And on the way to Grandfather and Grandmother Seremet’s house, no matter how careful I was, the sticky, boiling soup would spill and scorch my hands, adding burns to the sores on my knuckles—the sores from the sharp, rusty grater I grated potatoes on.
When the soup cooled, it turned into viscous, greenish-gray glue. And it had quite enough time to cool, because it wasn’t a short walk. I went along paths that crossed wheat fields, and the spikes were taller than I was. Flowers grew there too, red poppies and blazing blue cornflowers.
It must all have happened in summer.
Of all the animals in the village of Marcinkowice, the geese were the stupidest.
It wasn’t a large flock, and I was their shepherd. I was the horse’s shepherd too, but the two jobs were totally unalike. The geese followed each other, waddling along heavily, shifting the weight of their round, plump, white-feathered bodies, from one short orange leg to the other, jerking their long, narrow necks forward, back, forward, and jiggling their rear ends right, left, right. Ridiculous.
When one of the geese—usually an enormous goose, their king—opened its flat orange beak and started honking, they would all go on a terrible, never-ending quacking spree. Later on, when I was twelve and a half, I met the wise Martin, Nils Holgersson’s goose. He wasn’t anything like my geese, which were stupid, malicious birds. I learned about Nils Holgersson and Martin the goose from Selma Lagerlöf in the beautiful, thick book illustrated by Jan Marcin Szancer. My mother gave me the book as a gift on the eve of our emigration from Poland to Palestine, with this dedication:
To My Daughter Ilonka
I give you this book along with a request and a demand that in this new stage of our lives, you become more disciplined and more serious in your attitude toward being independent.
Mother 12.12.1949
What did she want from my life?
And I was such a good girl. I always ironed all the laundry, even my father’s handkerchiefs.
More than once, the leader of the geese, the enormous gander, would chase me and manage to nip my ankles painfully. Bad, stupid animals.
I liked shepherding my dear horse better. He was such a noble horse.
Ewunia Lipska, a small girl my age, bouncy and full of happy energy, who had been hidden in the village as a Christian child, like me—she looked the part better because she was blond—once told me how they made her work at force-feeding geese. Long hours. Day after long day. She told me that geese had a very hard bump in their beaks that bruised your hand when you force-fed them and made it bleed. And the bruise on her hand, which never had time to heal, left a scar.
We only talked about that once, and she showed me the scar.
That was in camp, the summer camp for Jewish children, not in the mountains, not in Zakopane, where the Poles shot at us, but on the shore of the gray Baltic Sea. There were four of us there, all twelve-year-old girls—Clara, Celinka, Ewunia, and me.
One morning, Celinka’s bed and her nightgown were covered in blood. Celinka went into shock. We were all shocked. The blood was coming from her body. From between her legs. I knew that there was such a thing in the world. Would blood come from between my legs too?
It did. On a gray day, December 31, 1949, on the deck, slippery with vomit, of the disgusting immigrants’ ship, Galila.
I’m still a girl. And I see and I am invisible.
I see a dark mountain taking shape in the fog, a golden dome in its center. But Flavius Josephus wrote that the Romans had burned down the Jews’ Temple in Palestine.
I am surrounded by drab, tired, and smelly people.
We’re here.
I want to go back.
THERE WERE ALSO OTHER KINDS OF BIRDS IN THE VILLAGE of Marcinkowice. Chickens, for instance, which weren’t much smarter than the geese. They wandered around everywhere, in the yard, in the house, trying to take off and fly, landing heavily—on the table, on the bed, on the shelf under the holy picture: sweet pink Jezusik, Jesus, his face encircled by a wavy blond beard, his eyes looking skyward, a crown of thorns on his head. Beautiful red beads of blood dripped from where the thorns pierced his forehead.
With his delicate hands, he held open his shirt and the flesh of his chest, and his bright crimson heart glowed and beat inside his body. Yellow flames spouted from it.
The chickens ran around outside in the yard too, foraging, cackling, and pecking.
One even swallowed the most beautiful stone in my collection right in front of me. They would pull up long, pink earthworms, tear them into a few writhing pieces, and eat them. And they pecked everything, all the time, pecked and ate even the snippets of lung Grandpa Seremet spit up after every coughing fit, until he died of tuberculosis.
They had red combs and shiny feathers that were brown, yellow, green, and purple, like the colors of the beetles.
The rooster had a huge comb, a gorgeous tail, and yellow feet with very sharp nails. The rooster walked slowly, pecking the sand aristocratically, proudly, arrogantly.
The chickens had a blank look.
The goats had an even blanker look. A yellow eye with a black rectangle. I didn’t like the goats. I loved the pigs. Pink, plump, round. Sometimes their stubbly skin had strangely shaped dark spots painted on it. Then, I wasn’t yet familiar with the pungent odor of a pig’s skin after it’s killed or it dies and they make a schoolbag out of it or a suitcase you take with you on a stormy sea voyage to Palestine.
Their sweet little faces, with their flat pug noses and round, wide nostrils that looked at me like a pair of eyes that always seemed to express amused understanding. Their curly tails were especially merry. I didn’t like their ears. They were flawed. All sorts of shapes had been cut out of them. The pigs were my best friends. They would make snorting sounds, and I’d answer them. We talked.
The pigs lived in a pen. The pen had a low door, and only a little girl like me, about six years old, could crawl inside. I spent many happy hours in that pigpen, on the straw that was sometimes fresh but usually damp, packed tightly and probably smelly. I loved straw. The coffin I slept in was lined with straw too. The pigpen was my hiding place, my most private place, and the pigs were my best friends. I thought that’s how it was in the world.
I used to crawl inside and sit down in a corner. It was a small place, just a corner in the dark illuminated only by the dim light that came from outside. The darkness was pleasant. The pigs came and went around me, and I played with my doll.
A doll I made myself.
A stick that I found, not too long and not too thin, was the doll’s body. An apple I stuck the tip of the stick into was the head. The little face was made up of dark pea eyes I pressed onto the skin of the apple, a white pea nose, and a piece of carrot or a petal from a red flower was the mouth. Later, when I was already in my parents’ hiding place, after Hania Seremet threw me out of the village because my parents didn’t have any more money to pay for me, I pasted some red flower petals on myself too, from the flowers my mother brought when she went out hunting for bread.
We were very hungry, we had no manna. My mother went out to the Aryan side, the side of life, the side of death. The red flower in the pot was her disguise. Walking around with the flowerpot in her hand, she wasn’t a hungry Jew coming out of hiding to feed her beloved husband and her hungry child, but just another woman who’d bought a red flower in a flowerpot and was walking innocently down the street.
My mother brought the red flower with the bread.
I wrapped a rag around the stick, which was the doll’s body, and my doll had a dress. She had hair too.