mean acknowledging the groans that cloud her luck, and the tablets and hours of useless sleep which intrude on our own cheerful stories.

  My brother and I spoke of it once.

  He was twelve; I was seven at the time. They told us she was staying back with a friend while we went on holidays with our father. We returned suntanned and bitter, angry not so much at the lie but at the sight of her lying in hospital while we had spent a fortnight buried in sand pits and dressed in tropical T-shirts.

  ‘Nerves,’ she said. ‘Like my own father.’

  That’s all, as if it were a hereditary disposition that could just as easily plague her own children.

  ‘Why?’ I asked her after I turned the camera off, as if these matters can be timetabled.

  She uncrossed her legs and pondered the question for a moment.

  ‘It’s just there.’

  I returned to the camera and viewed her through the lens, ignoring her pleas that she had told enough for one day.

  I knew that I had to wrap myself in the details of her story, if only to immunise myself against the secret thing that lay there, threatening me from beneath her clothes and bright lipstick.

  Dark, hiding in the cupboard it was all dark, while outside we could hear the footsteps, the shots, the screams.

  Not yet, I stopped her, not yet; first I need to hear how it began.

  VI

  For him it began in Wierzbnik.

  I was born in Wierzbnik.

  Wierzbnik was born before him. In 1657, founded by Bishop Bogusław Radoszewski who obtained royal permission to colonise woodlands along the Kamienna River.

  I remember on Saturday all the Jews would go walking in the forest; it was green, flowers, but in winter snow, and not far from there was a river. I was young—this is the earliest thing I remember about Wierzbnik—but one Shabbes we were walking, and everyone was talking, whispering, screaming. Somebody had drowned in the river. ‘A boy,’ they were saying. ‘He’s Jewish.’ But that’s all I remember about the river near our town. Except once, after the war started, I went skating on a lake and fell inside. That was soon after my father disappeared, because I remember I was sick from the cold when they told us he was dead. No, I won’t tell you about that yet. There’s so much more to say about my family before the war.

  ‘The beginning,’ I insist, ‘start from the beginning.’

  ‘I was born,’ he says. ‘Then I cried. What more should I remember about the beginning? Do you remember when we circumcised you? Do you remember crying when you were a baby?’

  For me it began in Melbourne.

  ‘Not a cry, but a sneeze.’

  I have heard much about that moment from my mother. ‘And it was good,’ she likes to say, vayehi tov, the same words used by God to admire His handiwork. The image of creator and creation is captured in a photograph of my mother, her body still rounded from pregnancy, giving me my initial bath.

  This first ablution has since become a ritual in our family, a task she insists on performing for each of her grandchildren. She will dip her latest treasure into the water, narrating the process as if it was learned from a prayer manual: ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she intones, while caressing the infant with soap and a Yiddish lullaby. Only then will she scrub shampoo into its head, guiding us through every step: ‘This is the most important part, I’m rubbing in the brains.’ She wraps her baby in a towel, and assigns it a profession to match its enlarged brain capacity. ‘A doctor, a lawyer, a dentist,’ she sings.

  Fresh from my bath, I was sent to be cut.

  ‘Vayehi tov.’ And it was good: ‘A cry to hear from Melbourne to Warsaw,’ my parents say.

  The thought of pain triggers an early memory.

  ‘The hot tea,’ I tell my father. ‘Do you remember someone spilled hot tea on me, you all cracked an egg on my back to soothe the pain?’

  ‘A Polish recipe,’ he describes the alternative remedy, examining its efficacy by raising my shirt to check if any scars remain.
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br />   ‘Swinging on a swing, you pushing me higher and higher.’ The image returns as a warm and comforting glow.

  ‘That one I don’t remember,’ he confesses.

  ‘My first home, the flat in Elwood.’

  ‘Not bad,’ he acknowledges.

  I push back into my childhood: ‘My bed, lying sideways against a wall, on the right as you walked through the door.’

  ‘The left,’ he corrects me. Mistaken or not, he shows a readiness to play with me. He looks up at the ceiling, biting the corner of his mouth until he retrieves the first clue. It begins with a smell:

  Mmmm, what did they call it? Mmmm. I can smell it but I can’t remember what we called it. The oven I remember. The smell of special cakes with blackberries from the forest. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.

  It seems right that his memory should begin in his stomach. Doesn’t all knowledge originate with a single forbidden bite? My father eyes his food before touching it, first declaring that this boiled chicken foot has been prohibited by his heart specialist. ‘I’ll get fat,’ he announces, and then throws the same accusation at his family even if they have no intention of sharing in his delights. ‘I shouldn’t have eaten it. It was good, but better I should have left it in the pot.’

  I want to know more about the blackberries picked from forests surrounding his home in Wierzbnik. He allows the smell to carry him through his house.

  An oven, we had a table. Let me think. First when you walk in the door you see stairs, going up from the side of the shop. You come in and here would be a kitchen. A few steps, down a corridor, and then a bedroom, and another bedroom separated by a curtain. It was all one big room, no walls, just a curtain. I was in one room with my older brother; no it was one big bed, and in the other bed were my two sisters, and my parents in a third bed. And then the oven. Mmmm, special cakes my mummy baked.

  ‘What else?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing.’

  So I help him. I hand him the family tree I have constructed from archives in Poland. He rotates the document under his glasses, straining to read the assembled names.

  ‘Gimpel? Where’s Gimpel? You haven’t got my favourite uncle.’

  ‘Shmuel Gimpel,’ I tell him, ‘that was his full name.’

  He reads the inscription. Born 1889. Wife Chana Katz. Death: Unknown.

  ‘What do you mean unknown?’ he protests. ‘You think he’s still alive today? He must be over a hundred.’

  ‘Unknown’, I explain, means that he died between 1940 and 1945.

  ‘Oh,’ is all he says. He looks at the other names alongside his uncle. Rochl. Unknown. Zalman. Unknown. Brandla. Unknown. Chaya Ester. Unknown.

  He considers the evidence silently for a moment. Now he seeks comfort in an earlier generation whose details are marked on the top edge of the family map.

  ‘Who’s Tsirla?’ he asks.

  ‘She’s the earliest Bekiermaszyn I could find,’ I answer, pointing out that she was born in 1787 and widowed after the turn of the century.

  ‘Was she the one who started all this business with the bread and bakery?’

  I have found no evidence to prove the family myth which associates our name with an enterprising baker from Szydłowiec, the ancestral home of the Baker Machines, located only thirty-five kilometres from Wierzbnik.

  This much I can say: there were ten bakers in the town of Szydłowiec in 1860. Ten bakers and nineteen butchers, most of whom lived in a squalid quarter known as Żydowska Street.

  ‘Jew Street,’ my father explains, ‘there were so many of us they used to call Szydłowiec, Żydłowiec.’

  I add to the picture of Jew Town. There were more rabbis than priests, and Jews owned three of the five inns providing shelter for visitors to the town’s drinking-houses.

  ‘I’m sure the Jews wouldn’t drink,’ he interrupts. For him it is a question of honour. He rarely drinks, although on the few festive occasions when he gets tipsy, he conceals it. ‘Don’t be silly, I just had one or two. I’m heppy.’ Drunkenness, my mother says, is not a Jewish habit.

  My father now turns his attention to another scion of the family, Leibush-Josek Bekiermaszyn.

  ‘Now there’s a tragic story,’ I say.

  A tailor born in 1815, he married Rivka Moskowicz and fathered seven children with her. Two years after his first daughter Ester was born in 1849, the registry records the infant’s passing, followed by the death of two adolescent sons in 1855. Leib’s end was no less tragic: in 1863 he was murdered.

  ‘Murdered?’ my father asks. ‘Like on TV?’

  I have no way of determining how or why his great-great grandfather was killed. All I can do is imagine the possibilities with my father: a thief who stole into his workshop in the still of night? A local vendetta? Or perhaps the motives were more political, linked to the 1863 Polish uprising against Russian rule.

  ‘At least he has a date,’ my father comments, ‘much better than unknown.’

  He has returned to the younger generation again, those members of his family who were denied a date of death.

  ‘Not even a funeral,’ he mumbles.

  For a moment he forgets his fear, and allows himself to reclaim forgotten images from childhood. Once again, it is prompted by the taste of food.

  Lollies. Anyone who is alive today from my town would remember Buba Laya and her lollies. My grandfather was a small man with a beard; everyone had beards in those days. They moved to Wierzbnik where he and his wife Laya had a shop, like a milkbar. They sold lollies. He would bribe me with sweets to learn more Torah and go with him to Shul. Everyone in Wierzbnik knew them, they lived on the corner of the market-square on the path leading to my school.

  ‘Why did they move to Wierzbnik?’ I inquire.

  ‘Who knows?’ he answers. ‘Probably business.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ I respond. ‘Business was far better in Szydłowiec.’

  Compared with bustling Szydłowiec, Wierzbnik in 1820 was a town with unpaved roads and fields of poor quality. By 1860, its population had almost doubled, numbering 543 residents, of whom 144 were Jews.

  My father looks despondent so I try to raise his spirits. ‘At least there was food in your town,’ I tell him. ‘Five butchers and eleven bakers.’

  ‘That’s why they came,’ my father declares. ‘They must have been the bakers in the town.’

  ‘Not your father,’ I remind him.

  What do I remember about him? Little things. Him praying, him eating, but mainly him working, all day in the porcelain shop. We had a truck with a driver who would travel to different towns to collect pots, pans, glassware—anything we could sell. Sometimes I would hide inside the truck without my father knowing. Then at night the goods arrived, in the truck or by train or by a horse and carriage known as a droszky, and I would help unload the boxes and carry them upstairs to our storeroom. That’s where I first learned how to drive a horse, which helped me survive later in Auschwitz. I always preferred working with my father than going to school: we sold wholesale to different shops on the market-square and retail from our own shop. That was before he was killed.

  His father, Leib Bekiermaszyn, also belonged to that category reserved for those whose deaths were unknown. He was born on 3 March 1900, and married Hinda Rubin, who relocated to Wierzbnik from nearby Ostrowiec.

  People were already starving before the war, they didn’t have anything to eat and would come to our place and my mother Hinda would invite them to eat. We also gave them money; not that we were rich, but we all worked from the shop and so we could afford to help poorer people. I don’t remember my parents ever fighting; my father would work in the shop downstairs while my mother would stay upstairs, cooking, preparing things for the house, playing with my two sisters. It’s not that she was beautiful or anything; she was short, a little fat, but I remember her as always loving me.

  Hinda and Leibush were married in Wierzbnik. I pass my father their wedding certificate which had been buried in an archive in cen
tral Poland:

  This occurred on the 18 December 1923 at 2 p.m. Two witnesses came forth: Shloyme Morgenstern, teacher’s assistant and Yankl Steinbok, 40 years old, from Wierzbnik.

  They declared that on 4 December 1923 at 6 p.m. a religious wedding ceremony took place in Wierzbnik between Leibush Bekiermaszyn, 23 years old, living in Szydłowiec, the son of Israel-David and Yenta (Zaletreiger), and Hinda Rubin, 22 years old, living in Wierzbnik, the daughter of Itsik-Mayer and Laya (Bliman).

  ‘This I don’t remember,’ he says. ‘How could I? Do you remember when me and mummy married?’

  I turn to a photograph. My mother is casting a bridal smile in the direction of the camera, while my father, the groom, is signing a certificate. All my memories are framed in black and white images like this one, channelled through snapshot portraits which present the past as a series of frozen moments. I collect my memories in colour-coded albums, each thematically divided into phases of my parents’ life: yellow for the few single remnants of their pre-war existence, which casually streams into pictures of their migration and period of courtship.

  I first appear in a red album, after a photograph of my brother dressed in a sailor suit. My mother is throwing me into the sky, smiling at me. I don’t know why I should think about that memory as a colourless moment. I presume the sky was deep blue, my hair blonder than a shade of grey, my mother’s lips polished in red hues applied with the aid of a hand mirror. When I walk along the beachfront suburb of my childhood, the orange-brick flats and tree-lined streets still lose their colour. All that remains is a landscape of shadows. I sometimes see my children this way, observing them at play in black and white fragments as if they were photographs of myself resurrected from a forgotten flash. When my father revisited Auschwitz, the wintry sky and foggy air seemed to conspire with death’s past, burying his tour beneath a mist of greyness.