Free The Woman from Hamburg by Hanna Krall Page B

at Uncle Marcin’s last night.” At night, the sound of a shot carries well, very far, and you can hear it. “In the morning people in every house knew that the Yids had been picked off. Three of them were lying there, but do you know what? One had risen from his grave and walked off. No one knows where he is.”
    “He’s here with you.” Blatt couldn’t contain himself, although I had begged him, before we went in, to sit quietly. “With you, in your kitchen.” They looked at him with disbelief. “Check it out, if you like. Here’s the bullet, right here.”
    They came over to him, one after the other: Zosia B., the sister, the sister’s daughter, the daughter-in-law. My,oh my, a bullet. Can you feel it? Because I do. It’s really a bullet. Comforted, they rushed to make sandwiches. So, you’re alive. Help yourselves. And did you give them a lot of that gold? My, oh my. Because our Józik found a ring with a heart in their farmyard, a big one that fit his middle finger. He lost it in the army. But I told him, Don’t take it, Józik. And my daughter lost the bracelet that a Jewess from Maliniec left her as a memento. She came with her child, we gave her milk, but we couldn’t take them, because we were afraid. The little girl was big; she could talk. And what did she say? She said, Mama, don’t cry. Here, help yourselves. Two Jewesses were hiding in Dobre, in the woods. People brought them yarn and they knitted it; then someone denounced them, and they hanged themselves right there. A beautiful Jewess lay in the road beyond the bend. First she was dressed; then someone took her dress. People came to look at how beautiful she was. Marcin, too, disappeared together with his wife and children. On the day when the uniformed men came from Lublin. The horses were neighing, the cows were mooing, the grain was standing there, but everyone was afraid to go in and everything was going wild. Perhaps he’s no longer alive? Or maybe he bought a farm with that gold? Or set up a mushroom-growing cellar? And why are you looking for him? Could you kill him now? I couldn’t, said Blatt. Do you want to ask him about something? I don’t. Then why are you looking for him? To look at him. That’s all, just to look. To look? And is that worth it to you?
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    A Jewess with a child. A beautiful Jewess. Two Jewesses in Dobre. Fredek in the barn. Szmul in the woods.… Thomas Blatt began counting again. They are all here, he pointed all around, and there are no graves. Why are there no Jewish graves? Why is no one sad?
    We passed Izbica, Krasnystaw, and Łopiennik. The sun was setting. Everything was even uglier and older. Maybe because specters are wandering about. They don’t want to leave, since no one mourns for them, since no one weeps for them. From unlamented specters there is such a grayness.

Only a Joke
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    When he was twenty years old, he started to write a book. It was a book about his childhood. His childhood had lasted seven years, until the Warsaw Uprising. He is still writing this book. For thirty-five years he has been writing a book about a childhood that lasted seven years.
2
    The world that he decided to write down took place in a spacious apartment, in a large Warsaw apartment house.There were three rooms: a golden room, with walls the color of honey, with toys on an étagère, and a teddy bear with shoes (his father took one of those shoes for good luck when he went to join the uprising); a dining room, filled, as he described it, with mature bronze, in which the furniture was enormous and full of inner strength, while the fragile delicateness of glass was sheltered behind the panes of a credenza; an office, with a gloomy library, with paperweights in the shape of ships, and with the surging waves of seas in a couple of paintings.
    Within this stage set existed the world that was to become his theme.
3
    After a year or two, the thought occurred to him that his book was complete. He retyped it, reread the