Ewa Kuryluk

Frascati

About the book

“Someone should write a post-war history from the inside. About the effects of shock and psychological polarisation,” Mama drawled slowly, as if guessing my thoughts, “about excessive empathy and total lack of empathy. Horror either sensitises one to evil, or leads to desensitisation. What does it depend on? A predisposition? A world outlook? Faith? Morality? Or the place where fate has washed us up?” She scratched her head.
“On all of them to some extent, Mama, but mainly on character.”
“Good character means little fear, lots of empathy and faith in oneself,” she stated with conviction.
“A rare combination.”
“Very rare! The war brings the worst characteristics out of rotten characters and the best ones out of good characters,” she claimed.
“It’s a fascinating subject, isn’t it, Mama?”
“I wanted to write about it, but I wasn’t up to it – it’s something for you,” she said, taking me by the hand.
“I don’t know much about the war.”
“You know a thing or two about the marks it leaves on the psyche,” she muttered knowingly. “Without too many details you’ll get to the heart of the matter more easily.”
“Frascati osculati,” she crooned after a longish pause, “hier ist meine zweite Heimat. Frascati is a tasty morsel,” she said, changing voice. “That terrible spring” – that’s what she called March 1968 – “they were lying in wait for our flat. They knew it had nothing but virtues. Three rooms in a pre-war tenement, quiet, with a balcony, the ideal layout, a residential area” – she counted on her fingers – “a grand piano, a secretaire, a music cabinet, a complete set of the periodical “Sygnał” in a pre-war binding. In the larder an assortment of jars of my own home-made preserves,” – she smacked her lips – “compote, mousse, jam and candied nuts. How much of it I cooked up after coming back from Vienna – do you remember? They wouldn’t give Karol a job, so I made some supplies. When he died they set Western diplomats on us working for the intelligence service. They tried persuading you to emigrate in every possible way.”
“No, Mama,” I muttered, “a few friends offered us help in case we left the country. They knew who Łapka was.”
“They knew!” she intoned ominously. “There’s the catch, meine Kleine,” she said, stroking my face as if I were a child, “they knew, but you didn’t. They knew because they had us wired from floor to ceiling,” – she raised her eyes – “they installed bugs in the phone, the radio and the television. They knew we were sitting there quiet as mice. They knew how to set a trap for a widow and her fatherless children” – she rolled her eyes. “They knew how to subject us to fear.”
“But Mama, no one did us…”
“Don’t play the fool!” she interrupted me. “You’re over fifty! They were rubbing their hands together with glee at the idea that we’d ask to emigrate voluntarily out of fear,” she stressed. “Over my dead body!” – she gnashed her teeth – “Voluntarily and for nothing! I gave myself a partisan’s word of honour” – she raised two fingers – “not for anything would we go whimpering for mercy like a kicked dog,” she whimpered. “If your mouths are watering at the thought of our Frascati, just break the door down with your rifle butts” – she shuddered. “Take away our documents” – she tossed a newspaper on the floor. “Take all our possessions” – she stroked the couch. “Confiscate our property!” – she waved the key to the bedside cupboard. “Los! Break your way in to a widow who’s not all there” – she tapped herself on the forehead. “Los! The Gestapo! Come in the night for meine Kleinen! Deport sick, underage children in cattle trucks with no water.”
“We weren’t underage, Mama.”
“Piotruś wasn’t eighteen yet,” she scolded me with her look. “He spent day and night on guard by the door to the stairwell, he and the dog, waiting for a father who was buried at Powążki, and gearing up to emigrate to the Moon. And why?” She looked at me. “Out of fear that he’d be stuck in a barbarian country with no one but a crazy mother and an asthmatic sister,” she answered herself. “Once a week an ambulance came and put you under an oxygen tent, or have you forgotten?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I knew you wouldn’t survive emigration” – she sighed. “I had to remain on Frascati Street” – she coughed. “How many thousands of people were frightened into emigrating?” She glanced at me.
“I don’t know exactly, Mama.”
“But they didn’t frighten us,” she boasted. “I made an oath that we wouldn’t give up Frascati voluntarily,” – she ran her gaze across the walls – “so I made up my mind.”
“To do what, Mama?”
“In March I played the madwoman to save Frascati.”
“You played…?” I stammered in shock.
“There was nothing else for it,” she muttered. “I worked out that they would never move a madwoman.”
“Was that why you used to scream?”
“I bawled the whole house down, so everyone would know” – she nodded. “I used to wind myself up to fall into a trance,” she added, “and I stopped taking the medicine prescribed by the junior professor.”
“Did you simulate the paranoia?”
“Mightily,” she replied. “I was terribly punished for it, I lured a beast out of myself. It was lurking inside me, and after two years one fine morning out it leaped. I very nearly committed murder” – she hid her face in her hands.
“So it was true?” “She was standing over me with a kitchen knife,” I heard my brother’s voice on the phone to Cambridge, “I had to call an ambulance” – he had made a great effort to be calm – “it took her off to the asylum”.
Mama nestled into a corner of the couch and closed her eyes. “That terrible spring” she didn’t wash, never took off her stinking dressing gown and never left the house. At night she would prowl about the flat with her ear to the wall, packing and unpacking suitcases, and tearing up letters and photographs. At dawn she would lie down on the sofa, and on waking she would plod into the kitchen. She’d drink water from the tap, fill a bucket and carry it into the room where the grand piano stood, with a string bag full of whatever she found in the larder: bread, preserves, onions, sugar cubes. She’d lock herself in and hide under the piano. “Los! The Gestapo!” she would scream until she lost her voice. Or, to our dog Zaza’s horror, she’d howl, whine and gnash her teeth. And what did I do? I cursed Mama, I reproached Łapka for not divorcing this mad old woman long ago, I almost choked coughing and planned my “final exit”.
“I dozed off for a moment, dear,” said Mama, wiping her eyes.
“That’s good.”
“I dreamed Karol and I were out for a walk to the Embankment.”
“What a nice dream.”
“Extraordinary,” she said and smiled at me charmingly. “I was whistling as loud as I could” – she started to whistle – “Frascati osculati”.

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones