The Shawl

for me they would have shipped Stella with a boatload of orphans to Palestine, to become God knows what, to live God knows how. A field worker jabbering Hebrew. It would serve her right. Americanized airs. My father was never a Zionist. He used to call himself a “Pole by right.” The Jews, he said, didn’t put a thousand years of brains and blood into Polish soil in order to have to prove themselves to anyone. He was the wrong sort of idealist, maybe, but he had the instincts of a natural nobleman. I could laugh at that now—the whole business—but I don’t, because I feel too vividly what he was, how substantial, how not given over to any light-mindedness whatever. He had Zionist friends in his youth. Some left Poland early and lived. One is a bookseller in Tel Aviv. He specializes in foreign texts and periodicals. My poor little father. It’s only history—an ad hoc instance of it, you might say—that made the Zionist answer. My father’s ideas were more logical. He was a Polish patriot on a temporary basis, he said, until the time when nation should lie down beside nation like the lily and the lotus. He was at bottom a prophetic creature. My mother, you know, published poetry. To you all these accounts must have the ring of pure legend.

Even Stella, who can remember, refuses. She calls me a parable-maker. She was always jealous of you. She has a strain of dementia, and resists you and all other reality. Every vestige of former existence is an insult to her. Because she fears the past she distrusts the future—it, too, will turn into the past. As a result she has nothing. She sits and watches the present roll itself up into the past more quickly than she can bear. That’s why she never found the one thing she wanted more than anything, an American husband. I’m immune to these pains and panics. Motherhood—I’ve always known this—is a profound distraction from philosophy, and all philosophy is rooted in suffering over the passage of time. I mean the fact of motherhood, the physiological fact. To have the power to create another human being, to be the instrument of such a mystery. To pass on a whole genetic system. I don’t believe in God, but I believe, like the Catholics, in mystery. My mother wanted so much to convert; my father laughed at her. But she was attracted. She let the maid keep a statue of the Virgin and Child in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes she used to go in and look at it. I can even remember the words of a poem she wrote about the heat coming up from the stove, from the Sunday pancakes—

Mother of God, how you shiver in these heat-ribbons!

Our cakes rise to you and in the trance of His birthing you hide.

Something like that. Better than that, more remarkable. Her Polish was very dense. You had to open it out like a fan to get at all the meanings. She was exceptionally modest, but she was not afraid to call herself a symbolist.

I know you won’t blame me for going astray with such tales. After all, you’re always prodding me for these old memories. If not for you, I would have buried them all, to satisfy Stella. Stella Columbus! She thinks there’s such a thing as the New World. Finally—at last, at last—she surrenders this precious vestige of your sacred babyhood. Here it is in a box right next to me as I write. She didn’t take the trouble to send it by registered mail! Even though I told her and told her. I’ve thrown out the wrapping paper, and the lid is plastered down with lots of Scotch tape. I’m not hurrying to open it. At first my hunger was unrestrained and I couldn’t wait, but nothing is nice now. I’m saving you; I want to be serene. In a state of agitation one doesn’t split open a diamond. Stella says I make a relic of you. She has no heart. It would shock you if I told you even one of the horrible games I’m made to play with her. To soothe her dementia, to keep her quiet, I pretend you died. Yes! It’s true! There’s nothing, however crazy, I wouldn’t say to her to tie up her tongue. She slanders. Everywhere there are slanders, and sometimes—my bright lips, my darling!—the slanders touch even you. My purity, my snowqueen!

I’m ashamed to give an example. Pornography. What Stella, that pornographer, has made of your father. She thieves all the truth, she robs it, she steals it, the robbery goes unpunished. She lies, and it’s the lying that’s rewarded. The New World! That’s why I smashed up my store! Because here they make up lying theories. University people do the same: they take human beings for specimens. In Poland there used to be justice; here they have social theories. Their system inherits almost nothing from the Romans, that’s why. Is it a wonder that the lawyers are no better than scavengers who feed on the droppings of thieves and liars? Thank God you followed your grandfather’s bent and studied philosophy and not law.

Take my word for it, Magda, your father and I had the most ordinary lives—by “ordinary” I mean respectable, gentle, cultivated. Reliable people of refined reputation. His name was Andrzej. Our families had status. Your father was the son of my mother’s closest friend. She was a converted Jew married to a Gentile: you can be a Jew if you like, or a Gentile, it’s up to you. You have a legacy of choice, and they say choice is the only true freedom. We were engaged to be married. We would have been married. Stella’s accusations are all Stella’s own excretion. Your father was not a German. I was forced by a German, it’s true, and more than once, but I was too sick to conceive. Stella has a