After Long Silence Read online

  “A marvelous amalgam of memory and imagination, of mourning and celebration, of loss and reclamation—so many strands, so deftly and seamlessly interwoven by a writer whose obvious talent is matched only by her humanity and generosity of spirit.”

  —Louise Kehoe, author of In This Dark House

  “Her eloquent voice graces the memoir with an intense sense of pride and dignity.… Fremont finally takes back the history she was denied by a family who attempted to protect her from unthinkable evils by erasing their own past.”

  —New York Post

  “An amazing chronicle of suffering and terror and rebirth and secrecy, carefully researched and courageously re-imagined to bring to light what had been hidden and hushed up.

  A brave and beautiful book.”

  —Charles Baxter, author of Believers and Shadow Play

  “A deeply moving family memoir … an immensely gifted writer who has vividly reconstructed a sensitive and memorable family saga of terror, hiding, and passing, as well as of personal imperatives over two generations around both casting off and confronting the past.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Helen Fremont has the rare wisdom to know that the life of the story is her subject, not the life of the autobiographer, which is only the raw material of the story. And what a story it is—about historical brutality, human frailty, moral complexity, and the power of fear, shame, and love. The result is a rich, deftly structured work of art, both profound and entertaining, and a gift to the rest of us humans: the real thing.”

  —Michael Ryan, author of Secret Life

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 1999 by Helen Fremont

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80465-5

  v3.1_r1

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names, locations, and identifying characteristics of a number of individuals in order to protect their privacy. In some instances, I have imagined details in an effort to convey the emotional truths of my family’s experiences.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART: ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART: TWO Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART: THREE Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  We loved each other and were ignorant

  —W B Yeats

  Prologue

  The first time I heard about the bomb that killed my mother’s parents, I was five years old, and my sister Lara was eight, and we each clasped a batter-drenched beater in our hands while working our tongues around the stainless-steel blades. My mother had spread raspberry jam over the pan of linzer torte dough, using a scarred wooden spatula that looked like it had survived the Pleistocene Era.

  “When I was your age,” Mom said, screwing the lid back on the Stop & Shop jar, “my mother used to cook huge pots of raspberry jam. The whole apartment smelled of it.” She broke off a small piece of dough and rolled it into a long noodle between the palms of her hands. “Now, watch,” she said, draping it across the pan like a plump worm. “See, this is how you make the lattice top.”

  Her hands worked quickly, forming a crisscross pattern.

  “What happened to your mother?” Lara asked.

  My mother pinched the corners of the lattice and slipped the pan into the oven. She glanced away as she wiped her hands on her floral print apron. “Oh, she died,” she said.

  “When? What happened?”

  “It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born.”

  “What happened?”

  My mother didn’t answer right away. “They died,” she said slowly, “in a bomb.” Her eyes looked so dark and full of memories, Lara and I grew quiet.

  “What do you mean?” I whispered. “Where were you?”

  My mother took a deep breath. “I was living at home, in Poland, but I would take the trolley each morning into town. And one day … one day I took the trolley into town—” Her lips quivered; a single tear drew a shiny trail down her cheek.

  “And when I came back at the end of the day …” My mother’s voice seemed to lurch on creaky wheels. I’d never seen her like this before, and it seemed to me that the words themselves were hurting her. “Everything was gone …” she said, “the whole block was bombed out! There was nothing left, no trace of them.” She wiped her eyes.

  I stared at her. It terrified me, the thought that I might find my parents’ house bombed out, that I might go to school one day and come home and find nothing there. How could my mother manage to live without her parents, to lose them and continue her life?

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  Tears poured down my mother’s face. “I was twenty.”

  “Oh,” I said, greatly relieved, “you were already a grown-up. You didn’t need them anymore.”

  Lara shot me a glare that I will never forget. “Helen!” she snapped.

  ——

  “I loved them very much,” my mother said, breaking into thin sobs.

  My discovery that my father’s mother, too, had died in a bomb was much less horrifying. We were sitting at the dining room table, I think, and either Lara or I asked, “How did your mother die?”

  I remember my father’s terse response: “A bomb.” He sounded angry, and we let it drop.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  Lara and I were raised Catholic in a small city in the Midwest. In 1960, at the age of three, I went to nursery school at the convent of the Saint James Sisters, and at six I wore Lara’s hand-me-down itchy white petticoat dress to my First Communion. It was the first and last time I would ever swallow a wafer, however, since our family always tiptoed out of church every Sunday before Communion. “It’s not an important part of Mass,” my mother explained, and for a long time we believed that Communion was a curious American addition to Catholicism.

  My sister and I knew that our parents were from a distant and dangerous world, that they had come out of a war, and that no one else had come with them. Although we could not hear their accents, our playmates told us our parents spoke funny English; and when our schoolmates asked about our grandparents and aunts and uncles, we said we didn’t have any. Except, of course, our auntie Zosia, who lived across the ocean in a place called Italy.

  I also knew that my parents had been in concentration camps. I misunderstood the meaning of concentration and assumed that in prison, the inmates were consumed by intensely focused mental activity. I believed that these camps were so deadly that they had sewn my parents into pockets of complete silence, And so I understood that two things could happen to you in a war: either you were suddenly, breathlessly, swept off the streets by a bomb, or you were scooped into a concentration camp, where you swallowed a terrible silence.

  My mother, I knew, was finally sprung from the camp by her sister, Zosia, who baked goodies and buttered up the camp warden. My father had it worse—he was off on a sheet of ice somewhere in Siberia for six years, until he escaped. I never knew how he escaped, except that he had managed to jump a train and hang on for days. I pictured him dangling from his one good arm, long, tattered legs swinging an arc each time the train banked a curve.

  Their love story I had been fed early and often, until it seemed part of my bones. I knew that they had fallen in love before the war, and they had been separated for six years without knowing if the other was alive; my mother escaped Poland dressed as an Italian soldier, and my father walked across Europe after the war, found my mother in Rome, and married her ten years to the day after they had first met. This was the tale they liked to tell and retell, the story they used to summarize their lives. It was a good story, because it ran a thread across the war and connected the two lovers before and after. It tied a knot in their tongues at the end, and the war remained silent; the intervening six years could never be spoken.

  My father, Kovik Buchman, was a self-employed family doctor with a sharp Slavic accent, pure white hair, and a chip on his shoulder the size of a Soviet tank. He was forty-two when I was born, twice as old
and almost twice as tall as other daddies. He built a little office downtown, having drawn up the blueprints and supervised the construction himself. He bought all the latest equipment, an X-ray machine and elaborate instruments, lab equipment and simple furniture. His office was dark and smelled of medicine, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, textbooks, and illustrated medical periodicals. My mother sewed the curtains—bold op-art designs without a trace of heritage.

  His patients poured in, Poles and Lithuanians, Czechs and Hungarians. They liked bantering with him in their home tongues, liked his European approach, his punctuality, his efficiency, his dry sense of humor. He worked from early morning until late at night, six days a week. He made house calls on a moment’s notice, day or night. You could almost hear him click his heels as he marched from one patient to another. His stride was enormous, his smile brief, his gaze intense. “Sit,” he would command, slapping on a blood-pressure band. “Inhale deeply.” “Cough.” “Say ‘Aaah.’ ” His exam was quick and thorough. “All set,” he would snap. “You may dress. Call me tomorrow.” In a flash he would be down the hall, ushering the next patient into his other examining room.

  My mother was a more slippery figure. Slender and supple, she was half my father’s size and twice as elusive. She spent the day at home up to her elbows in yellow Playtex living gloves, cleaning house. She smelled of ammonia and lemons. “Be a doctor,” my mother always instructed us. “Don’t marry one.”

  In the fall she tied her hair in an aqua-green surgeon’s cap and began rearranging nature, brandishing a rake that was taller than she was. She stuffed leaves into barrels, dragged them from one end of the property to the other, and dumped them over the cliff behind our house. In the spring she planted an elaborate rock garden under the white pines, using rocks she had kidnapped from nearby streams. Kneeling in dirt for hours, she separated and reunited plants from the woods and the rock garden, until it was hard to tell where her garden ended and the woods began.

  Our house itself was a crazy-shaped glass-and-brick affair surrounded by a small forest—a swank fifties Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff. My parents had fallen in love with it instantly because it looked like nothing they’d ever seen before. We moved in just after I was born, after they’d changed their name to Bocard and settled into their new American identity.

  It was a loud house. The sun danced through the pines and smashed through our floor-to-ceiling windows. An overbearing sky trumpeted each new day and tossed us out of bed. From the living room, violins wept on the hi-fidelity. A fat medical text lay open on my father’s lap, the Sunday Tribune spread at his feet. The dog a respectful distance away, banished from the Oriental rug.

  Kazakhstan followed my father to the new world in the form of floor covering. He wiped his feet on Middle Asia. Solzhenitsyn lined his bookshelves. The First Circle, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The Gathering Storm, volume after volume after volume, by Churchill. Books soared for the ceiling: The Art of Florence, The Operas of Puccini, The Roman Ruins. Dictionaries in every color and language. Volumes of German grammar, Duden.

  From the moment my mother moved to the States, she and her sister, Zosia, wrote each other three or four times a week. Pale blue aerograms with every millimeter of available space filled in elite type, with handwritten notes squeezed into the margins. The Italian post was terrible, and my mother would go days without mail and then get a bonanza of letters. Sometimes the letters arrived in little plastic bags, charred, torn, and taped back together.

  They wrote of the same things day after day: the weather, their bridge games, the children, books, movies, opera—or so my mother claimed whenever I asked her to translate the letters. From the excerpts she read to me, I couldn’t fathom why my mother’s face lit up every time she found a letter from my aunt in the mailbox. “Zosia!” she would exclaim, and race up the driveway to make herself a celebratory cup of pale tea with lemon. Then she gently pried open the aerogram with a knife, careful not to lose any words clinging to the inside edge of the folds, and settled into the chaise longue in her bedroom to read.

  When I was small, maybe five or six, my mother came to my bed every night to tuck me in. She would teach me the sign of the cross in six languages: Polish, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English. Each night I selected a language, and we said the sign of the cross in that language: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Then she taught me the prayer Our Father in these languages, and I rehearsed them until I knew them by heart. I loved the way gumdrop syllables rolled off the tongue in Italian and the way consonants crashed in German; I loved the tongue-twisting sounds of Polish and the fur-lined purr of French and Russian. And of course, I loved our conspiracy—my mother’s and mine. It was our time alone, our time together, and she was sending me into a night of sleep, protected by a God who could respond to me in any language, under any sky.

  What I didn’t understand was that my mother was equipping me with the means of survival: proof of my Catholicism to anyone in a dozen countries.

  Like most little kids, I considered my parents perfect. That is, I twisted in any direction necessary so that they always remained absolutely perfect in my mind.

  My father suffered from the realization that his life had been unbearable. My mother, on the other hand, suffered from the illusion that hers was not so bad as it really was.

  And so my sister and I grew up between the trunks of these two old trees, twisted and tough, throwing enough shade to shelter three or four continents. Childhood was a strange place to find oneself after so much history.

  As the baby of the family, I was the tail end of that history, and by the time I would try to make sense of it, it had been erased by my elders.

  In grade school my classmates and I marched single file into the blue-windowed gymnasium under the howling horn of Civil Defense drills, the heels of our patent-leather shoes clacking over the polished wood floors like the patter of rain. Our teachers lined us up in rows, then ordered us down on our knees; obediently, we offered our heads to the floor, clasping our little hands over the nape of our necks, elbows poking the shiny floor like praying mantises. I prayed the drill would last forever, cut into class time, splash the day with emergency and adventure. I never equated those drills with war or with the bombs that had wiped out my grandparents, my history, my identity. I loved Civil Defense drills for the distraction from my daily life as a first-grader.

  I was free to skip church once I’d made my First Communion. Consequently, as a youngster I came to associate Catholicism with The NFL Today, which I watched on TV every Sunday while my mother and sister were at church. Highlights of the prior week’s games were replayed in slow motion, set to rock-and-roll music, with voice-over narration by Frank Gifford. The moments of impact were like a dream: Half a ton of heavenly bodies, jerseys, and cleats collided soundlessly in exquisite slow motion. This is how I worshiped my Catholic God each Sunday at noon, through the miracle of television.

  My mother never really paid attention to what I watched; she was under the spell of America, and everything American, she believed, must be good for me. I ate Fritos, Scooter Pies, and Fluffernutter sandwiches on Wonder bread and watched The NFL Today.

  My mother always emphasized that one’s relationship with God was personal. She had private tête-à-têtes with God from time to time, I later discovered; my mother and God would bargain a little, and she would extract from Him a promise of our well-being in exchange for her vow to go to Catholic church each week.

  There was no doubt in my mind that my mother’s churchgoing was a sacrifice. “Ach!” she would shout, storming into the kitchen and slamming the garage door behind her. “It’s a sin the way that priest speaks English!”

  I would creep out from the TV room, glance up at the clock, and realize that once again my mother had come home early from church.

  “ ‘Jesus died for you and I!’ ” she would exclaim. “ ‘For you and I!’ ” She would shake her head in a rage. “An idiot he is!” She would yank off her gloves and march into the bedroom, peeling off her dress, her stockings, her slip. “A waste of time!” she’d mutter. “I have better things to do than listen to someone who doesn’t even know basic grammar!”