Zyta Rudzka

Doctor Josef’s Little Beauty

Excerpt

The action of Zyta Rudzka’s new novel is set in Arcadian surroundings – the terrace of a once elegant boarding house and a rose garden in summer. Its main characters are doubly imprisoned, in an old people’s home and in their own ailing bodies. In addition, the main ones, Miss Czechna (short for Czesława), her sister Leokadia, and Mr Leon, all bear the scars of the Nazi concentration camps, where they ended up as children. Focusing her narrative on the “martyrdom of old age”, Rudzka implies that their present situation is in many regards a state of return, to childhood as well as the traumas associated with it (not without reason does the phrase “I want to go back to the camp!” come up now and then). In the case of the woman referred to in the title, the problem is even more complicated, because she was a “patient” of the infamous Josef Mengele; nowadays she treats her experience in the camp with a mixture of pride and shame, because it has proved to be the most significant episode in her long life, and she regards her connection with a perverse torturer as her one and only “contact with a famous person”, so she exalts it in a peculiar way, being also the source of a still vivid (or increasingly vivid) erotic obsession. Here Rudzka is clearly referring to Liliana Cavani’s once celebrated film The Night Porter, replacing the film’s provocative sensationalism with some focused thought about the fate of characters whose roles the same actress, Charlotte Rampling, might successfully play in a few years’ time.
In terms of style, the book is written in Rudzka’s usual “reporting” tone, although she very skilfully shapes it to fit the main characters’ “senile” patterns of thought, while also making plenty of allusions to the tradition of Polish avant garde fiction. The reference to the work of Marian Pankowski (the scene comparing tattoos of a camp number and a butterfly, symbolising “the chaos of history”), despite being derivative, is particularly effective, maybe because Rudzka is telling her story from the female perspective, so here a “tattoo” means something different – it is not just a symbol but also suggests beauty, coquetry, and finally youthfulness. And admittedly Miss Czechna has no lack of all three.

Adam Wiedemann