TOO MANY MEN
BY

LILY BRETT
From The Cover:
praise for Too many men:
'Too Many Men is [Lily Brett's] masterpiece' the australian
This is writing of a high order of accomplishment' sydney morning herald
'A very funny writer with a feel for the vagaries of conversation and behaviour' 
the age
'Like a beautiful fragile tea set wrapped in an abundance of tissues, this novel 
has a gem to reveal to those who take the time to unwrap it' australian book 
review
It means 'too many men', a young man passing by said to Ruth. She is saying to 
you, you have too many men in your life. Ruth laughed. Too many men. She didn't 
have any men in her life.
Ruth Rothwax is in control. She keeps her mind sound with her successful New 
York-based letter-writing business; she keeps her body sound by running and 
lifting weights. There's no one she has to report to since her three marriages 
ended. A good life, all in all... But there's something missing.
Ruth has a burning need to travel with her father Edek to Poland. She needs him 
to help her make sense of the past - to make sense of the murder of her family. 
She needs him to help her understand who she is.
So why are people staring at her as if they've seen a ghost?
Too Many Men is Lily Brett's most powerful and imaginative novel to date, a 
dazzling exploration of the places between past and present, tragedy and comedy, 
sanity and lunacy. It is the novel that confirms Lily Brett's unique status as 
one of Australia's wittiest and most loved writers.
PICADOR
ISBN  0-330-36192-9
Pan Macmillan Australia
 


Also by Lily Brett FICTION Things Could Be Worse What God Wants Just Like That 
ESSAYS In Full View POETRY The Auschwitz Poems Poland and Other Poems After the 
War , Unintended Consequences In Her Strapless Dresses Mud in My Tears TOO MANY 
MEN Lily Brett PICADOR Pan Macmillan Australia
 


The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to 
real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  Trade edition first 
published 1999 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited  This edition 
published 2000 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney
Reprinted 2000 (twice), 2001 (twice) Copyright (c) Lily Brett 1999
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 prior 
permission in writing from the  publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Brett, Lily, 1946-. Too many men.
ISBN 0 330 36192 9. I. Title. A823.3
Typeset in Minion by Midland Typesetters Printed in Australia by McPherson's 
Printing Group  For David, my love, with all of my love.
 


chapter one
The last time Ruth Rothwax had been with a group of Germans, she had wanted to 
poke their eyes out. The feeling had sprung out of her so suddenly and so 
unexpectedly that it had almost bowled her over. Where had this feeling come 
from? It had been a fully developed, ferocious wish-not some half-baked, half-
hearted aggressive inclination. There had been no build-up, no preparation. One 
minute she was deep in her own thoughts, the next minute she wanted to gouge an 
old woman's eyeballs out. To stick her middle and index fingers right into those 
wrinkled sockets until the eyes dislodged themselves.
She had felt nauseated for hours after the incident. It had been in Poland, in 
Gdansk. She had been staying at the Hotel Marta. The Marta was meant to be a 
luxurious hotel. But something had gone wrong. The tall, bleak building was 
awkward and ungainly. It stood on its large block of land, alone and unrelated 
to anything around it. It was impossible to feel at home at the Marta. A wind 
howled through the vast lobby each time the front doors were opened. And nothing 
was where it could be expected to be. The concierge's desk was hidden behind the 
women's toilets and the lifts were at the back of the building, a five-minute 
walk from the front desk.
The hotel was near the centre of the city. It felt as though it was in the 
middle of nowhere. Ruth's room was on the seventeenth floor. There was an 
international golf tournament on in Gdansk, at the time. Every guest at the 
Marta seemed to be wearing a cap and carrying a set of golf clubs. There was a 
uniformity in the ensembles, too.
 


The women wore pale sweaters and pastel pants or skirts. The men were dressed in 
knit tops, and plaid or patterned trousers.
The golfers had unnerved Ruth. She didn't know much about golf, but she didn't 
think Poland was high on the list of the world's premier golfing locations. She 
had never heard anyone say they were going to Gdansk to play golf. If people 
knew of Gdansk at all, they knew of it as a port city, the home of Solidarity. 
Still, there were a lot of golf-playing Germans, Scots and English at the Marta.
The German whose eyesight Ruth had wanted to eradicate got into the lift with 
her, on her second night in Gdansk. There were four Germans. Two men and two 
women, in their mid to late seventies. It was late. After eleven p.m. Ruth was 
very tired. She moved over to make room for them. The two men were in tuxedos; 
the women wore evening dresses. They had obviously been celebrating. One of the 
women laughed flirtatiously with one of the men. The laughter was the slightly 
off-key laughter of someone who had been drinking. The man smiled. The woman 
laughed, again. A high-pitched trill of a laugh. And then it happened. With no 
warning. All Ruth had felt was a rush of blood to her head. Suddenly her face 
had been tight with tension. She had turned towards the laughing woman. She had 
wanted to clamp the woman's laugh right off. To shut it down permanently. 'It's 
not that funny,' she wanted to say. She wanted to jab her fingers deep into the 
woman's pale blue eyes and repeat, 'It's not that funny.' Ruth's heart had 
started pounding. She had held her arms firmly by her side, at the back of the 
lift. She had pressed her hands into her hips in an effort to anchor them. She 
was terrified that they would take flight, of their own accord. Act 
independently of the rest of her. She had thought her fingers might strike out 
and dig and prod until they had reached the woman's brain.
The lift was a particularly slow lift. Ruth had thought it would never get to 
the seventeenth floor. Her hands burned and her skin
itched. 'It's not that funny,' she wanted to say. 'It's not that funny.' She had 
kept her mouth clenched shut. The woman kept laughing. Finally, the lift stopped 
at the seventeenth floor. Ruth got out. She walked unsteadily to her room. She 
sat down on the king-size bed with its blue brocade bedspread and trembled.
That was a year ago. Ruth shuddered at the memory. She felt cold despite the 
fact that she had already been running for twenty minutes. She was in Poland, 
again. In Warsaw. What was she doing in Poland? It was a good question. She 
hadn't come on a whim. She had spent two years talking her father, eighty-one-
year-old Edek Rothwax, into joining her on this trip. He was flying in from 
Melbourne, tomorrow.
Ruth checked the pedometer around her waist. She was doing seven miles an hour. 
She pressed another button. She saw that already she had run almost three miles. 
The pedometer was strapped on to a belt that also held a drink flask and a 
cassette recorder. A small microphone was attached to her headphones. This 
allowed her to record lists of things to be done, as she ran. They were 
breathless recordings, but Ruth was able to decipher them. Her credit cards and 
some zlotys were tucked into her socks.
In New York, where she lived, she looked like any other runner. Most runners had 
water bottles around their waists and Walkmans plugged into their ears. But not 
in Poland. In Poland, Ruth looked weird. Several people in the hotel foyer had 
stared at her as she left for her run this morning. The doorman, the porter, and 
a group of Germans. The Germans stared hard and looked perplexed. She had smiled 
at the Germans. This had unnerved them further. They had all looked away.
Ruth loved running. She loved feeling her hip bones, her abdominal muscles, her 
legs. She also lifted weights three times a week, in
 


Manhattan. She loved the way her chest seemed to expand when she brought down a 
lap pull. And she relished the stretch in her pectoral muscles as she strained 
to bench-press.
Sometimes, in the gym, men stopped their own exercises to watch her squat. It 
always amused her. She did three sets of twelve repetitions. She wasn't showing 
off. She was squatting for herself. For the sheer pleasure of feeling her back 
and legs as she lowered and raised herself with one hundred pounds on her 
shoulders. Lifting weights, her body felt alive. She could feel the individual 
components. Her feet and fingers felt strong. She felt connected to herself in a 
primal way. At the end of a workout, she felt replenished.
Exercise, she thought, was a reasonable substitute for sex. It wasn't perfect, 
but then neither, on the whole, was sex. Ruth thought that more and more women 
would soon be finding more fulfilment with their exercise equipment than their 
partners. New York City was full of women complaining about their men, or women 
complaining about their lack of men. Ruth fitted in well. She was forty-three, 
twice-divorced, single and childless.
She had actually had three divorces, but the last marriage was a green-card 
marriage and she didn't include it among her marriages or divorces. Ruth had 
married her first husband at nineteen. She had been chubby, and grateful that 
anyone had wanted to marry her. She hadn't noticed that he lingered longer than 
was necessary when he said goodbye to certain of his friends. The marriage ended 
when she found him jammed inside a young man, in her bed. She had read about 
homosexuals in books. She hadn't known that she had known any.
She married husband number two because she felt sorry for him. He couldn't work 
out what to do with his life. He was thirty-two. She thought he was very clever 
and could really do anything he wanted to do. He was a good-looking man. Tall, 
blue-eyed and blond-haired. She felt lucky to be married to him. Good-looking 
men were usually
 I
attracted to slim girls and women. She tried to keep the light switched off, in 
bed at night, and apologised incessantly for earning more money than he did.
That marriage fell apart when he accused her of hindering his search for a 
vocation. 'You're so efficient at what you do,' he said, 'that it intimidates 
me. I feel crushed. I feel more unable to work out what I want to do, now, than 
I did when we got married.' He did work out that he wanted half of the small 
cottage she had bought in their second year of marriage. In the end, she had 
acquiesced. She sold the house and gave him half of the proceeds. She was 
surprised to find that she felt happier without him.
Two years after the divorce settlement he suggested that they reconcile. 'No 
thanks,' she said. She had felt elated at her certainty, and had had to tap her 
right foot ten times to ward off any evil that might have come with such 
happiness. She had a habit of tapping her right foot ten times to ward off evil. 
She knew it was stupid. She knew evil couldn't be warded off. Particularly with 
the tap of a foot. If tapping was effective, then every Jew in wartime Europe 
would have been tapping, day and night. Whole cities would have trembled with 
taps.
Ten taps were hard to disguise. Exceptionally hard in a business meeting. She 
had to count the taps, too, so she often lost the thread of what was being said. 
She had a few lesser protective mechanisms such as five rapid blinks of either 
eye to stop the destruction of small-scale happinesses or success. One year she 
had had to spit three times over her shoulder when she had felt in danger. That 
had proved a difficult thing to do, in public, and she had been relieved when 
she'd felt safe enough to give that up.
Ruth tried to curtail the taps and the blinks as much as she could. She knew 
that if she let all of her idiosyncrasies loose, she could look like a maniac, 
in minutes. These superstitious gestures had been part of her since she was a 
child. Yet she didn't believe in the supernatural.
 


She scoffed at star signs, tarot cards, palm-readings, clairvoyants psychics.
Ms and
This was the third trip Ruth had made to Poland. She really didn't know why she 
was here. And she didn't know why she wanted her father to join her. Her first 
trip to Poland was just to see that her mother and father came from somewhere. 
To see their past as more than an abstract stretch of horror. To see the bricks 
and the mortar. The second time was an attempt to be less overwhelmed than she 
was the first time. To try and not cry all day and night. And she had cried less 
on that second visit. Now, she was here to stand on this piece of earth with her 
father.
Edek Rothwax hadn't wanted to come to Poland. When Ruth had first asked him, 
he'd said no. 'What do you want to go to Poland for?' he had said. 'There is 
nothing there. Everyone is dead. There is nothing to see.' One day Ruth had felt 
a crack in Edek's resistance. She had told him she was going to go to Poland, on 
her own, again. 'You still want so much to go to Poland?' he said. 'Yes,' she 
said.
'I'd really like to be there with you,' she said.
'You are crazy,' Edek said. 'Where do you think we will be? Somewhere important? 
No. There is nothing important there. There is nothing there.'
'We could go to Monte Carlo afterwards,' she had said. Edek loved a poker 
machine, and, Ruth was sure, although she'd never been there, that Monte Carlo 
must have poker machines.
'Pheh,' Edek said. 'We got such poker machines in Melbourne, now.'
'We'll stay in a really nice hotel,' Ruth said.
'You can afford the best hotels,' he said, 'in Las Vegas, in Monte Carlo, in 
Poland.'
He was always telling her what she could afford. 'You can afford to take it a 
bit easy,' he would say if she said she was tired. 'You shouldn't work so hard,' 
he said regularly. 'You can afford for someone else to do your work for you. You 
can afford anything.'
He also wanted her to buy things. Cars in particular. He called, constantly, 
with suggestions of good cars to buy. They were always Lincoln Continentals, 
Cadillacs or Pontiacs. He loved American cars, and he couldn't understand Ruth's 
lack of interest in them. 'It costs four hundred dollars a month to garage a car 
in Manhattan,' she would say to him. 'You can afford it,' he would say.
He called with other suggestions of what she could afford, too. These were 
mainly gadgets. Gadgets that chopped onions or cleared drains or converted 
currency. Ruth had said no to a self-coiling extension cord, an ultrasonic moth 
repeller, a hand-held paper shredder, an indoor and outdoor thermometer, a pen 
that wrote underwater, a portable security motion detector, and hundreds of 
phones, fax machines and photocopiers. If she had taken up all of Edek's 
suggestions she wouldn't, now, be able to afford anything.
When she first went into business on her own, Edek had been very nervous. 'You 
have, finally, such a good job,' he had said. Edek's dream had been for Ruth to 
be a lawyer. He saw the job she had writing letters and speeches at Schoedel, 
Firth and Thomson, a large New York law firm, as a great disappointment. As 
Ruth's salary rose, Edek's disappointment eased. Ruth got the job by accident. 
She had a master's degree in twentieth-century literature, a degree which was 
not in high demand, and she had four years' experience as a private secretary in 
Melbourne. She had been working as a temporary typist at Schoedel, Firth and 
Thomson, and trying to decide if she should stay in New York or return to 
Australia. She'd been in New York for three years. She was thirty-three. One 
evening, just as she was about to leave the office, a senior partner asked her 
to type a speech for him. It was late. Even the late-working secretaries had 
left. It was
 


a terrible speech. Ruth typed it up. She also typed an alternative version. She 
left both speeches on the partner's desk. Two weeks later she was on the 
permanent staff of Schoedel, Firth and Thomson with four weeks' annual vacation 
and a health-care package.
'It makes me jittery,' Edek had said to her, two years later, when she told him 
of her plans to branch out on her own. To start her own business. A letter-
writing business. Edek had liked the wooden sign she had had made for her new 
office. 'Rothwax Correspondence. Est. 1991' it said. 'Letters Written On All 
Subjects For All Occasions.' And his fears were mollified by the number of 
office items she had had to purchase in order to start the business.
Now that Rothwax Correspondence was successful, Edek was convinced that the 
company had been his own idea. 'I did say to you,' he said to Ruth regularly, 
'that if those lawyers could afford to pay you so much and still make a profit, 
there was for sure a profit to be made in this letter-writing business.'
Ruth looked at her watch. Her father would be arriving in about thirty hours. 
Edek Rothwax had been forced out of his home, in Poland, when he was twenty-
three. He hadn't been back since. He was nearly eighty-two, now. He was twenty-
three when he, his sister, his two brothers and his mother and father were 
ordered to leave their home. Like all the other Jews of Lodz, they left 
everything behind. They left the furniture, the piano, the bedding, the books, 
the china, the cutlery, the crockery, the photographs, the clothes. They took 
only what they could carry.
It was February 1940. They walked, with all the other Jews, along the one street 
they were allowed to use for their relocation. Mothers, fathers, children, 
grandmothers and grandfathers carried their possessions in sacks, sheets, 
suitcases, prams, and upturned tables. Bearded men carried bundles of books 
bound together with stringing wind howled and smacked at them. It was an 
exceptionally
Id winter. They were not allowed to use the sidewalks. Over one hundred and 
fifty thousand Jews walked on the side of the road. They had to step out of the 
way whenever a car or truck drove by. The procession took days.
The Nazis had allocated 5.8 Jews to each room in their new homes. The Jews 
walked to those rooms, in the run-down slum area that had been designated for 
them, hanging on to their belongings and to each other. They walked out of their 
own lives, and, six years later, the few Jews who had survived found no trace of 
their former lives left.
'I don't know why I want to be in Poland with you,' Ruth had said to her father, 
the last time she had talked about going to Poland.
'I, for sure, don't know why,' he had said.
'I just want to,' Ruth said, 'that's all I know.'
'You are supposed to be so clever,' Edek had said. 'If you don't know, who 
should know?' Ruth sensed a barrage of criticism coming her way. She began to 
say goodbye. Edek interrupted her. 'It is not important for me to go to Poland,' 
he said. 'For me, it is all finished there. But, if it is so important for you, 
I will go to Poland with you.'
Ruth was stunned. 'When do you want to go?' Edek said.
'Next month,' she had said.
Okay,' said Edek. 'You buy the tickets and pick me up on the way.'
Ruth had been so taken by surprise, she hadn't been able to answer
mm. 'Thanks, Dad,' was all she had said. She had had to call him
back and explain that Melbourne was not on the way from New
York to Warsaw. She wouldn't be able to pick him up. She would
have to meet him there.
Ruth felt a bit dizzy. She was used to running in larger spaces. She had been 
following the paths and promenades cutting across and
 


around the Saxon Gardens. The park, off Pilsudskiego Place, a large square, was 
one of Warsaw's most popular gardens. Two soldiers, with the freshly scrubbed 
faces of the young, guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at one end of the 
square. They marched in brisk unison around the memorial. Their black, highly 
polished metal-tipped boots clicked in a sharp synchronicity that echoed around 
the square.
The grey, thin winter light gave the park a sparse, Spartan demeanour. The 
Baroque sculptures, the fountain and the benches didn't seem to add any warmth. 
There were over a hundred species of trees in the two-hundred-year-old gardens. 
They all looked the same to Ruth. They had trunks and they had branches. Maybe 
in summer, when they had leaves, it would be easier to differentiate between 
them.
Ruth didn't know a great deal about nature. Trees were green, to her. Grass was 
green. Nature was green. Too much green made her feel claustrophobic. She was 
glad it was winter. Jews weren't meant to know about trees. They weren't meant 
to be able to distinguish between poplar trees and oak trees, or birch trees or 
maple or willow trees. In Yiddish, there was one word for tree. Tree. It covered 
all trees.
There were quite a few people walking to work through the Saxon Gardens. On the 
whole, they didn't look happy. They looked locked into some kind of misery. New 
Yorkers didn't spend their days smiling, but there was a purposefulness and a 
vivacity to their snappiness and their lack of patience. Here in Poland, people 
looked oppressed. In 1983, on her first trip to Poland, Ruth had thought that 
they looked oppressed because of the terrible conditions that most Polish people 
were living under. There had been a dire shortage of food, then. Long lines of 
people queued for bread, for milk. There were queues everything. Queues for 
soap, shampoo, toilet paper. Things were very grim for all Poles, in 1983. The 
luxury goods stores
in Warsaw displayed tubes of toothpaste and packets of washing powder, in the 
middle of otherwise empty shelves.
Things had certainly changed since then. Now you could buy Chanel, Armani, 
Guerlain, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. And food stores were stocked with 
sausages and cheeses, and pickled and potted meats and herring, and smoked and 
roasted ducks and chicken. But everyone still looked miserable. In restaurants, 
shops and offices, the notion of service hadn't been wholly absorbed. Train 
conductors, shop assistants, clerks and waiters seemed to slip from sycophantic 
to surly with unseemly speed. Most officials could lurch from obsequious to 
peremptory, in any exchange, with no evidence of what caused the switch. It was 
hard to like Poles, really, Ruth thought. A lot of Jews disliked Poles. 'They're 
a suspicious and sour people, and they seem to have a monopoly on stained, brown 
teeth,' her friend, Aaron, a lawyer she had worked with, had said when she told 
him she was going to Poland.
You rarely heard Jews voice similar sentiments about Germans. Jews might express 
anger or hostility, or a fear of Germans, but they didn't deride them in the 
same way that they slurred Poles. Ruth found this strange. Yet she was the same. 
She hardly ever expressed any hostility to Germans. Yet, given half a chance, a 
round of aggression would fly out of her if she spoke about the Polish. 'They 
look harsh and crushed and wrinkled and old as soon as they hit forty, as though 
their souls have slipped out of them and turned into skin,' she had said to 
someone, recently. What sort of a way was that to speak about any human being? 
She hated herself when she said things like that.
A man's voice startled her. 'I think you can hear me,' he said. She looked 
around. There was no one there. She slowed down. Who could have said that? Where 
did the voice come from? There was definitely no one there. The nearest person 
was thirty or forty feet away, at the end of the path. She must have imagined 
it. Maybe she
 


was missing New York. In New York there was always someone saying something to 
you, or to themselves. She slowed down to a walk. She was probably more tense 
and more jet-lagged than she realised. She decided to go back to the hotel.
A couple walked past her. Ruth recognised fragments of their conversation. 
Fragments that were of no use. Ja me moge, I can't. Ja ci mowie, I am telling 
you. She'd heard Polish spoken, by her parents, all of her life, and she 
understood so little of it. A van with Hebrew lettering and our roots, in upper 
case print, on its side, drove by. Ruth remembered the brochure she had found in 
her hotel room, in Warsaw, on her last trip. The brochure, Through Jewish 
Warsaw, was published by Our Roots, the 'Jewish Information and Tourist Bureau'. 
The brochure detailed six tours, and the times you could be picked up for each 
tour from six different hotels. The price for all of the tours was in U.S. 
dollars.
Tour One covered the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Cemetery, the Nozyk Synagogue, 
the Jewish Historical Institute and the ghetto wall. Tour Two was identical to 
Tour One except for the pick-up times. Tour Three was stated as Warsaw-
Auschwitz/Birkenau-Warsaw. Tour Four offered Warsaw-Treblinka-Warsaw and Tours 
Five and Six had Majdanek as part of their package. Neither the guides, nor the 
people in the Our Roots office, seemed Jewish to Ruth.
Ahead of Ruth, at the edge of the park, a young woman, about twenty, was 
squatting beside a tree. As Ruth got closer she realised that the young woman 
was having a shit. A thick roll of brown shit hung from the woman's bum. Ruth 
felt nauseated. She wished she hadn't seen the shit in such detail. How could a 
young woman do that? There were hotels with public toilets, nearby. Ruth 
wondered why this relatively uncommon sight seemed so Polish, to her. She had 
never seen anyone shitting in public, in Poland, before. Why did she see Poles 
as coarse and vulgar? It was very prejudiced of her. Two women walked by. They 
were probably her own age, Ruth
thought, though they looked about sixty. They both scrutinised Ruth, then nudged 
each other and continued to stare at her. Ruth felt uncomfortable. Why were the 
women being so aggressive?
Like many Polish women, they were over-lipsticked. Their bright red lipstick 
extended way above and beyond their mouths, and the black pencilled curves on 
their foreheads were not in the same place that the eyebrows they were mimicking 
could possibly have been. They looked harsh and judgemental. Photographs of two 
other Polish women had appeared in the New York Times, the morning that Ruth 
left for Poland. The article accompanying the photographs was about the 
prevalence of domestic violence in Poland. All that bowing and kissing of hands, 
that so many Polish men indulged in, may have masked more disturbing habits. The 
Times quoted a common Polish proverb: 'If a man does not beat his wife, her 
liver rots.'
The Polish government was now embarking on a billboard campaign to let people 
know that brutality could not be viewed as a family disagreement. A photograph 
from one of the billboards reproduced in the New York Times showed a blonde 
girl, her face swollen and bleeding. The caption read: Go musiaijakos 
odreagowac-Because he had to let off steam. In another billboard, a battered and 
cut woman is photographed with her young son. Go zupa byla za slona the caption 
says-Because the soup was too salty. There was nowhere for battered Polish women 
to go. There were very few women's shelters. Warsaw didn't have a women's 
shelter. There was no one for the women to turn to. The police, prosecutors and 
the Polish public saw men as the kings of their own domain. Complaints about men 
were hard to get heard. It was also hard to get divorced, in this highly 
Catholic country. Poland had one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe.
Ruth hurried past the two women in the park. She was five minutes away from the 
hotel. When she got there, she would write out the
 


list of things to do that she had dictated, on her run. The thought of putting 
things in order soothed her. She liked order. She liked things to go smoothly. 
Disturbance unnerved her. Even a change in the weather disturbed her. She saw it 
as disorderly. If it suddenly rained or became windy, she would often ask why. 
Why is it raining? she would say to whoever she was with. Or, why is it so 
windy? She saw an unexpected downpour, or a thunderstorm or a darkening of the 
sky that took her by surprise, as a bewildering and possibly unnecessary lack of 
order. As though, with the application of more discipline and efficiency, 
unpredictable changes in the weather could be eliminated.
All change disturbed her. She even felt disturbed when other people moved out of 
the building she lived in. It was a large building. Ten floors and six 
apartments on each floor. Someone was always moving in or out. Ruth felt stupid 
being bothered by these departures and arrivals. She wasn't even particularly 
friendly with anyone in the building. But, she liked the security of knowing 
that Mr Hing on the sixth floor always walked his dog at six a.m. And she knew 
that she could rely on Maria and Marcus, whose apartment was directly above 
hers, to do their washing every Friday. If she didn't hear their washing machine 
rumbling and spinning for a few weeks she started asking people in the building 
if they had seen her upstairs neighbours and were they well. No wonder some 
people in the building thought she was strange.
She didn't mind. Routine reassured her. The smallest daily deviations could 
sometimes take a toll on her. If she found out that she had run out of Raisin 
Bran, or that there wasn't enough wheat germ left in the jar, as she sat down to 
breakfast, it could rock her for the rest of the day. She knew that her response 
was ridiculous. There were four twenty-four-hour delicatessens within a three-
minute walk of her apartment. But, running out of anything was a sign, to her, 
that she had slipped up, loosened her guard. What she was on guard
for wasn't quite clear. What she did know, however, was that routine, structure 
and order were essential to her survival.
A terrible lack of order had disrupted her mother's life, when her mother was 
fifteen. Ruth's mother was still in high school when the Germans took over Lodz. 
The Germans took over Lodz on the fifth of September, 1939. The fifth of 
September, almost seventeen years, to the day, before Ruth Rothwax would come 
into the world, already quiet. Already understanding that things had been thrown 
out of kilter in her world, and would remain tilted and off-balance for years. 
Photographs of Ruth show a wide-eyed, sombre baby girl in the arms of a mother 
whose small smile masked none of her torment.
In Lodz, on that day in September 1939, people could hear cannon fire and 
shelling and the low rumble of artillery heading towards them. 'It was so quiet 
in the streets,' her mother had told her. 'It was like even the birds and the 
flies had stopped breathing,' Rooshka Rothwax had said to Ruth. 'Even children 
were quiet.' When Ruth listened to Rooshka talk like this, she could feel the 
silence, herself. A silence that had enveloped the Jews of Lodz. All everyday 
noise seemed to have stopped. As though everyone had caught a hint of what lay 
ahead.
Hundreds of German troops had arrived a few days later. The soldiers sang, with 
gusto, songs about Jewish blood flowing from their knives. 'You could smell the 
evil,' Rooshka had said. New edicts from the Germans appeared daily in Lodz. 
Jews were allowed to be on the streets between eight a.m. and five p.m. Any Jew 
seen on a street at any other time would be shot. The Germans began to round UP 
Jewish men. They made them hop and jump in the street. They cut men's side-locks 
off and set fire to their beards. Rooshka's mother sent Rooshka out to buy 
bread. It was safer for Rooshka to go. She was in less danger than her father or 
any of her four brothers.
The Poles were eager to prove their loyalty to the Germans. Heil Hitler, they 
said. Heil Hitler. They pointed out Jews to the Germans.
 


Poles who went to school with Jews pointed their former friends out. Poles who 
had done business with Jews, for years, turned them in to the Germans for any 
infraction of the new rules. 'You'll be sorry you didn't fuck with me,' a boy 
Rooshka went to school with said to her. 'No one will want to touch you now, you 
piece of shit,' he said. 'You missed out on a good fuck.' Rooshka said nothing. 
She walked away from him. 'You thought you were better than me,' he shouted. 
'Well you're not. The Germans know who is shit and who isn't.'
Rooshka Rothwax, Rooshka Spindler, then, had been a shy girl.
Bookish, despite her quite startling beauty. She wasn't really interested
in boys. She wanted to be a doctor. A pediatrician. She knew that
in order for a Jewish girl from a poor family to stay in school it was
necessary to have no distractions. 'I want you to marry Edek Rothwax,'
Rooshka's mother had said to her, the day they had to move into
the ghetto. 'They are rich. You will be safer with them, and you will
be able to help us, too. He has been chasing you for years. I think
he will be a good husband.' Edek and Rooshka were married, in the
ghetto, on December the seventeenth, 1940. She was sixteen.
Ruth wiped the sweat from her face. She was surprised at how sweaty she was. 
She'd thought that she probably wouldn't sweat much, in this cold weather. She 
had been deep in thought. She often thought about things when she was running. 
Thoughts that she managed to avoid at other times often arrived in the middle of 
a run.
Ruth thought about her mother. Order appeared to have returned to Rooshka 
Rothwax's universe, in Melbourne, Australia. The bunks, the barracks, the lice, 
the mud, seemed to have receded. But the recession was only on the surface. The 
silk blouse and the suntan couldn't erase the dead, their arms and legs 
sometimes still twitching. It couldn't erase the pus, the vomit, the shit, the 
piss. It couldn't
eradicate the stench of all that flesh burning. Rooshka's mother and father and 
three sisters and four brothers' bodies had been part of that terrible smell.
In Australia, Rooshka Rothwax's house smelled of Chanel No. 5 perfume and 
Christian Dior creams and lotions. Everything was in its place. Rooshka ironed 
and folded towels and tea towels, napkins and sheets. She ironed handkerchiefs. 
She stored things in neat, carefully organised shelves. You could see at a 
glance where everything was kept. Everything was in its place. And Rooshka 
needed it that way. Now and then Edek accidentally put something where it didn't 
belong. A pillowcase on top of the towels, or a couple of bowls where the 
saucers should have been. It always left Rooshka distraught. Order was 
everything.
Ruth Rothwax tried hard to be disorderly. She didn't want to be like her mother. 
At work, she practised messing up her desk. Moving pieces of paper so that they 
weren't perfectly aligned. It wasn't easy, and Ruth felt proud when she could 
tolerate some chaos. She felt overjoyed the day she managed to leave her 
apartment without making her bed. She was also in the process of trying to 
create a degree of disarray among the coat-hangers in her closet. For most of 
her life, she had needed her hangers all to face the same direction. Now, if she 
accidentally put one back the wrong way, she tried to leave it there. At least 
for a day. Ruth could see the absurdity of some of the issues she was trying to 
come to grips with. How many sane people wrestled with their coat-hangers? She 
started to laugh and almost tripped over. It was impossible to laugh and run. 
She straightened herself up.
She imposed order, on herself, in other ways. She allowed herself a maximum of 
twelve minutes to read People magazine. She knew that People magazine was 
rubbish, and that it often gave her a headache to read about this starlet's 
battle with bulimia, or that actress's long road to recovery from alcoholism. 
Even the divorces and
 


marriages were hard to digest. She had barely caught up with a celebrity's 
second marriage when the magazine was reporting his third. A twelve-minute limit 
to this information seemed to settle Ruth's conflict about the place People 
magazine should occupy in her life.
The place that New York City occupied in her life, had crept up on her. For her 
first five years in the city, she had claimed she was in transit. On the verge 
of returning to Australia. Now, after twelve years, she had to acknowledge that 
she loved New York. She loved it most when things worked. When a taxi arrived as 
soon as you raised your arm. When the train to Greenport, Long Island, left at 
7:04 p.m., on Friday, and the ferry that took her to Shelter Island was waiting, 
in Greenport, for that train.
She liked Shelter Island because it was quiet, but also because everyone obeyed 
the rules. If you drove through a stop sign, it would appear in the 'Police 
Blotter', in the Shelter Island Reporter, the following week. Ruth knew that 
being on Shelter Island relaxed her, and she tried to spend at least six 
weekends a year there. She needed the peace of mind and the freedom that the 
island gave her.
Order helped Ruth to experience freedom. Children of Holocaust survivors found 
it hard to feel freedom. Ruth had read that, many times. They found it difficult 
to separate from their parents. Difficult to have a life of their own. Difficult 
to have a life. They had to create obstacles and burdens for themselves. To 
align themselves with their parents. To experience at least some of the horror. 
Weighted down with fear, apprehension and depression, they felt free enough to 
go on. Children of survivors had to fill up their parents' emptiness. They had 
to make up for lost objects and people and ideals. No wonder freedom seemed far-
fetched for so many of them.
The warnings of impending danger that children of survivors
received from their parents were not overt or intentional. Parents didn't shout 
out their knowledge of the hostility of the world. They didn't have to. The 
children had received that message of omnipresent threat, a long time ago. The 
children understood, too, that they had to keep their anger to themselves. How 
could you be angry with parents who had suffered so much? The children became 
adept at turning their anger on themselves. And dealing with parents who were 
too preoccupied to notice the angers and upsets of ordinary, everyday life. 
Parents who were always preoccupied. Always somewhere else, somewhere out of 
reach. In a past that was untouchable.
There were also strange envies and resentments to grapple with. Ruth knew that 
her mother envied her for having a mother. And she knew, when she was a 
teenager, that her mother resented the fact that Ruth had a youth. Ruth tried to 
dispense with her youth. She cultivated a serious weariness. At twelve, when she 
began to attract looks, she tried to get rid of them, too. She covered her new 
breasts with bulky dresses that covered most of the rest of her.
Her mother's looks were one of the few things about Rooshka Rothwax that had 
survived intact. Rooshka was exceptionally beautiful. And Ruth didn't want 
anything to diminish the importance of that. So, Ruth put on pounds and pounds 
of fat, and soon no one looked at her, except in pity. By the time Ruth felt 
safe enough to emerge, Rooshka Rothwax was dead and buried.
Ruth grieved for her mother for years. She was twenty-eight when her mother 
died. Rooshka had died of cancer, at sixty. She had died with her beauty 
undimmed, her looks as luminous as they had ever been. Ruth often still cried, 
now, when she thought of her mother. A psychologist once asked Ruth if she had 
linked her mother's death with her own ability to lose weight. Ruth had nearly 
fainted at the question. It was not a connection that had occurred to her. A 
lack of understanding about the connections and complications of being the child 
of survivors was not the only thing missing from most
 


children of survivors. Children of survivors depressed Ruth. She tried to avoid 
them. She found them curiously blank and lifeless. Joyless. The high achievers 
seemed as muffled as the more forlorn.
Even in expansive moments children of survivors still seemed mute. Ruth had 
watched Leon Wasserstein at his wedding to wife number two. Ruth had been at 
school, in Melbourne, with Leon. He was a short, slight man. A scientist. He 
looked frightened even when he was expressing happiness. Leon was born, after 
the war, in Bergen-Belsen. When Ruth asked him about Bergen-Belsen he said he 
had no memory of it and was sure it had had no effect on him. 'It was my mother 
and father who suffered,' he had said.
Leon Wasserstein was forty-three when he married for the second time. His wife, 
a tall, big-boned blonde Australian, several years older than Leon, announced 
that she and Leon were going to dance for the guests. 'My wife Lee-Anne 
choreographed these dances, herself,' Leon added, before they began dancing.
On the dance floor, Leon Wasserstein looked like a child trying to guess what 
was going to happen next. Lee-Anne flung him around. He followed her movements 
as best as he could. They were tricky movements. The couple had to put their 
hands up, then their hands down. They had to kick the right leg out in front of 
them, then kick the left. They had to turn towards each other with their arms 
outstretched, and turn back again, and clap. They had to step this way and that 
way, and turn and whirl.
At one stage, the bride's blue satin dress billowed wildly and nearly swallowed 
poor Leon. When he emerged, he was still kicking. Ruth noticed that although 
Leon's fingers and toes were animated, his face had remained peculiarly unmoved. 
By the third dance, Ruth had had to leave the room. She couldn't bear the sight 
of Leon nodding his head to a beat that was clearly out of his reach.
Ruth was about to enter the Bristol Hotel. The Bristol was one of Warsaw's most 
expensive hotels. 'I think you can hear me,' a voice
said. Ruth nearly fell over. It was that voice, again. Her heart started 
pounding. She looked behind her. There was no one there. She was alone. She 
looked in front of her. The doorman was standing behind the large, glass doors 
of the hotel. There was no one else about. The doorman stepped forward to open 
the door for Ruth. She turned away. She walked briskly along Krakowskie 
Przedmiescie. Then, with no warning, she stopped and looked back. There was no 
one there. Nobody was following her.
She began to walk back to the Bristol. 'I think you can hear me,' the voice 
said, again, with an emphasis on the word you. Ruth felt frightened. She began 
to tremble. She pulled herself together. She was just tired, there was no one 
there. 'I can't hear you,' she said, defiantly, to the almost empty street. 'I 
knew you were the one,' the voice said, triumphantly. Ruth shook herself. This 
was absurd. She was, clearly, hearing things. She had always had an overly 
active imagination. She really must be very tired.
 


chapter two
Two wake-up calls, five minutes apart, woke Ruth up. She always requested two 
wake-up calls, in hotels. It decreased the odds of the call being forgotten by 
fifty per cent. Three minutes later, the alarm clock she had set rang. At home, 
in her regular life, she had weaned herself off a variety of multiple wake-up 
mechanisms. She now made do with two alarm clocks.
Ruth found it hard to go to sleep at night. Night had an endlessness about it. 
An excessive number of unstructured and unknown hours that frightened her. Alarm 
clocks punctuated that time. Marked the end with a loud ring. Alarm clocks 
enabled Ruth to feel some sense of certainty about waking up.
She confused sleep with death, one shrink had said to her. Another suggested 
that sleep frightened her as what happened when she was asleep was something 
that was out of her control. Ruth didn't like either theory.
She had slept well, last night. She often slept well in hotels. There was less 
to feel anxious about. Someone was on guard all night. In expensive hotels 
several someones were on guard. There were security systems. Cameras that roamed 
the elevators, staircases and hallways. There were fire and smoke detectors. 
Less could be overlooked.
Ruth felt refreshed. Her head felt clear. Her vasomotor system must have gone 
astray, yesterday. She wasn't sure exactly what her vasomotor system was. She 
thought it had something to do with her nervous system. She imagined it as a 
series of wires connected to her brain. When one of them came loose, things went 
a bit haywire-
She thought that as a mature person, she should understand the workings of the 
brain, in more detail. But she didn't want to. If you knew too much, Ruth felt, 
about how any part of your body functioned, it left you more vulnerable about 
what could go wrong. Certain things, Ruth was certain, could cause a loose 
connection in the brain's electrical circuitry. Like jet lag. It must have been 
jet lag that made her imagine someone was speaking to her.
She had a suite in the Bristol. A bedroom and a living room. The living room had 
a sofa, an armchair, a coffee table and bookshelves. The books in the shelves 
simulated somebody's real collection. There were well-thumbed-through old 
volumes, and current titles. A couple of the book covers were torn. It was an 
upper-class library that this collection was imitating. There were several 
leather-bound books, and no paperbacks.
Ruth had tried to look through the books on the shelves last night. But there 
wasn't enough light in the living room. On the whole, the more you paid for a 
hotel, the less you could see. As though an adequate amount of light might lower 
the tone. The lighting definitely seemed to dim or brighten in direct ratio to 
the dollars expended by the guests.
Ruth got out of bed. She couldn't see herself in the mirror. If she stayed in 
hotels any more expensive than this, she would have to Pack a flashlight. All 
four phones in the suite rang. Ruth looked around. She couldn't see any of them. 
Every surface contained a "gurine or a vase or a bowl. It took her a couple of 
minutes to locate a phone.
We can put calls through to you now, madam?' The hotel operator asked.
Yes,' she said. She had forgotten that she had asked not to be disturbed until 
eight a.m. today.
'You have Maximilian on line two for you,' the operator said. 'Line two is in 
the bedroom.'
 


'Maximilian?' Ruth said.
'Yes, madam, Maximilian,' the operator said. 'She waits for you already five 
minutes.'
Ruth picked up the other phone. 'Hi Max,' she said. 'The operator told me 
Maximilian was on the line.'
'She called me Maximilian,' Max said. 'Maximilian is better than Maxine. I told 
her it was just Max. I told her that my parents wanted my brother to feel 
involved in my birth, that they didn't want him to feel left out, so they let 
him name me. I told her he was six and he named me Max. I explained it to her 
carefully, but she didn't seem to get it.'
Ruth laughed. Max often made her laugh. Max was twenty-six. She had been working 
for Ruth for five years. Max always over-communicated everything. It drove some 
people mad, but Ruth found it an endearing quality. When Max's effusive 
explanations got too much for her she would say 'Edit, Max, edit.' Max never 
took offence. She just removed the extraneous detail. Ruth was very fond of Max. 
'I'll be brief and to the point,' Max said. 'I don't want to intrude on what has 
to be a very emotionally tumultuous trip.'
'The tumult hasn't quite started,' Ruth said. 'But let's not run up more phone 
bills than we need to. Is everything okay?'
'Everything in the office is A-l' Max said. 'If my personal life was in as good 
shape as this company, I'd be off and away. Metaphorically speaking, of course.' 
'Good,' said Ruth.
'Bern is working out well,' Max said. 'He got in late, this morning, but he 
said, and I believe him, that there was some kind of holdup on the subway. They 
kept the train at Union Square Station for thirty minutes. With the doors 
closed. He couldn't get off. That doesn't happen so often now, but it used to 
happen to me, regularly.' 'Edit, Max, edit,' Ruth said. She didn't need to hear 
about Bern's battles with the city's transport system. She had hired Bern two
months ago. He used to make deliveries to them from a local stationery store. 
Ruth was impressed by his eloquence and his good nature. He often asked Ruth 
questions about the business.
'You are a smart dude,' he had said to her one day. 'I'd like a company like 
this.'
'You could have one, one day,' she'd said. 'I need to learn the business first,' 
he said. 'Would you give me a job?' The question had taken her by surprise. Bern 
was very young. He was only eighteen.
'I'll do your pick-ups and deliveries,' he said. 'I'll clean the office. I'll do 
all the jobs you don't want to do until I've learnt the business and I'm more 
useful.'
'I'll think about it,' she said. A week later, she hired Bern. Bern hadn't 
stopped smiling since he'd got the job. His mother had called Ruth to thank her 
for giving Bern this opportunity. Ruth had felt bad. She felt she wasn't giving 
Bern all that much.
'We needed someone else in the office,' she said to Bern's mother. 'Not many 
white women would give a young black man a chance,' Bern's mother had said. 'I'm 
going to pray for you in church, on Sunday.'
'Thank you,' Ruth had said.
Ruth knew life was hard for young black kids, especially boys. She could see how 
segregated America was. If you went to the theatre or a dinner party or a museum 
or art gallery, you saw very few black People. At an opening of anything, in New 
York, everyone wanted to let themselves be seen being friendly to the two and a 
half black People who were present.
Ruth had gone to the opening night of a big Broadway play. Television cameras 
and photographers and journalists were outside the theatre, and at the dinner, 
afterwards. There were celebrities everywhere. Tipper Gore was there.
Congratulations and embraces flew from one celebrity to another.
 


Lavish compliments and superlatives were hurled in a giddy whirl from one guest 
to another. Less celebrated guests hovered and waited discreetly for a chance to 
pass on their admiration or adoration. Kathleen Turner had elbowed Ruth out of 
the way, in her rush to get to the playwright. 'I'm Kathleen Turner,' she said 
to the playwright in her deep voice. 'And I really want to meet you.'  The 
dinner party was in the Roosevelt Hotel. It seemed to occupy most of one floor. 
The only African-American Ruth could see was a well-known actor, a dignified 
man, who seemed to keep to himself. No one Ruth knew had any black friends. She 
didn't either.  Ruth was very fond of Bern, but she didn't want to be sitting in 
the Bristol Hotel, in Warsaw, discussing delays in the New York City subways.  
'Sorry,' Max said. 'I've got Mrs Prescott in the office. Remember Mrs Prescott? 
We did the thank-you-for-the-dinner-party letter and the thank-you-for-the-
flowers, for her, and she drove us nuts.'  'Why are you ringing me about her?' 
Ruth said.
'She heard me tell Bern I was going to call you and she said she wanted to deal 
directly with you,' said Max.
'Oh shit,' Ruth said.
'She's been here for two hours,' Max said.
'Can't you get rid of her?' said Ruth.
'I've tried,' said Max. 'Sorry.'
'This is ridiculous,' Ruth said. 'Put her on. Tell her I'm in Warsaw and she's 
got to be brief.'
She felt annoyed. She was sure other people didn't run their businesses this 
way. She should have done an M.B.A., then maybe she wouldn't, now, be having to 
take this call from Mrs Prescott. In the background, she could hear Max telling 
Mrs Prescott to be brief. I took Max two or three minutes to get the message 
across.  Ruth was quite agitated by the time Mrs Prescott came on the line. 'I'd 
like a condolence letter,' Mrs Prescott said. 'It's for the wife  of, or widow 
of, I should say, my husband's boss.' Ruth took a legal pad and a pen from her 
briefcase and sat on the bed.  'Leland, the now-deceased boss, was younger than 
my husband, but more successful,' Mrs Prescott said.
'Would you like one page or two?' Ruth said.
'I've never had more than one page.' Mrs Prescott said. 'What is the 
difference?' Ruth tapped her right foot ten times to blot out her feelings of 
irritation at Max and Mrs Prescott.  'Two pages is a longer letter,' she said. 
'One page is one hundred and thirty-five dollars. Two pages is two hundred 
dollars'.  'That's expensive,' Mrs Prescott said.
Ruth sighed. She had had this conversation with Mrs Prescott before. 'A good 
letter is an expensive item,' she said. 'But it can have a greater impact than 
hosting a dinner party or buying a room full of flowers. It's cheap by 
comparison.'  Ruth wished she hadn't taken the call. She should have told Max to 
deal with Mrs Prescott. Mrs Prescott had been one of Ruth's first customers. 
Ruth had been so eager to make Rothwax Correspondence work in that first year, 
that she had spent far too much time with and been far too friendly to every 
client. By the second year, the business was thriving and Ruth was able to be 
more businesslike.  'I'll have two pages,' Mrs Prescott said.
'It's to the widow of Leland who?' Ruth said.
'Davis,' said Mrs Prescott. 'Marcia Davis.'
'How old was Leland and what did he die of?' Ruth asked.
'He was fifty-four,' Mrs Prescott said. 'He died of cancer. Cancer of the liver. 
It was terrible. He was bright yellow in the end. He couldn't eat anything and-'  
'It's okay,' Ruth said. 'I don't need those details. Did you like him?'
No, not really,' Mrs Prescott said. 'Nobody in the office really liked him.'
'Did his wife like him?' Ruth said.
 


'I think so," Mrs. Prescott replied. Ruth asked if the deceased man had any 
children.
'Two boys,' Mrs Prescott said. 'I never saw them. We didn't socialise with the 
Davises. Leland thought my husband was stupid. My husband is not stupid.'
'Of course not,' Ruth said. 'Was there anything remarkable about Mr Davis?'
'He had a beautiful singing voice,' Mrs Prescott said. 'He was chairman of the 
Manhattan Concert Hall.'
'Was he sick for long?' Ruth asked her.
'A few months,' Mrs Prescott said. She paused for a moment. 'I'd like a very 
moving letter,' she said.
'Of course,' said Ruth.
'Don't do that to me, again,' Ruth said to Max.
'I'm sorry,' Max said. 'I felt sorry for her. I find it hard dealing with women 
my mother's age.'
'You're going to find it hard to deal with me if you do that again,' Ruth said. 
'Can you get the date of the death from Mrs Prescott and fax me the weather 
details for that day?'
'Sure,' said Max. 'One more thing. We've got an order for fifteen different 
thank-you letters. It's Mr Newton of Newton Labs. He wants fifteen thank-you-
for-your-thoughts-while-I-was-ill letters. His secretary said to make sure we 
don't duplicate any of his thank-you-for-our-wedding-anniversary-gifts letters. 
I can't put fifteen different versions together from our thanks-for-your-thought 
file, especially if they can't duplicate the wedding anniversary letters. There 
were seventy-five of them, I looked them up. Each one was slightly different.'
'I'll do it, Ruth said. 'What was wrong with Mr Newton?'
'Bypass surgery,' said Max.
'Call and ask him if he minds if I include some details of what bypass surgery 
entails,' she said. 'It won't be anything too gory. If he says yes, print out 
the bypass operation details from the medical file and fax it to me with Mr 
Davis's weather details.'
'Okay,' Max said. 'I'll do that right now.'
The business centre of the Bristol Hotel had a genteel, refined and very 
masculine air. It was furnished with large, well-padded leather sofas and 
armchairs. Leather-bound books lined the bookshelves and tasteful framed prints, 
drawings and historical documents were on
the walls.
'Are you looking for someone, madam?' the man at the business
desk asked her.
'I need to fax some documents,' she said. He looked surprised. 'There are a lot 
of women doing business today,' she said. 'Probably
even in Poland.'
'Of course we have faxing facilities,' he said, and stood up, rapidly, to greet 
a very fat man with a gold fob watch hanging from his pinstriped waistcoat.
Ruth pulled up a file labelled Condolences from her new laptop computer. It was 
the smallest and lightest computer on the market. Her father would have approved 
of this purchase. It is so hard to believe that Leland has left us, she typed. 
His unusual qualities of grace and ambition, business acumen and acute 
musicality, combined with "is forceful intelligence made him an important 
presence in our personal lives, a great man, and a highly respected colleague. 
Dear Marcia, this will be a heart-breaking time for you.
Ruth blinked her left eye five times. She always did this when she composed 
condolence letters. It was a strange safeguard she didn't really understand. A 
sign to someone, a higher being, maybe, that she knew death was not to be 
meddled with. But, she didn't believe
 


in higher beings. She didn't believe in God.
'There is no God,' was the only reference to religion that was voiced when Ruth 
was growing up. 'There is no God,' her mother said, always looking up at the 
sky. Ruth often wondered why her mother looked upwards when she made this 
statement. She never asked. She didn't want to hear the stories of babies used 
as footballs by the Gestapo, or babies who had their heads smashed against brick 
walls, again.
Ruth finished the condolence letter without any more blinking. A man sat down on 
the other side of the table she was working on. She recognised him. He had been 
at the front desk, when she left for her run, yesterday. 'I am a physician,' he 
had kept shouting, in his thick German accent. 'I am a physician and I do not 
like the room you have given to me.'
Forty-five per cent of German doctors became members of the Nazi party during 
the Third Reich. Ruth knew that from her reading, Doctors were the largest group 
of any professionals to join the Nazi party. The Nazi Physicians' Association, 
in March 1933, appealed to their fellow physicians who had so far resisted the 
cause. 'No profession is as Jew-ridden as the medical profession,' they said in 
a published statement. 'Jewish doctors control the professorships in medicine, 
take the spirit out of the medical art and have imposed on generation after 
generation of young physicians a mechanist! spirit.'
A mechanistic spirit. Ruth had an image of a group of Germ; doctors dispensing 
warmth and exuberance and tenderness once they] had rid themselves of those 
mechanistically spirited Jews. In April 1933 Nazi doctors and SA 
Sturmabteilungen troops stormed public hospitals and clinics and universities 
expelling their Jewish colleagues. Removing the Jewish doctors removed the 
competition. German' doctors' careers flourished.
Ruth looked at the German doctor sitting opposite her. He looked
calmer this morning. They must have given him the room that he wanted. He was a 
thickset man in his seventies, with coarse features and a large, grim face. Ruth 
wondered if he still saw patients. She wouldn't want to have her health in this 
physician's hands.
It had taken Ruth a long time in America to find a doctor she liked who was on 
her health insurance company's list of doctors. Health care was a large issue 
for most Americans. The issue was the health insurance. How to get the 
insurance, how to pay for it, and exactly how much health was covered by this 
insurance.
Health care insurers were often portrayed as being more interested in their own 
profit than anyone else's pain. The image of insurance companies as paternal, 
trustworthy institutions, who provided peace of mind for their insured, was 
almost gone, in America, today.
Some insurance companies had a bleak past. Days after Kristall-nacht, that night 
in November 1938 when German mobs smashed, looted and burned one hundred and 
seventy-one synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops and businesses, German 
insurance companies seized the opportunity to save themselves money. Nineteen of 
the forty-three German fire insurance companies stood to suffer losses for the 
year if they honoured the policies held by their Jewish policy holders.
The Isar Life Insurance Company articulated the problem eloquently in a letter 
dated November 17th, 1938, in which they explained that so many Jewish clients 
were desperately trying to cash in their policies that 'the worst fears have to 
be asserted for the further existence of our company'.
They didn't have to worry. Their concerns were heard. The Nazis established the 
practice of confiscating the insurance assets of German Jews. It was no longer 
necessary for German insurance companies to make payments to Jews for fire or 
life insurance.
In December 1938, an insurance company which sold pension annuities informed the 
German government that they would be
 


discontinuing the payment of pensions and widow's pensions 'insofar as the 
recipients are Jews'. That was fine with the German government. Ruth put away 
her work. She felt nauseated. She decided she needed some breakfast. She often 
felt nauseated if she tried to skip breakfast. The dining room was full of 
businessmen. Ruth found a table she could have to herself. She didn't like 
eating with strangers. She took some melon and strawberries and kiwi fruit from 
the buffet.
The men at the table next to her were German. She watched them eat. They were so 
neat and particular. They wiped their mouths with a napkin after each mouthful 
of food, and buttered their bread with architectural precision. These small 
movements were made by large men. Tall, big-boned men. Their hands, the ample 
hands of grown men, were at odds with the gestures they were making. The 
fastidiousness of the men's habits belonged to a more diminutive race.
The men were quiet while they ate, too. Unlike their American I counterparts, 
who spoke in voices loud enough to pollute most of the dining areas they 
inhabited. The German businessmen were also formal in other ways. They ate in 
their well-pressed suits. Not one of the men removed his jacket for the meal. 
Their shirts were crisp and creaseless and their shoes perfectly shined.
Ruth wondered if all Germans were so meticulously groomed. They made even 
smartly attired Americans look sloppy. The Germans did have a sloppy past to 
contend with, Ruth thought. Maybe they couldn't cope with sloppy clothes or 
manners as well. Theirs was a past as crumpled and stained as any past could be.
Ruth couldn't take her eyes off the table of Germans. They were graciously 
polite with each other. They lacked the chumminess of American or Australian 
men. They were lavishly well-mannered with the waiters and waitresses. They 
nodded their heads and said thank you to every ounce of tea poured and every 
dish removed. A politeness so excessive it bordered on caricature. All that 
courtesy and restraint
made Ruth want to fart or burp loudly. She decided to go for a walk. She had 
seven hours to kill until her father arrived.
Ruth walked. She wasn't walking anywhere in particular. She was just walking. 
Warsaw was an ordinary city, she thought. Apart from the perfectly reconstructed 
old town, built from scratch after the war, there was not a lot to look at. She 
knew she was close to the University of Warsaw. She walked in the general 
direction of the university.
She passed a Wedel chocolate shop. Her father was always talking about Wedel 
chocolate. He spoke of it in the same exalted terms that he used to describe 
Polish ham. 'Polish ham is out of this world. Sweet like anything,' he would 
say. Wedel's chocolate was, in Edek's opinion, 'out of this world'.
You would have thought his life in Poland was composed of slices of ham and 
blocks of chocolate. Maybe in Edek's mind it was. It was certainly easier to 
dwell on ham and chocolate than a dead mother and father and sister and 
brothers. They were truly out of this world, Ruth thought.
Edek always looked transported when he recalled the taste of the ham or the 
chocolate. Ruth looked at the chocolate in the window. It did look good, but 
then most chocolate looked good to her. She thought that the sight of a whole 
shop full of Wedel's chocolate would definitely make the trip from Australia 
worthwhile for her father.
Ruth bought Edek blocks of chocolate whenever she traveled. She had sent him 
Mexican chocolate, English chocolate, French chocolate and chocolate from 
Bermuda. She regularly shipped packets of Hershey's semi-sweet dark chocolate to 
him from New York. She understood Edek's love of chocolate. She felt that way 
about cakes. Poppy seed cakes and cheesecakes.
Warsaw had wonderful cake shops. Cake shops that had the cakes of her childhood. 
When she was growing up they didn't have apple
 


pies or jam tarts or custard or vanilla slices or other Australian cakes in the 
house. They had strudel and sponge cakes and marzipan and cheesecakes. The cakes 
of the past. The cakes that Ruth could see all around her now.
She was gazing at a large poppy seed strudel on the counter of a small cake 
stall in a pedestrian underpass close to the university, when she felt a tug at 
the hem of her coat. Ruth looked down. A woman was sitting cross-legged on the 
ground, almost lost in the throng of students.
It was hard to tell how old she was. Her skin was dull with ingrained dirt and 
her eyes were flat with weariness. The multi-layered cotton garments she wore 
were smudged and clouded with grime and dust. A large, once brightly coloured 
scarf was wound in intricate circles around her head.
She tugged at Ruth's coat again, and looked up imploringly. Ruth slid the strap 
of her backpack off her shoulder. She had to give this woman some money. She had 
seen several gypsy women in Warsaw. Most of them were begging. Ruth smiled at 
the woman.
In between the folds of the woman's clothes, something moved. Buried in a 
grubbiness it should never have been a part of, was a baby. The baby was 
attached to one of the woman's breasts. Ruth looked at the baby. It seemed 
inert. Almost lifeless. The breast, a brown, wrinkled flat bag of a breast, 
looked as though it couldn't contain any nourishment. Ruth wanted to cry. She 
opened her purse. The woman held out her hand. It was a surprisingly young hand. 
Ruth gave her fifty zlotys.
Fifty zlotys was a bit less than twenty dollars. Ruth knew it wasn't much. She 
wanted to give the woman more, but she felt too embarrassed. She didn't want to 
emphasise the discrepancy in their financial positions. What an imbecile she 
was, she thought. As though it wasn't obvious that she had more money.
She got out another fifty zlotys and gave it to the woman. The
man smiled. If she hadn't had so many teeth missing it would have been a very 
sweet smile. The woman said something to her. fjie mowie dobrze po polsku, Ruth 
said.
Ruth could say Me mowie dobrze po polsku, I don't speak Polish very well, very 
well. It confused people. 'You have a perfect accent,' several people said to 
her. If only she could say more in this perfect accent it would be useful.
The woman repeated what she said. Ruth shrugged her shoulders and shook her 
head. She had no idea what the woman was saying. The woman repeated herself, 
slowly enunciating each word.
'It means "too many men",' a young man passing by said to Ruth. 'She is saying 
to you, you have too many men in your life.' Ruth laughed. Too many men. She 
didn't have any men in her life. The gypsy woman looked agitated. She stabbed 
the air with her finger and repeated what she had said.
'She says you have too many men in your life,' the young man said. 'These 
gypsies are psychic,' he said. 'They have a God-given psychic power.' Ruth was 
irritated. Why were Poles so fixated with God? 'God-given?' she said. 'If there 
is a God, he could have given them food and shelter.'
The young man raised his eyebrows in the manner of someone of an older 
generation, and crossed himself. 'You don't need to protect yourself,' Ruth said 
to him. 'It was my blasphemy.'
Do widzenia, she said to the woman. Ruth could say goodbye well, too.
Do widzenia, the woman said.
Ruth wondered how the gypsy baby was going to survive. The baby had no future at 
all. Ruth felt depressed. She felt that she should be able to do something about 
the gypsy woman and her baby. Something about all gypsy women and their babies.
She felt the same way about the homeless, in New York. In her first few years 
she had given money to every homeless person she
 


had passed. Now, she donated money, annually, to several charities. But she felt 
that it wasn't enough. The money that she gave didn't really make a dent in her 
lifestyle. Middle-class people like her were always puffing themselves up with 
what they did for others. The reality was that most of them, like her, did very 
little.
Ruth looked at the students around her. This part of Warsaw, with its student 
population, had more life to it. It had a vivacity and a vigour that was missing 
from the rest of the city. The students had the earnestness and joyfulness of 
students anywhere. They talked and laughed and argued with each other with 
passion and intensity. She was glad she was walking in the middle of them.
She thought about the gypsy woman. Too many men. What did she mean? It sounded 
like a joke. A New York joke. In New York, single women regularly bemoaned the 
lack of available men in the city. There did seem to be a shortage of men in New 
York. And those who were there considered themselves highly desirable 
commodities. Ruth didn't want too many men. She wasn't that comfortable with 
men. She wasn't that comfortable with anyone. The only man she had truly felt 
comfortable with, went back to his wife. He was separated when he met Ruth. And 
Ruth was newly divorced. One day his wife decided she wanted him back. His wife 
cried and screamed and drove her car through a restaurant window to show him how 
much she needed him. He went back to her. He called Ruth, often, after that. He 
said he loved her, but he was frightened of what his wife might do to herself if 
he wasn't around.
Being left for someone else left Ruth feeling awful. It gave her a second-rate 
feeling about herself. As though she was a runner-up and not good enough to get 
the prize. She knew that that image of herself with a man as a prize was a 
retrograde thought. No woman should think of a man as a prize.
She wasn't thinking very clearly when she met him. She knew he was still 
married. But, two days after she met him, thirty-four hours
after she met him, to be exact, she was mad about him. She was wildly in love 
and understood, for the first time in her life, why it was called wild. They 
were both twenty-nine. He was a painter. He painted large, almost monastic, 
meditative abstract paintings. Grey and black strokes quietly placed on the 
canvas. The paintings possessed a power that disquieted Ruth.
She loved to watch him paint. He painted the mystical marks with rough, firm 
gestures. When he used colour, it was muted and elegant. Pale aqua oblong 
ellipses, interspersed with shadows of themselves, swam like fish across a bare 
background. Ruth found his paintings surprisingly calming.
Painting, art, of any sort, was not part of her world before she had met Norman 
Taylor. He was not as self-contained as his paintings. He touched and laughed 
and cried. He was unselfconscious. His clothes were not the carefully chosen, 
studiedly casual working-class clothes of the art world. He dressed more like a 
moderately successful accountant. He wore gabardine trousers and plain shirts. 
But he was unlike any accountant Ruth knew.
He was unlike most other people she knew. He was tactile and sensual. He allowed 
mango juice to drip down his face when he ate the fruit. He pulled lobsters 
apart with his fingers and sucked the flesh out of the claws. The filaments of 
fish or intestines or liquid that sometimes sprayed out at him left him 
unperturbed.
'I've never loved anybody so utterly,' Norman Taylor said to her, days after 
they met. He seemed to love all of her. He loved her body. Nobody, including 
Ruth, had ever loved her body. When Norman told her she was beautiful, she 
pointed out the lack of proportion between the top half of her and the bottom. 
'I love the feel of you,' he said to her, over and over again. 'I'm too fat,' 
she replied.
 


'She is fat,' was the worst thing Rooshka Rothwax could say about another 
female. Fat men were not quite in the same category. 'She is so slim,' was her 
mother's highest accolade. It didn't appear to matter if the slim girl or woman 
was clever or stupid or kind or arrogant. If she was slim, she was to be 
admired. Edek also derided fat people. He didn't seem to notice he was one of 
them himself. He had spent most of his adult life twenty to thirty pounds 
overweight. He was still a bit chubby now.
Ruth's mother's slim figure was admired by everyone. 'I was always a slim girl,' 
Rooshka Rothwax used to say. 'I was never fat.' Ruth thought that her mother saw 
greed and lack of self-control stitched into every fat cell in existence. 'In 
the ghetto I never ate my bread straight away,' her mother would say to her. 'I 
was a human being. Not a pig. Even when I was starving.' 'In Auschwitz,' Rooshka 
would say, 'if someone was fat you knew that they were doing something that was 
making the lives of the other Jews worse.'
The Nazis caricatured Jews as short and fat. Rooshka Rothwax spent the rest of 
her life, after the war, determined to be tall and thin. She added two and a 
half inches to her height and never overate. 'Are you sure you're five foot 
four?' Ruth had asked her mother once. Ruth was nine, at the time. They had 
measured Ruth's height at school. 'You're five foot two,' the gym teacher had 
said to Ruth. 'I can't be,' Ruth had said. 'I'm taller than my mother and she's 
five foot four.' 'I am five foot four,' Rooshka Rothwax had said in answer to 
Ruth's question. 'I am tall for a woman,' her mother had said. 'You are too 
tall. You are so tall because you eat so many sweets.' Ruth had thought her 
mother hadn't known about the sweets. Rooshka had never mentioned the assorted 
sweet wrappers Ruth left lying around.
When Ruth reached five foot nine, she tried to stop eating sweets. She was 
already taller than all of the boys in her class. She ate no sweets or chocolate 
for a week. She didn't shrink. She went back to
two packets of musk Lifesavers after school, and the bag of chocolate-coated 
broken biscuits she bought in the grocery store every morning. She remained at 
five foot nine.
Ruth wasn't too tall for Norman Taylor. She wasn't too anything. He tolerated 
all of her idiosyncrasies. He was amused by them. 'You're so funny,' he would 
say to her. Norman hadn't come from a funny past. His mother was English and his 
father was Irish. Alcoholic, illiterate and Irish. Ruth couldn't understand 
Norman's lack of connection to his parents until she met them. There was a 
mocking cruelty to his father and an indifference in his mother. Norman's 
stories about being beaten up by his father and having to protect his mother 
from similar beatings made sense to Ruth when she met the Taylors.
Ruth had wondered why Norman bothered to keep in contact with his parents at 
all. They didn't seem to love him. 'You were born nothing and you'll die 
nothing,' Norman's father had said to him, the day Norman introduced Ruth to 
them. Ruth had squirmed and wished she hadn't asked to meet the Taylors. Ruth 
knew that Norman had had very little as a child. She hadn't realised how little. 
She knew that he had walked the five miles to school and back, in bare feet, 
until he was twelve. His parents' lack of warmth and apparent lack of interest 
overwhelmed Ruth. She couldn't wait to leave their house. The Taylors still 
lived in the same small fibro house, in an outer suburb of Sydney, that Norman 
grew up in. Norman had moved on. He had moved into the middle-class world of art 
and literature. He wrote art reviews for a national newspaper and had regular 
exhibitions of his paintings in galleries around the country.
 


'She is fat,' was the worst thing Rooshka Rothwax could say about another 
female. Fat men were not quite in the same category. 'She is so slim,' was her 
mother's highest accolade. It didn't appear to matter if the slim girl or woman 
was clever or stupid or kind or arrogant. If she was slim, she was to be 
admired. Edek also derided fat people. He didn't seem to notice he was one of 
them himself. He had spent most of his adult life twenty to thirty pounds 
overweight. He was still a bit chubby now.
Ruth's mother's slim figure was admired by everyone. 'I was always a slim girl,' 
Rooshka Rothwax used to say. 'I was never fat.' Ruth thought that her mother saw 
greed and lack of self-control stitched into every fat cell in existence. 'In 
the ghetto I never ate my bread straight away,' her mother would say to her. 'I 
was a human being. Not a pig. Even when I was starving.' 'In Auschwitz,' Rooshka 
would say, 'if someone was fat you knew that they were doing something that was 
making the lives of the other Jews worse.'
The Nazis caricatured Jews as short and fat. Rooshka Rothwax spent the rest of 
her life, after the war, determined to be tall and thin. She added two and a 
half inches toiler height and never overate. 'Are you sure you're five foot 
four?' Ruth had asked her mother once. Ruth was nine, at the time. They had 
measured Ruth's height at school. 'You're five foot two,' the gym teacher had 
said to Ruth. 'I can't be,' Ruth had said. 'I'm taller than my mother and she's 
five foot four.' 'I am five foot four,' Rooshka Rothwax had said in answer to 
Ruth's question. 'I am tall for a woman,' her mother had said. 'You are too 
tall. You are so tall because you eat so many sweets.' Ruth had thought her 
mother hadn't known about the sweets. Rooshka had never mentioned the assorted 
sweet wrappers Ruth left lying around.
When Ruth reached five foot nine, she tried to stop eating sweets. She was 
already taller than all of the boys in her class. She ate no sweets or chocolate 
for a week. She didn't shrink. She went back to
her two packets of musk Lifesavers after school, and the bag of chocolate-coated 
broken biscuits she bought in the grocery store every morning. She remained at 
five foot nine.
Ruth wasn't too tall for Norman Taylor. She wasn't too anything. He tolerated 
all of her idiosyncrasies. He was amused by them. 'You're so funny,' he would 
say to her. Norman hadn't come from a funny past. His mother was English and his 
father was Irish. Alcoholic, illiterate and Irish. Ruth couldn't understand 
Norman's lack of connection to his parents until she met them. There was a 
mocking cruelty to his father and an indifference in his mother. Norman's 
stories about being beaten up by his father and having to protect his mother 
from similar beatings made sense to Ruth when she met the Taylors.
Ruth had wondered why Norman bothered to keep in contact with his parents at 
all. They didn't seem to love him. 'You were born nothing and you'll die 
nothing,' Norman's father had said to him, the day Norman introduced Ruth to 
them. Ruth had squirmed and wished she hadn't asked to meet the Taylors. Ruth 
knew that Norman had had very little as a child. She hadn't realised how little. 
She knew that he had walked the five miles to school and back, in bare feet, 
until he was twelve. His parents' lack of warmth and apparent lack of interest 
overwhelmed Ruth. She couldn't wait to leave their house. The Taylors still 
lived in the same small fibro house, in an outer suburb of Sydney, that Norman 
grew up in. Norman had moved on. He had moved into the middle-class world of art 
and literature. He wrote art reviews for a national newspaper and had regular 
exhibitions of his paintings in galleries around the country.
 



'They don't have to be so cruel,' she said.
'They can't help it,' he said.
'Why aren't you angry with them?' she had said to him.
'I'm just not,' he said. 'I feel sorry for them.'
Norman found it hard to be angry. He couldn't even make a dismissive comment 
about anyone he knew. He went out of his way not to hurt or offend anybody. Ruth 
was rude for him. She had a sharp tongue and she used it liberally. Resentments 
and irritations flew out of her. Norman laughed at them.
Norman laughed a lot. And Ruth laughed with him. They laughed at how happy they 
were with each other. And Norman wept. He wept with joy. Ruth, who had barely 
been able to cry, even when she was in pain, wept with him.
He didn't seem to mind her anxiety or her fear.
'I'm freeing you of the need to feel those things,' she joked with him. 'You can 
feel them vicariously through me.' He smiled at her. His smile lifted her. It 
lifted her spirits and overrode many of her fears. She had never been so happy. 
She knew it had to end. It ended the day his wife called to say she wanted him 
back.
He had married someone he didn't like very much and he had I stayed married to 
her while she humiliated him by laughing at him; in his yellow nylon pyjamas, or 
by lying to him about the various ; men she took on as lovers.
'She bought me the pyjamas,' Norman said to Ruth.
'Why did you wear them?' Ruth asked.
'I thought they were just pyjamas,' he said. Norman spoke about 1 his wife with 
kindness and understanding. 'She's not a bad person,' he said. 'She just has 
some problems.'
'The humiliation of her affairs must have reminded you of the humiliation your 
father made you feel,' Ruth said to him. 'The humiliation and the degradation 
must have felt like love.'
When Norman's wife drove through the restaurant window, he I
came to see Ruth. 'She really needs me,' he said to Ruth, weeping. 'I'm worried 
about what she'll do to herself if I'm not there.'
'Well, you better be there,' Ruth had said.
'You should have fought for him,' her girlfriend, Cathy, had said.
'I don't want anyone who doesn't want me,' Ruth said.
'He does want you,' she said. 'He just needs help extricating himself from her.'
'Then he doesn't want me enough,' Ruth said. She left for New York two months 
later.
Norman had called Ruth several times in the last few years. He had left his 
wife. Three years after he went back to her he had left. He had given her the 
house and the car that had replaced the one that she had smashed. Whenever 
Norman called, Ruth made sure that she exuded friendliness and warmth. But she 
gave him no information about her life. She gave him nothing but politeness. And 
she made sure that she was the one to say goodbye first.
Sometimes when Ruth stayed in expensive hotels she thought of Norman. He loved 
cheap motels. She understood this. There was an immediacy to a cheap motel. 
Everything was what it appeared to be. Nothing was dressed up or masked behind a 
multitude of pillows and bolsters or sleep masks, slippers and shoehorns. The 
kettle was there to boil water, not to show you that the management cared. There 
were the grunts and coughs of the other guests and, sometimes, someone else's 
pubic hair on your blanket. But she understood why Norman preferred this world 
of lodgings to the five-star circuit she was on now.
In expensive hotels, guests never acknowledged each other. No one spoke, at 
breakfast, unless it was to 


someone they already knew. It seemed to be an unwritten rule. If you broke the 
rule and said good morning, you were viewed with suspicion. The wealthy and the 
successful, it seemed to Ruth, indicated their status and power with a lack of 
friendliness. An affectation intended, Ruth thought, to
 


let the world know that they already knew too many people. As if a sign of 
interest in a stranger might reveal a vulnerability or a curiosity which could 
disqualify them from their own ranks.
In cheap motels the ordinariness inherent in all human beings was on display. 
Guests asked other guests if they had slept well. They said good morning to 
everyone in the room. And advised each other about what was good on the 
breakfast menu.
Why was she thinking about Norman now, Ruth thought? Probably because she knew 
that her father still saw him. Edek and Norman spoke on the phone now and then, 
and had dinner together once or twice a year. Edek periodically gave Ruth news 
about Norman.
Edek always tried to bring the subject up casually. 'I did see Norman,' he would 
say. 'He is still by himself. Not married.' Edek's nonchalance would last less 
than a minute.
'You are a stupid girl, Ruthie,' he would say. 'What did he do to you that was 
so bad?'
'Nothing,' she would say.
'Why won't you give him a chance?' Edek would say.
'For how long does he have to suffer?' Edek had asked the last time he had 
brought the subject of Norman up.
'No one is suffering, Dad,' she'd said. 'If you love him so much marry him 
yourself,' she had suddenly shouted. 'I'm sick of hearing about him.'
'Sorry,' Edek had said. 'I thought maybe you would see it a bit differently 
now.' That was two years ago. Her outburst had surprised her and shocked Edek. 
Edek hadn't mentioned Norman since.
'You experience anything that feels bad to you as a permanent situation,' one of 
her shrinks had said to her. 'If it is raining, you think it will rain forever. 
If there is noise in a neighbour's apartment you think it will never stop. You 
have trouble seeing these situations as transitory. That's why you can't forgive 
people. You think they, like you, are still connected to the incident or the 
argument or the
difficulty that made you both feel bad. They have forgotten, but you haven't.' 
There were some things, Ruth thought, when the shrink had finished, that 
shouldn't be forgotten.
Ruth hadn't thought about Norman this much for years. She had been too attached 
to Norman. That sort of attachment came affixed to a flood of anxiety, for her. 
She had worried about his wellbeing. If she woke up, in the middle of the night, 
she checked that he was still breathing. If he was late to meet her, she 
envisaged him bloodied and broken, in an ambulance. If he caught a cold, she 
enlarged the outcome to include bronchial pneumonia or a new strain of flu that 
had no cure. It was exhausting. Attachments were enervating.
She had had less anxiety since she had been unattached. She had been on dates 
with different men over the years. She hated the word 'date'. Americans used 
'date' whether they were referring to sixteen or sixty-year-olds. It was hard to 
come up with a better word. 'Rendezvous' or 'assignation' suggested a mystery 
that wasn't present on most dates. An evening of social intercourse' was too 
wordy, although it did possess the stilted quality of many dates. So Ruth, too, 
used the word 'date'.
Her dates had been, mostly, unmemorable. She found New York men unexpectedly 
juvenile. They prevaricated over insubstantial issues, small things, like the 
choice of a cup of coffee, with as much indecision and intensity as a young 
girl. 'I'll have a cafe latte with skinny milk and a dusting of cinnamon, not 
chocolate, on the top,' the last man she had gone out with had said. 'No, make 
that a skinny cappuccino and hold the cinnamon,' he had said, before he settled 
for an iced coffee made with skim milk, and Sweet and Low, not Nutra-Sweet.
It was not manly to be that fussy, Ruth thought. But just being a man was 
enough, in New York. If you were a man, you were desirable and in demand. 
Possibly this made New York men more self-centred. Maybe if women were in the 
same position, they would dispense
 


with the need to be thoughtful and interesting, too.
'Why don't you like me?' the latte/cappuccino/iced coffee man had said to her 
when she refused his second invitation. 'I'm practising moderation in my 
attachments,' she said. 'Hey,' he had said, 'I'm a long way from asking you to 
marry me.'
Ruth felt lightheaded. She had walked to the outskirts of Warsaw and back. The 
outlying areas of Warsaw were as unattractive as the outskirts of any city she 
had seen. Grey concrete housing estates were everywhere. Building after building 
was the same. Drab, dilapidated and depressing. She was glad to be back near the 
university. She needed to eat. She stopped at a cafe full of students. If there 
were so many students eating there, she thought, the food must be either
very good or very cheap.
Inside, the cafe was noisy and humid. Ruth stood in line at the
buffet. She took a large plate of kasha and a bowl of beetroot salad.
Kasha, boiled buckwheat, was a dish her mother had often made.
She sat at a table with two young women, who smiled when she
joined them, and moved over to make more room for her. Ruth felt
grateful for their friendliness. She ate the kasha with relish. It was
very good.
Ruth thought about the gypsy woman. 'These gypsies are psychic,'
the young man had said. If there were psychic people, Ruth thought,
why couldn't they see her scepticism and leave her alone. When she
was sixteen, a fortune-teller at a circus had called out to Ruth to tell
her she would one day meet a man with a large scar who would play
a very important part in her life. It was a small circus, set up in a
seaside suburb of Melbourne for the summer. There were holes in
the circus tent and the ringmaster's wig kept slipping. The two circus
lions looked moth-eaten and drugged. The fortune-teller sat at a
table, near the entrance to the tent. She also sold soft drinks.
'It is a very large scar,' she had said to Ruth. Ruth exchanged glances with the 
girlfriend she was with.
'Oh yeah,' they said to each other. The oh yeah of sarcastic, sophisticated 
sixteen-year-olds. As Ruth was leaving, the fortune-teller called her back. 'I 
can see it,' she said. 'It is on his chest. The scar runs vertically from the 
top of his rib cage to his waist.' Ruth's sarcasm was temporarily subdued. 
'Thank you,' she had said to the fortuneteller. For years Ruth made jokes about 
scouring the emergency rooms of hospitals to look for the man of her dreams.
The noise and heat of the student cafe were too much for Ruth. She finished her 
meal and left. She was, she decided, too old to be with so many young people. 
She'd go back to the hotel. She looked at her watch. She had enough time for a 
quick swim.
The pool at the Bristol was small. Ruth swam up and down. She tried to turn, at 
the end of each lap, without stopping. That way she could get some sort of 
cardiovascular benefit from this swim. It was hard to get your heartbeat rate up 
by swimming. Unless you were a very good swimmer, and Ruth wasn't.
Her mother and father were very impressed when she learnt to swim, as a child. 
'Look how she swims,' they said to each other. It was not such a great 
accomplishment. All Australian school children were given swimming lessons. But 
Rooshka and Edek continued to see it as extraordinary. 'Look how she swims,' 
they said to each other and anyone else in the vicinity, each time they went to 
the beach. The excessive admiration bothered Ruth a bit, but she kept quiet. She 
was pleased that she was pleasing them. Ruth thought that not 


many people in Poland must have been swimmers. Or maybe it was just Jews who 
were not at home in the water.
The beach that Edek and Rooshka and Ruth went to was St Kilda beach in 
Melbourne. They went there to cool off, on hot summer nights. St Kilda beach was 
the only beach the Jews of Melbourne went to. It was a beautiful beach with a 
strip of palm trees and tea
 


trees before you reached the sand. Peanut vendors and ice-cream sellers walked 
around selling their wares. The Jews sat in groups and talked and ate.
Most of the Jews couldn't swim. Rooshka waded backwards and forwards along the 
shoreline, and Edek sat under a tree with a bag of peanuts and an ice-cream. 
Ruth had such a clear picture of Edek under that tree, shelling peanuts.
Something disturbed Ruth's reverie about her father. It was a voice. 'I should 
tell you my initials,' the voice said. 'My initials are R.F.F.H.' Ruth stopped 
swimming. There was no one else in the pool. There was no one else in the room.
'Maybe I make it easier for you?' the voice said. 'My initials are R.H.' Ruth 
shook herself. This was absurd. She was hearing things. She started swimming 
again. She pushed her arms and legs through the water. She kicked and splashed 
more than she needed to. All she could hear was the sound of water.
'I will give you some clues,' the voice said. 'I love animals, especially 
horses. On one occasion, when I was a young boy, I took my horse into my bedroom 
with me. It was a very black pony with glowing eyes.' Ruth kept swimming. 'My 
father planned for me to be a priest,' the voice said. 'He wanted me to help 
those less fortunate than myself. He taught me to be always respectful and 
obedient.'
'I can see that these are not such good clues,' the voice said. 'I can see that 
you do not know with whom you are speaking.' Ruth stopped swimming. Her heart 
was palpitating. 'Yes, I had a very fine upbringing,' the voice said. 'But this 
is too much, too soon. You are not yet interested in my upbringing.' 'Not yet?' 
she said, aloud, to herself. 'I knew you could hear me,' the voice said. Ruth 
swam to the edge of the pool. She got out. She shook her head. She must have 
water in her ears. Water in her ears often disoriented her. She should have worn 
a cap. She felt sick. Waterlogged
I
 ears had left her off-balance and nauseated, before. She towelled herself dry.
She looked around. There was definitely no one in the pool. No one in the room. 
She started to feel better. There was no voice. It must have been her 
imagination. 'You've got more imagination than is good for you,' a school 
teacher had said to her when she was six.
There was still some water left in her left ear. She leaned over, and hopped up 
and down, on one leg. She felt the water trickle out. She looked around, again. 
There was nobody in the room. Her imagination must have been working overtime.
She was always imagining things. Imagining lines for other people. Inventing 
sentences for others to say. She did this in her working life, and in her life 
outside the office. She prepared herself for every encounter by rehearsing the 
anticipated conversation. She gave her dentist and her doctor dialogue. 'I need 
my head elevated, and I like to sit up between procedures,' she would practise 
saying to the dentist before every appointment. 'That's fine. I know you're 
anxious about dental treatment,' was the reply she would make up, for the 
dentist.
Ruth rehearsed her lines so thoroughly that she often forgot that the real 
conversation had not yet taken place. And she was shocked, in real life, when 
others detoured from the dialogue she had given them. And even more shocked when 
she herself made the departure.
She had practised what she was going to say, for weeks, before
she told husband number one that she was leaving him. When he
said, 'You can't go, I'll lie down in front of the car,' she had said,
1 hat's fine. I'll drive over you.' She had intended this conversation
to be about remaining friends forever.
Ruth walked back to her room. She had an hour to shower and get dressed before 
leaving for the airport to pick up her father.
 


chapter three
Edek Rothwax emerged from the customs and immigration area. He paused just 
outside the self-opening doors. He looked around him. A look of bewilderment and 
anxiety occupied Edek's face. Ruth had spotted the short, anxious movements Edek 
made with his head, the minute he had come through the door. 'Dad,' she called 
out from behind the roped-off area she was standing in. Edek saw her. His face 
broke into a smile. It was a smile of relief. The sort of smile you saw on small 
children who thought they had lost their mothers. He ran towards her, clutching 
a briefcase and an overnight bag.
The sight of Edek made Ruth want to cry. She blinked back her tears. She had 
missed him. Most of the time she tried not to let herself know how much she 
missed Edek. From the other side of the world, she took care of his phone bills, 
his credit card payments, his health care and his car insurance. But she knew 
she wasn't really looking after him.
If she really was a good daughter, she would be living closer to him. She 
wouldn't be separated by ten thousand miles and delivering her love for him, 
long distance, in the form of a bit of money and some book-keeping. She bit her 
lip. She didn't want to cry. There were two things she was determined not to do, 
on this trip. She was not going to cry and she was not going to feel angry or 
annoyed with Edek.
She looked at Edek. He was trying to overtake a woman in # wheelchair. He looked 
well. He didn't look like a man who had just flown halfway around the world. 
Ruth was relieved. She had dreaded
seeing a decline in Edek. Dreaded the thought that he might look noticeably 
older. She hadn't seen him for almost a year. She moved to the front of the 
crowd to get closer to him. He was still hemmed in by the wheelchair.
Edek looked up at Ruth and shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly, the woman in the 
wheelchair stopped. Edek saw his opportunity. He lost no time. With one nimble, 
sure-footed movement, he propelled himself past the woman. Ruth ran up to him 
and hugged him.
'I'm so happy to see you, Ruthie darling,' he said. 'Now that I have seen you, I 
feel much better.'
'What's wrong, Dad?' Ruth said.
'Ach, the little piece where you put your feet up didn't go up?' Edek said.
'What little piece, where?' said Ruth.
'The little piece what you put your feet on. That's why a person flies business 
class, to get a little piece,' Edek said.
'Oh, you mean a footrest.'
'That's right. A rest for the feet,' said Edek. 'My feet did get no rest on this 
trip. I had to sit the whole way with my feet just normally on the floor and I 
paid for my feet to be on this rest.'
'Your seat didn't have one?' Ruth said.
'Of course the seat had one. All the seats in business class have got such a 
rest. My one didn't come up. It was stuck,' Edek said.
'Oh, no, what a drag,' Ruth said.
'That's not the end,' said Edek. 'They put me in the last row and my chair 
didn't go back so much. Other people could nearly sleep in their chair. I 
couldn't sleep. I did have to read a book the whole time.'
I'll call up and complain, tomorrow,' Ruth said. No, no, no,' Edek said. 'I 
fixed it. I have to go to the airport manager for the airline, and talk to him.'
Now?' Ruth said. 'What are you going to talk to him about?'
 


'I'm going to talk to him,' Edek said. 'You go pick up my suitcase from the 
luggage place.'
'Dad, I'll talk to whoever you want me to talk to tomorrow,' Ruth said. 'It's 
nine o'clock. We should go to the hotel. You need to get some sleep.'
'I know what I need,' Edek said. 'I need to talk to this manager. My suitcase is 
brown.'
'Brown?' Ruth said.
'You will see it,' Edek said. 'I did put some yellow tape what they use for 
packaging on the handle and around the case. That way I can recognise it 
straight away.'
'Exactly where will we meet?' said Ruth.
'It's not such a big airport,' Edek said. 'We will meet here where we are 
standing.'
'It's a bit crowded here,' Ruth said. 'Let's meet by that brown bench.'
'Okay,' Edek said. 'You think I won't see you if you are not next to this brown 
bench. I will find you.'
'We'll meet next to the bench,' she said. 'Dad,' she said, 'can you believe 
we're in Poland, together?'
'Yeah, yeah,' he said. 'I got to go to the manager's office.'
'I love you, Dad,' she said.
'I love you, too,' he said as he rushed off.
Ruth heard him ask a guard for directions, in Polish. The two men gesticulated 
for two minutes. The guard pointed to the right, then to the left, and then 
waved his arm in a motion that indicated distance. Edek thanked him with several 
short bows. Ruth watched Edek running across the airport. He took the quick 
little steps she was so familiar with. One small, swift step after another.
He always ran like this. As though everything was an emergency-He ran to the 
corner store, if he ran out of milk. He ran to answer the phone. But, there was 
an enthusiasm as well as desperation in
his urgency. He looked happy when he was running. If Ruth needed anything bought 
or picked up and shipped to her, in New York, from Australia, she called Edek. 
Edek bought, packed and shipped Australian face creams and body lotion, 
Australian raincoats and Australian boots, for Ruth. He did administrative tasks 
and chores such as renewing her Australian driver's licence, and making sure 
that her name was still on the electoral rolls.
She called him for small things and big things. Things that had to be done were 
irresistible to Edek. Ruth knew that her request would be executed with ruthless 
efficiency. The boots or the creams or the documents would arrive in New York in 
record time. She knew that her father would drop everything to run an errand.
He used to run errands for Henia, endlessly. Henia was a New York woman Edek had 
known, in Lodz before the war. 'We should be together,' she said to him on one 
of his visits to Ruth. 'I knew your Rooshka and you knew my Josl. If we get 
together, I can talk about my Josl and you can talk about your Rooshka.'
Ruth had encouraged her father in this liaison. Edek had been so depressed since 
her mother died. And Henia seemed to have a liveliness and sparkle to her. 'It 
wouldn't be like with Mum,' Edek had said to Ruth when he finally agreed to 
leave Australia and move in with Henia.
'Of course it wouldn't be the same as your marriage to Mum,' Ruth had said.
In order for Edek to stay in the United States, he needed a green card. Edek and 
Henia had had to get married. Josl had left Henia a wealthy woman. Her two grown 
sons were not about to let the wealth be diluted. They didn't want this 
marriage. But Henia wanted Edek, and she overrode their objections. The sons 
prepared a thirty-page Prenuptial agreement for Edek to sign. 'I find that very 
objectionable,' Ruth had said to Edek. 'I wouldn't sign it.' 'What's the big 
deal?' he , and signed the documents. The marriage lasted four years.
 


Henia's seduction of Edek lost some of its gloss after the wedding. When Henia 
was in full pursuit of Edek, she smiled at him and laughed at everything he 
said. She patted him on the hands and on the head. She blew him kisses in the 
street. She didn't play her cards as well once they were married. She criticised 
Ruth, endlessly. 'She is not married. She doesn't have any children. What sort 
of life is this?' she said to Edek every time Ruth rang. Edek never answered 
her.
Edek and Henia had dinner regularly with her sons and their wives and children. 
They ate at the older son's house every Wednesday and Sunday, and with the 
younger son on Tuesdays. If Ruth invited them out, Henia developed a toothache 
or a stomach-ache or a headache. 'I make her ache,' Ruth said once to Edek. 'It 
is not so funny,' he said. He looked miserable.
'Look at her,' Henia had said to Edek, the only time she had ever invited Ruth 
to lunch. 'She doesn't eat.'
'Maybe she doesn't like your food?' Edek said.
'That's impossible. My boys love my food,' Henia said. 'Anyway, it is not your 
fault she is like this. Let's forget about it.'
'My daughter is fine,' Edek had said.
'Something is not right with her,' Henia had answered. 'She moves her leg under 
the table. The whole table claps and bumps.'
'Maybe you don't make her so comfortable?' Edek said.
'She is a snob,' said Henia. 'And always in black. Like a widow.'
'An expensive widow,' Edek said. 'You know how much she does pay for those black 
things?' As soon as Edek had said this, he had regretted it. He knew he had 
unwittingly given Henia another round of ammunition to fire at Ruth.
Henia's sons came around together one Friday afternoon. They had another series 
of documents for Edek to sign. More papers to safeguard Henia's property.
'We've noticed that our mother's phone bills are a hundred dollars
a month more than they used to be before you arrived,' the elder son said. 'And 
we feel you should pay for this.'
'I feel that I should, too,' Edek said, 'which is why I do. I do pay all the 
phone bill and all the electricity and all the food bills straight into your 
mother's account.'
'Does he?' The elder son asked his mother.
'Yes,' said Henia.
'Don't they notice how much better off Henia is with you?' Ruth asked Edek when 
he told her about the incident. 'You do everything for her. You shop, you wash 
the dishes. Henia's got a very cushy life.'
'I call them the waiters,' Edek said to Ruth. 'They are waiting for their mother 
to die.'
When the boys came back for a third series of documents to be signed, Edek 
patiently signed each page. Henia never said anything during these signing 
sessions. As the older son was leaving, he leaned over to Edek. 'You're not 
giving your daughter any of our money are you?' he said. Edek was stunned. He 
looked at Henia. Henia remained silent. Edek decided he had had enough. He left. 
He went back to Australia.
He felt bad about leaving Henia. As though he had abandoned her. 'She was a 
cow,' Ruth said. 'She abandoned you when she didn't speak up for you.' Ruth 
tried to persuade Edek to stay in New York. But he didn't want to stay in New 
York. He didn't want to bump into Henia or her friends. 'You can live in New 
York and never come across Henia or any of her friends,' Ruth said. 'It's a very 
big city. Anyway, they all live in Queens. You can just never go to Queens.' But 
Edek was adamant. He had to go. He booked his ticket to Australia and left.
Edek had been unhappy and out of sorts for most of his first year back in 
Australia. But slowly he had stopped 


blaming himself for the breakdown of the marriage. And slowly he started playing 
cards again, and eating chocolate, and running errands.
 


Edek didn't look eighty-one. His silver hair was thick and vigorous; his face 
was hardly lined. Ruth felt lucky to have a father in such good shape. She 
didn't want to lose him. She had reeled for too long after the death of her 
mother. When she flew anywhere, she still found herself looking out of the 
window of the plane, wondering if at thirty-three thousand feet up in the air 
she was any closer to her mother. Wondering if there could possibly be a heaven, 
and if there was, was this where her mother now lived. She knew it was a stupid 
thought. There was no heaven. And there was no life after death. There was 
nothing, after death. 'Mum's spirit still lives on in me,' she had once said to 
Edek. 'I think about her all the time. I cook the food that she used to cook. I 
use the face creams she used. I even lie in the sun like she used to, and 
understand why she loved it so much.'
'There is no spirit,' he said. 'Mum is dead. Nothing has changed.'
The baggage collection area was crowded. The luggage from Edek's flight was 
already arriving. Ruth saw Edek's suitcase straight away. Six inches of bright 
yellow masking tape was wound around the middle of the case. She lifted the 
suitcase off the carousel. It was very light. She hoped Edek had packed enough 
clothes.
She had noticed that he was wearing the navy knit top she had bought him. Her 
mother used to choose all of her father's clothes. Rooshka had good taste. She 
bought finely woven one hundred per cent cotton shirts and simple well-cut 
trousers for Edek. Rooshka made sure that he always had one good quality suit 
for everyday occasions, and one suit with a bit more panache, for going out at 
night.
Left to his own devices, Edek would have stuck to the same items of clothing 
until they disintegrated. He never noticed what he was wearing. When Rooshka 
went on her annual two-week winter
vacation to Surfers Paradise, Edek mixed and matched his clothes with an abandon 
that disturbed Ruth and drove her mother mad. 'You can't wear sandals with socks 
here in Australia,' was the first thing Rooshka said to him when he picked her 
up at the airport, after her very last vacation in the sun. 'It is not Poland,' 
she said. 'It is comfortable for my feet,' Edek said. But the minute they got 
home, he had changed his shoes.
As soon as there was a stain or a smudge on anything Edek was wearing, Rooshka 
would whip the garment off Edek, and put it in the laundry. There, it would soak 
in bleach or salt or whatever Rooshka thought would best remove the offending 
mark. Edek was resigned to this. He would take off the socks Rooshka thought he 
had worn for too long, or the trousers with the cuff that contained a spot of 
mud. He understood that Rooshka had had too many smudges and stains in her life. 
Edek would change whatever he had on, as many times a day as Rooshka wanted him 
to, if it made Rooshka happy. He loved her dearly. He saw her, until the day she 
died, as the beautiful young girl he had pursued, and won, in Lodz.
Ruth walked back to where she had arranged to meet Edek. A couple with two 
teenage children were sitting on the bench. Ruth put down the suitcase and stood 
next to them. The son, a sallow-skinned sullen-looking youth, stared fixedly out 
into the distance, as though by removing his gaze he had removed himself from 
this family picture. The girl looked down at her lap. Nothing Ruth had seen, in 
her forty-three years, had persuaded her that having children was a good idea. 
All that effort to enable someone to voice complaints, bitterness, resentment 
and hostility towards you. It didn't feel like the right return on an 
investment. Something happened to women when they had children, Ruth thought. 
Their brains seemed to dim in direct ratio to the number of nappies they had 
changed or Pounds of pumpkin they had pureed. Ruth had seen it many times.
women who had graduated from Oxford, with honours, were
 


reduced to pointing out fire engines, or assembling jigsaw puzzles and reading 
Robert the Rose Horse. Not that Ruth had anything against Robert the Rose Horse. 
It was a wonderful book, just a bit limited as daily reading material.
Ruth had seen women with PhDs apply their intelligence to organising driving 
pools and parent-teacher meetings. After enough time, their children outstripped 
them and the women appeared pale and dull. Ruth had rarely seen evidence that 
motherhood was a good thing. If you were truthful about the job description, 
Ruth thought, there would be very few applicants.
A colleague she had worked with at Schoedel, Firth and Thomson was always on the 
phone to her son. For the first few months that Ruth had shared an office with 
her, Ruth had thought that the son was twelve or thirteen. He was twenty-eight, 
and six foot two. He used to leave his mother in tears. His mother was fifty-two 
and trying to deal with menopause and motherhood, two events, surely, not meant 
to occur simultaneously.
The mother worked as a consultant at Schoedel, Firth and Thomson. It was a 
substitute for the partnership she had passed up in order to produce this boy. 
The kid-Ruth actually always thought of him as the thug-seemed to shout at his 
mother in every call. 'Don't shout,' she would say, lowering her voice.
'He's going through a bad phase,' the colleague would say, to Ruth, after she 
had hung up.
'Is there a good phase?' Ruth asked her once.
'When he was two and three,' the woman said, 'he used to beam at me from one end 
of his face to the other, when I went into his room in the morning. He used to 
be standing in his cot, waiting for me.'
'And the relationship has gone downhill ever since?' Ruth said, as a joke. The 
woman didn't laugh.
One day Ruth arrived at work to find her colleague slumped in
her chair. Her eyes were red and her chest was blotchy. Her normally well-
behaved hair was jutting out everywhere as though she'd been tugging at the 
roots. 'Just a bit of trouble with my son,' she said, in response to Ruth's 
raised eyebrows. 'I know that he must have loved and admired me a lot as a 
child, and he's just having trouble separating from me. I know he doesn't want 
to be out of my life, or he wouldn't keep calling me. But the separation is 
obviously difficult for him. I think the only way he can do it is by keeping an 
awful picture of me frozen in his mind. He needs to see me as manipulative and 
domineering.'
Ruth had had to sit down. This breathtaking interpretation of the son's 
behaviour had left her speechless.
'He shouted at me,' Ruth's colleague continued, 'that I hadn't changed at all. I 
wanted to ask him what was it I should have changed from, and into what? But he 
didn't pause in between shouts.' She sighed. 'I can't work it out. I'm his 
mother, not his analyst.' 'Does he have an analyst?' Ruth asked.
'Oh yes,' she said. 'I pay one hundred and fifty dollars an hour twice a week 
for him to sort these issues out.' The woman paused to blow her nose. 'I expect 
to see signs of progress, soon,' she said. There was nothing Ruth could say. 
This son wasn't retarded or uneducated. He was doing a Master's degree in fine 
arts. Who was paying for the Master's degree? His mother. One day the son had 
dropped into the office. Ruth couldn't believe how normal he looked. How 
gracious he was. How charming. How articulate. Ruth could barely speak to him.
The New York Times had recently had an article about a psychiatrist who made 
house calls. The psychiatrist was currently working with a couple who were 
trying to get their five-year-old to bed at a reasonable hour. The child 
apparently ran around till late every night.
This psychiatrist treated problems ranging from sibling rivalry to
chronic misbehaviour, the Times said. He charged five hundred to
 


seven hundred and fifty dollars for a two-hour visit. The value of a home visit, 
he said, was that he could identify a problem and critique or correct it on the 
spot. Maybe if home visits had been available when the thug was small, Ruth 
thought, the psychiatrist could have identified him as a pain, and recommended 
adoption.
Had children always been such a problem, Ruth wondered? Had they always been so 
awful to their parents? Or was it just this particular generation of children 
and this particular generation of parents? At a Passover dinner last year she 
had watched, appalled, as her neighbour Marilyn's lesbian daughter bristled with 
barely disguised contempt for Marilyn. Marilyn and her husband Emmanuel seemed 
like perfectly nice parents, to Ruth. They seemed completely comfortable with 
their daughter's lesbianism. 'Meet my daughter and her life partner,' Marilyn 
had said. A straightforward, unambiguous and non-judgemental introduction, Ruth 
had thought.
But during the meal, when Marilyn voiced opinions or asked questions, the 
daughter and her girlfriend looked at each other knowingly. They said very 
little, and held hands under the table, their fingers intertwined. What were 
they united against in that grip, Ruth thought? Clearly Marilyn, but why? 'I 
found some of that green tea you like, so I bought a couple of packets for you,' 
Marilyn said to the two girls as they were leaving. The girlfriend grimaced as 
she said good night. Marilyn kissed them both goodbye. She looked exhausted.
Ruth glared at the teenage boy sitting on the airport bench. Why couldn't he 
smarten up and be reasonable to his parents? They were, after all, paying for 
him to fly from somewhere to somewhere else. She looked at her watch. Where was 
Edek? She should have asked him exactly which office he was going to. What if he 
had forgotten where he said he would meet her? She hated casual, open-ended 
arrangements like this. She liked to pin things down to a time and a place.
She walked around the airport to see if she could see Edek. She
stopped at a cake shop. Even at the airport, the cakes and pastries looked 
wonderful. She looked at a round, well-filled piece of apple strudel. She 
wondered what percentage of the apple strudel was composed of just apple. All 
the apple was probably bathed in butter and sugar, she decided. Maybe on her 
last day in Poland, she would have a slice. If she started eating strudel, now, 
she'd be sunk.
Edek was nowhere to be seen. Ruth went back to their meeting place. The mother 
and father and their two hapless teenagers were still sitting there. Ruth was 
agitated. Where could Edek be? How could he arrive, and then disappear like 
this? Maybe she should have him paged?
Just then Edek appeared. He was flushed and excited. 'Where were you?' Ruth 
said. 'I was worried.'
'What could happen to me?' Edek said. 'I am in an airport. Nothing could happen 
to me in an airport. I had to speak with the manager, then another manager, and 
a supervisor, but I got it done. Another ten minutes and the whole thing will be 
finished with.' He rushed off again.
Ruth stood next to the family on the bench. They were all looking forlorn now. 
Maybe the parents had realised that travel would be wasted on these children. 
Ruth looked at them. Why would anyone want to have children?
Ruth knew that, after the war, her mother didn't particularly want to have 
children. She knew that her mother hadn't been overjoyed to find herself 
pregnant with Ruth. Rooshka and Edek had not been in Australia for very long 
when Rooshka discovered that she was Pregnant. They were both working in 
factories. They had no money and they spoke no English. 'What right did we have 
to bring a child into this world?" her mother had said to her. Ruth thought that 
the world her mother was referring to was a larger world than the world
Poverty and lack of language. It was a world where everything as erratic, and 
nothing would ever make sense again. This world
 


was full of mourning and full of dead people. Dead people who hadn't just died. 
Dead people who had been murdered.
The murderers of these dead people were rarely referred to, and Ruth, as a 
child, often wondered who they were, and would she recognise them if she passed 
them on the street. For years she used to examine the faces of passing strangers 
to see if they contained evidence of murderousness.
Ruth had had a German school friend, Elfriede. Elfriede had long blonde plaits 
and three brothers, a mother and father and four grandparents. When Ruth was 
ten, she had stayed at Elfriede's place overnight. Ruth had eaten bratwurst and 
Kartoffelklosse for dinner and listened to the German words and phrases flying 
around the dinner table. In the middle of the night, she had woken up with a 
stomachache. Was she in a house full of murderers? She had asked her mother, the 
next day, if Elfriede and her family were the murderers. 'Who knows?' Rooshka 
had replied. It was a worrying answer.
Rooshka had told Ruth that she had tried to abort the pregnancy that had turned 
into Ruth. Rooshka said she had jumped up and down. She had sat in hot baths, 
she had swallowed castor oil. But nothing had helped. The pregnancy had 
proceeded. 'I was ashamed to be pregnant,' her mother had said. Ruth hadn't 
really understood why her mother was ashamed to be pregnant. She didn't think it 
had anything to do with Ruth herself. She knew that her mother had vomited, on 
the train, every morning after leaving Ruth in day care. She thought that that 
was pretty good evidence of her mother's attachment to her.
Ruth knew that her mother had lost two babies. One baby boy in the ghetto and 
another baby, also a boy, after the war. Being pregnant hadn't resulted in a 
great deal of happiness for Rooshka Rothwax. Her mother must have loved babies, 
at one time, Ruth thought. Rooshka used to tell Ruth a story about her amazement 
at finding a baby in the toilet block, in Stuthof, the concentration camp
Rooshka was sent to from Auschwitz. 'I couldn't believe I had found a baby,' 
Rooshka used to say. 'It was like a miracle. It was a newborn baby. It was on 
the floor, in the toilet block. I ran like crazy to the hospital in Stuthof. 
"Look, I found a newborn baby," I said to the nurse. "I think it is perfectly 
healthy." They took the baby from me and threw it into the rubbish bin. I don't 
know how I could have been so stupid to run to the hospital with the baby.' 'It 
wasn't your fault,' Ruth would say. 'I am not talking about fault,' Rooshka 
would
answer.
The hospital in Stuthof was the reason that Ruth had been in Gdansk, a year ago. 
She wanted to see where it was that her mother had run to, in such hope, all 
those years ago. Stuthof was a forty-minute drive from Gdansk. Ruth had imagined 
that hospital many times. She imagined a small hospital with gleaming white 
tiles and polished chrome and stainless steel equipment. It had taken Ruth half 
an hour, in Stuthof, to find the hospital. She had wandered around Stuthof with 
a map, trying to match what was left of the camp with the details on an old plan 
of the former death camp.
Ruth was the only visitor in Stuthof that day. The only visitor. The emptiness 
made the place seem even more bleak. Two women manned a small information desk 
at the entrance to the camp. It was so quiet. Deathly quiet. Ruth thought that 
she could feel the evil in the quiet. If ever there was a godforsaken place, 
this was it. Her mother and all the other Jews had really been forsaken by God, 
here. That is, if there was a God. And in this abandoned corner of the universe, 
crowded with the throes of death, God seemed an even more dubious proposition.
The Nazis had destroyed as much of the camp as they could, before
they fled. Ruth had walked through the remaining prisoner barracks.
Crudely put together wooden bunks were jammed from the floor to
the ceiling in each hut. There would have been no room to breathe
when these barracks were full. The air in the huts seemed yellow.
 


The pallor of corpses hung above every bunk. Ruth felt that she couldn't 
breathe. She could hear the death rattles; she could hear the last breaths. She 
wanted to leave.
Outside, Ruth had tried to steady herself by taking deep breaths. But her lungs 
felt shallow. She couldn't stop thinking about her mother. Where had Rooshka 
walked? Where had she slept? Where was she when she lay in the snow and ice 
here, burning with typhus? Had Rooshka Rothwax walked on any of the paths that 
Ruth was walking on now?
Ruth was holding two sheets of paper in her hands while she walked. Two sheets 
of paper that had made her tremble. She had managed to persuade one of the women 
at the information desk to look for her mother's name in the archives that the 
Polish government was trying to put together from documentation that the Nazis 
had left behind. Ruth almost hadn't asked. The two women were so surly and 
unhelpful, and she had thought that it was a long shot anyway. She was sure that 
there would be nothing there. All other evidence of her mother's existence 
before the war had been erased. There was no family. There were no photographs. 
There were no school records. The two sheets of paper in Ruth's hands were the 
only signs left of Rooshka Rothwax's life in Poland. One of the sheets was her 
mother's individual prisoner documentation. Rooshka Rothwax, it read. 
Haftlinger. 74419. Prisoner 74419. Maiden name Spindler. Born in Lodz, December 
5th, 1924. Date of arrival in Stuthof, August 28th, 1944. Religion, Jude. Jew.
Ruth's fingers had trembled as she held the pieces of paper. She felt that she 
had her mother's life in her hands. The information about Rooshka Rothwax, 
Haftlinger 74419 was handwritten in pen and ink. Ruth could tell this even from 
the copy. The handwriting was meticulous. Every full stop was firmly dotted, and 
the loops on the letters that looped were perfectly looped. The woman at the 
front desk had also given Ruth a copy of a typed list. This was part of the
list that documented all of the prisoners on the transport that Ruth's mother 
had arrived on in Stuthof. It was a transport that had left Auschwitz three days 
earlier. A train full of young Jewish girls and women. The oldest of the thirty-
two Jewish women on Ruth's typewritten page was twenty-six. Ruth had put the 
sheets of paper carefully away in her bag. She had hesitated before folding 
them. She didn't want to crush them.
One of the boxcars, the cattle wagons that transported Jews to their death, was 
on display in Stuthof. P.K.P., the initials of the Polish public railroad 
system, was on the side of the wagon. Ruth was surprised that the Poles hadn't 
removed the initials. P.K.P. was still on the side of every train in Poland, 
today. Ruth looked at the wagon. One of these wagons was in the Holocaust 
Museum, in Washington D.C. Ruth had stood inside it. Edek had too. 'It was very 
clean,' he said to her afterwards. Edek had gone to the museum when it first 
opened, with Henia. Ruth had gone, months later, on her own.
The wagon in Stuthof wasn't clean. Ruth had peered into it. The floor was 
littered with debris. She had climbed up into the wagon. As soon as she got in, 
she felt sick. And panicked. What if she couldn't get out? She hung on to the 
side of the wagon and lowered herself down. She had been in there for less than 
a minute. What did the debris on the floor of the wagon contain, she wondered? 
Were there remnants of people there? Remnants of piss and shit? There were no 
toilets on these trains. These trains were made to transport cattle. Today, it 
was probably possible, through forensic testing, Ruth thought, to find out quite 
a lot about the people who had occupied that cattle wagon.
Ruth had finally found the hospital. The hospital, in Stuthof, like 'the rest of 
the buildings in the death camp, was preserved exactly was found. There were no 
tiles or stainless steel in this hospital.
The hospital was built with the same cheap wooden boards as the
 


barracks. Two broken operating tables were in the middle of one room. Some empty 
shelves stood in a corner. A few old implements were scattered around. Several 
broken lights were on the wooden floor. The floor had as many holes and gaps in 
it as the floors of the barracks. There had clearly been no need for hygiene in 
this hospital. It was so bare and so barbaric. There was no pretence that anyone 
was going to be cared for in this hospital. Ruth had wept and wept. How could 
she have imagined white tiles and stainless steel? She had read enough to know 
that that was absurd.
She had read hundreds of books on the Holocaust. Books by survivors. Books by 
historians. Despite all the books Ruth bought and read, part of her could still 
not imagine the truth. Part of her still wanted to believe that it couldn't have 
been that bad. That her beautiful mother hadn't really slept in the middle of 
corpses, and been left for dead, many times. Part of her wanted to believe it 
was all a bad dream.
When Ruth had got back to the Marta Hotel, after Stuthof, she had showered for 
over an hour. She hadn't been able to get out of the shower. She hadn't been 
able to wash off whatever it was that she was trying to wash away. She had 
showered until all of her skin had wrinkled.
Ruth was exhausted. Warsaw airport was nearly deserted. It was almost ten 
o'clock. Where was Edek? How could he do this to her? Just run off. What was he 
doing? A priest walked up to Ruth and asked her if she would donate some money 
to a children's charity-Ruth said no. She didn't want to give anything to a 
Polish priest. She didn't like priests and she didn't like Poles. Her father 
didn't express much resentment towards Poles. He knew, first-hand, what the 
Poles had done to the Jews, he knew from his own experience how Polish people 
hadn't been able to wait to get rid of the Jews-
But he didn't dwell on it. He didn't express much anger at the Germans, either. 
Ruth couldn't understand why he didn't hate Germans. She realised that neither 
Rooshka nor Edek expressed a lot of anger at what had happened to them.
what Ruth did see, in her mother and father, was anguish and shock. They were 
still shocked. As though neither of them could quite believe what they had lived 
through. Ruth saw her mother and father's guilt, too. A guilt at their own 
survival. The guilt of still being alive when everyone else in their world was 
dead. Maybe Edek and Rooshka had seen too much base behaviour to want to be 
overtaken by a lesser emotion like anger, she thought. Getting through each day 
seemed to take all the emotional energy her mother had, anyway. There was not a 
lot of room left for anger.
Edek got through his days by working and reading detective fiction, when he came 
home from work. Edek loved working. In the four years since he'd been back in 
Australia, he'd applied for over twenty jobs. Jobs as a cutter in a clothing 
factory, a pattern maker for a shirt manufacturer, a shop assistant in a 
pharmacy, and a job as the manager of the shipping department of a sporting 
goods store. Edek knew nothing about sport and even less about sporting 
equipment. The only products he could identify were the exercise bikes. He was a 
quick learner, he told the baffled owner who interviewed him. He didn't get the 
job.
He didn't get most of the jobs he interviewed for. He couldn't understand why. 
'I think you're over the age that most people are looking for in an employee,' 
Ruth had said. 'I didn't tell them I was eighty-one,' Edek said, 'I told 
everyone I was sixty-six.' He didn't seem to realise that sixty-six was already 
way too old to be applying for jobs.
He did get one of the jobs. It was a temporary position itemising stock in the 
back room of a health food store. Edek had to unpack new shipments, note what 
was running low and clean the store, after
 


it closed every night. 'It is very important for those places what sell this 
healthy food to look very clean,' Edek had said to Ruth. 'They have to look more 
clean than shops what sell normal food. People who eat this sort of stuff like 
to have a very clean shop.'
Edek came to work two hours before the shop opened and he stayed longer than any 
other employee. 'The manager does trust me,' he said proudly to Ruth. 'He did 
give me the key to the business after just one week.' Edek was so happy. He did 
extra jobs without being asked, and brought chocolate biscuits for everyone for 
morning tea. When the job came to an end, the manager took Edek out for a cup of 
coffee and told him how sorry he was that the man he had replaced was coming 
back. Edek had resumed his search for employment.
Ruth felt agitated. Where was her father? She had only seen him for a minute 
before he had disappeared. She tried to calm down. She was not going to feel 
irritated by Edek, she told herself; not on their first day together. She was 
grinding her teeth and blinking her right eye five times by the time Edek 
arrived back. He was triumphant. He was holding his ticket in the air.
'I did fix it,' he said. 'They did give me a first class ticket for the way 
back. I am in seat 2B. The manager didn't want to do it, but the supervisor, in 
the end, did agree with me. I did pay for a business class and my seat was not 
such a business class seat.'
'Dad, I've been waiting for over an hour,' Ruth said.
'I am not such a young man,' Edek said. 'I did want to make sure I could have 
one of those things for the feet. It is not so easy to travel at my age.'
'I would have done it for you, tomorrow,' Ruth said.
'Why should I bother you?' Edek said.
Ruth calmed down. 'You must be tired, Dad,' she said. 'Did you manage to get any 
sleep when you stopped in Bangkok?'
'To tell you the truth,' Edek said, 'I did not have such a good night in that 
Bangkok.'
'Oh no,' Ruth said. 'What went wrong? I thought your hotel was
just near the airport.'
'The hotel was near to the airport,' Edek said. 'I did find it. I got a bus as a 
matter of fact. I didn't want to take a taxi. Who knows where a taxi driver 
would take me?' 'So what was wrong?' Ruth said.
'Everything,' said Edek. 'I was the only guest in the whole hotel. Nobody did 
speak English. I was frightened to leave the room. I didn't see one person who 
was not Chinee. Everybody was Chinee. You never know what they can do to you.' 
Edek always pronounced
Chinese, 'Chinee'.
'They're not Chinese, Dad, they're Thai,' Ruth said. 'And just because they 
don't look exactly like you doesn't mean that they're not exactly like you. 
They're not going to do anything to you.'
'I am not going to argue with you,' Edek said. 'Which one of us knows what 
people can do?'
'It was a stupid idea to stop in Bangkok,' Edek said. 'It was your idea,' said 
Ruth. 'No, you did make the arrangements,' he said. 'I wanted you to fly 
Qantas,' Ruth said.
'That Qantas is too expensive. I was saving money for you,' Edek said.
Ruth took a deep breath. 'I can't believe we're having an argument about 
Bangkok,' she said. 'Dad, we are in Poland. You and I are in Poland, together.'
That Bangkok is not a place to go,' Edek said. You only saw the airport,' said 
Ruth. 'It was enough,' Edek said.
Do you want a Mercedes taxi?' a man asked them. A Mercedes?' Edek said. He 
turned to Ruth. 'I will talk to him,' said. How much are you going to charge me 
for this Mercedes?' said to the driver.
 


'Where are you going?' the driver asked.
'Where are we going?' Edek asked Ruth.
'To the Bristol Hotel,' Ruth said.
'We are going to the Bristol Hotel,' Edek said to the driver. The driver was 
about to give Edek a price for the trip, when Edek suddenly slapped himself on 
the forehead.  'I am an idiot,' he said to Ruth. 'I am speaking to him in 
English.'
'I'm sure he can understand English,' Ruth said.
'That will be one hundred and thirty zlotys,' the driver said.
Edek answered him in Polish. They talked for a couple of minutes. 'A hundred and 
ten zlotys,' Edek announced to Ruth. 'Why not?' ,  'Okay,' said Ruth. She 
followed her father and the driver.
'This is a very nice car,' Edek said to Ruth inside the car. 'It is a very big 
Mercedes.' He looked around the car, opened and closed the ashtray, patted the 
leather seats. 'A very nice car,' he said. He sat back. He was silent for a few 
minutes. Ruth was worried about her father. How did he feel being in Poland? She 
didn't want to ask him how he felt, every two minutes. She didn't want to make 
this trip any more difficult for him than it already was. She felt pretty tense 
herself. She tried to relax.  'Excuse me,' Edek called out to the driver. 'How 
much is such a car, in Poland?'
'This car is not cheap,' the driver said.
'Why is he speaking to me in English?' Edek asked.
'Because you spoke to him in English,' said Ruth.
'Oy cholera,' said Edek. Oy cholera, literally translated into 'Oh cholera', but 
Ruth knew it was closer to 'Oh shit'.  'Oy cholera,' Edek said again. He leaned 
forward and started talking to the driver in Polish.
Ruth couldn't work out exactly what they were saving. She knew the conversation 
was about the price of cars and how many miles to the gallon the cars used. 
Polish numbers were incomprehensible  to Ruth. They all sounded the same to her. 
She couldn't tell the difference between the number two, three, eight, ten, 
twenty, thirty or forty. She knew they were all numbers  Whatever the numbers 
were, they were animating Edek. He was offering his opinion and his advice as 
though he was a car mechanic or a racing car driver. Ruth leaned back in the 
car. It was starting to snow. Snow made all cities more attractive.  'Look Dad, 
snow,' she said. Edek stopped talking to the driver and looked around.
'When was the last time you saw snow?' she said. 'What is so important about 
snow?' Edek said. 'I seen a lot of snow. Snow is snow.' 'Well, I like snow,' 
Ruth said. 'What are we going to do?' Edek said. 'About the snow?' she said.  
'No. What are we going to do?' he said. 'Where are we going to go? What are the 
plans? What is the itinerarerary? Is that how you say it? Itinerarerary?' 'It's 
itinerary,' Ruth said. 'Itinerarerary,' Edek said.  'We're going to spend one 
day in Warsaw, then we're going to-' 'We don't need to stay in Warsaw a whole 
day. What for?' Edek said, interrupting her.  'Okay,' she said. 'If you don't 
want to stay a whole day, we'll spend  the morning in Warsaw and leave for Lodz 
at lunchtime. After Lodz,
1 thought we'd go to Krakow,' she said. 'I want to go to Auschwitz,  but if 
you'd rather not come to Auschwitz, that's perfectly fine. I've  booked us into 
a good hotel, and you can stay in the hotel.'
No,' said Edek. 'I'll go where you go. What time did you say we can leave 
Warsaw?'
About twelve-thirty,' Ruth said. 'That will give us time to see some of the 
city.' 'Edek leaned forward and spoke to the driver. 'He says he will take  us 
to Lodz for three hundred zlotys,' Edek said. 'He did want three hundred and 
fifty, but I said three hundred or nothing.' 'Dad, I've bought train tickets,' 
Ruth said. 'Why shouldn't we go to Lodz in a Mercedes?' Edek said. 'Why 
shouldn't I show him I can afford a Mercedes?'  'I think he understands 
English,' Ruth said. Edek lowered his voice. 'Why shouldn't I show him?' he 
said.
'Okay, Dad,' Ruth said. Edek looked elated. 'How do you feel, Dad?' she said.
'I feel fine,' he said. 'Why are you asking me how I feel? I feel fine.'
'Well, we're in Poland,' Ruth said.
 


'Big deal,' said Edek. 'We are in Poland. What is the big deal?'
Big deal. He loved to say big deal. It was one of his favourite phrases. She had 
asked him, once, if he would give her a dollar every time he said big deal. 
'There are too many things that are a big deal,' she had said to him. 'For you, 
maybe, not for me,' he had said. But he had tried to cut down.  'Well it's a big 
deal for me,' Ruth said to her father. 'We'll be at the hotel, soon,' she said. 
'You must be tired. And jet-lagged.'  'Why should I be tired?' he said. 'I am 
not tired. And I never had a jet-lag before. Why should I have a jet-lag now?'
Ruth decided to change the subject. 'It's a nice car,' she said.
'Mercedes makes a very good car,' Edek said. 'It is the best car you can buy.'
'Would you like a second-hand Mercedes?' Ruth said.
The? A Mercedes?' said Edek. 'I would never buy a Mercedes.
'Why can we drive in one, but not buy one?' Ruth said.
'Are you stupid?' said Edek. 'I am not going to give money to the Germans. If I 
drive in a Mercedes, like this, I am making myself comfortable, not giving money 
to the Germans.'  'You're giving money to a Pole,' Ruth whispered.
'Shsh shsh,' Edek said.
'I don't think we're going to make any difference to the German economy whether 
we buy a Mercedes or not. They are doing pretty well without us. Anyway, a 
second-hand car has already been bought by somebody else.'  'But that somebody 
does have to buy another car and they buy another Mercedes,' Edek said.
Ruth sighed. Nothing she was saying was right, with Edek, tonight. 'How is 
Moniek?' she said. She liked Moniek Steinberg. He was a quiet man. She knew he 
had been in Bergen-Belsen. She had often thought that part of him was still 
there. Maybe that was how it had to be, for anyone who had been in any of those 
places.  'Ah Moniek,' Edek said. 'He is dead.'
'Oh, no,' Ruth said. 'When did he die?'
'He did not die,' Edek said. 'But you cannot speak to him anymore. He does not 
answer the phone and when you see him in the street, he says just a hello, and 
he goes away. Sometimes people are dead in different ways. Sometimes a dead 
person can be dead and sometimes a person does not need to be dead to be dead.' 
To be dead to themselves or dead to you?' Ruth said. You are a clever girl, 
Ruthie,' Edek said. 'You always see a side to something that not many people can 
see. You was always like this.  'You could see things when you was a small 
girl.' What do you mean I could see things?' Ruth said.
You could see that Malka Feldman was a very sad person,' Edek said.
How do you know?' said Ruth.  because you did tell me,' Edek said, 'when you was 
six years old she was sad because she had to wear a wig. You did say to me Malka 
wears a wig because somebody did pull out her hair. Even  her women in the card 
players was not sure that her hair was
 


a wig. It was a bit funny that you did know to tell you the truth but you did 
know it was a wig.'
'Malka probably told me,' Ruth said.
'I did ask Malka,' Edek said. 'She was shocked. She said that since it happened 
she did not say one word to anybody. She did start to cry. As a matter of fact I 
did not feel too good for bringing up the subject. Malka did tell me that in 
Auschwitz in the last months they did not have time anymore to shave the hair of 
the women, so they did not shave those ones what were going to labour camps. So 
they did not shave her head. But a Kapo dragged her by the hair to the next 
barracks because she asked the Kapo if she could see if her sister was there.'
'A Kapo?' Ruth said. 'A Jew?'
'Yes,' said Edek. 'And who knows what I would have done if I had been a Kapo. 
Thank God nobody did ask me.'
'I did tell Malka that you did know that somebody did pull her hair out,' Edek 
said. 'She said it was impossible. "How could you know?" Malka said. You was six 
years old. You was not in Auschwitz.'
'I must have guessed,' Ruth said.
'That must be it,' said Edek. 'You guess things pretty good. You used to guess a 
lot of things. Even Mum was surprised, sometimes.
Ruth felt unnerved. There was no need to feel frightened by this, she told 
herself. It was clear that she was a kid who listened to things. And people 
often forgot that they had said something. Malka had probably mentioned her hair 
to Rooshka one night, at one of the card games. Malka would have trusted 
Rooshka. Rooshka wasn't a gossip like some of the other women. Rooshka didn't 
gossip. She didn't play cards either, she read a book while the others play 
pounds l' 'Even Mum didn't know about Malka's hair,' Edek said. Ruth felt sick.
They were at the Bristol. A uniformed valet opened Ruth's door for her. Another 
valet helped Edek out of the car. 'It's cold,' Ruth
said to Edek. 'Button up your jacket.' Edek breathed in deeply.
'This cold doesn't get to your bones,' he said. 'Not like the cold in America or 
Australia.'
'This cold is twice as cold as any cold in Australia,' Ruth said.
'But it doesn't get to your bones,' Edek said. 'You can feel it doesn't get to 
your bones. I am not cold. I told you, always, the cold in Poland doesn't get to 
your bones.'
'Dad, it might not have got to your bones when you were twenty-one,' she said. 
'But you're eighty-one. Button up your jacket. It's freezing.'
'I am going to pay the driver,' Edek said. 'Go inside.'
Ruth waited for him. 'Did you give the driver a fifty-zloty tip?' she said.
'Why not?' he said. 'I have got a rich daughter.'
Ruth went inside. She left Edek chatting to the doorman. She went to the front 
desk to check Edek in. She was filling out the endless information still 
required by Polish hotels about their guests, when Edek rushed up to her. 'Give 
me another twenty zlotys,' he said. 'I have not got any more zlotys.' Ruth gave 
him the zlotys. He ran off and spoke to the doorman.
It's worth to make sure he looks after us,' Edek said to Ruth when he came back.
What a beautiful young woman,' he said, in Polish, to the receptionist. She 
blushed. 'Thank you,' she said, in English.
'We can speak Polish,' Edek said.
'Why are you running around tipping everyone?' Ruth said to her father.
Why shouldn't I give a tip?' Edek said. 'We can afford it. You good money. You 
earn very good money for a girl.' earn very good money for anyone,' Ruth said.
'Why can't we give a tip?' said Edek.
 


Ways tip people,' Ruth said. She felt agitated with Edek. Why
 


did he have to argue about everything? And why did he always think he was right?
'Why do you have to hide that you have got money?' Edek said
'I don't hide it,' Ruth said. 'We're staying at the Bristol. It's obvious we've 
got money.'  'I don't mind showing them that you are rich,' he said.
Ruth's last shrink had said to her that Ruth hid what she had. From herself, and 
from others. 'You have trouble feeling you own achievement and you own success,' 
the shrink had said to her. 'You have to hide what you have. You're frightened 
that if you display it, somebody will take it away from you. So, you have to 
pretend you have nothing. It's also tied to how envious you are of others,' the 
shrink had added.  'That's not true,' Ruth had said. 'What do I envy?' 'Peace of 
mind,' the shrink had answered.  'I'm not rich,' Ruth said to Edek.
'You are rich,' he said. 'You own your own apartment.'
'I'm forty-three,' she said. 'A lot of forty-year-olds own their own apartment.'
'Your apartment is in New York,' Edek said. Ruth was annoyed. One apartment, in 
Fourteenth Street, was not rich, she thought.  'Your apartment has three 
bedrooms and two bathrooms,' Edek said. She glared at him.  'This is a beautiful 
hotel,' Edek said to the receptionist in Polish-
'Thank you,' the receptionist said.
'My daughter stays always in such a hotel,' Edek said.
'Aren't you tired, Dad?' Ruth said.
'No,' he said. 'Not at all.'
'I'm exhausted,' she said. 'I'm jet-lagged and I arrived here a day before you. 
And I've slept.'  'I don't have a jet lag,' Edek said. 'Only my daughter gets a 
jet lag-'
'I have to go to bed,' Ruth said.
The receptionist handed Edek and Ruth two sets of keys. She told them, in 
English, which rooms they had. 'Room 310 for you, Mrs Rothwax,' she said. 'And 
room 578 for you, Mr Rothwax.' 'Miss Rothwax,' Ruth said. 'Not Mrs Rothwax. 
Could you put that into the computer please?' She didn't want anyone to think 
that she was  Edek's wife.
 'Where is my room?' Edek said to the receptionist.
'Your room is on the fifth floor, sir,' she said.
'Where is my daughter's room?' Edek said.
'Your daughter is in 310, on the third floor,' the receptionist said. Edek 
looked crestfallen.  'What's wrong, Dad?' Ruth said.
'I feel like a fish out of water,' Edek said.
'A fish out of water?' Ruth said. 'Don't worry, we won't do anything in Poland 
that you don't want to do.'  'I am not worried about Poland,' he said. 'I am 
like a fish out of water. Don't you understand what that means? It is an 
expression what they use in Australia. I feel like a fish what is out of the 
water.' Ruth looked at the receptionist. The receptionist looked puzzled.  'My 
room is too far from your room,' Edek said.
'I gave you a very good room, sir,' said the receptionist.
'I want a room near you,' Edek said to Ruth. Ruth arranged a change of rooms.
 


chapter four
At this time of the morning, there were always people on the street in New York. 
There were people running and jogging. There were people walking to work. There 
were people having breakfast in cafes. It was six forty-five a.m. There was no 
one on the streets of Warsaw.
Ruth had been running on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, Al. Soli-darnosci, Gen. 
Wladyslawa Andersa, and Marszalkowska. Polish street names sounded militant if 
not military to her. And impossible to pronounce. If she got lost, she thought, 
she'd never be able to call the hotel and tell them where she was. And she 
couldn't ask anyone in the street for directions because she would never be able 
to match the sound of the street names with any of the street signs. She had 
practised saying Krakowskie Przedmiescie for ten minutes before she left the 
hotel. Krakowskie was easy. Przedmiescie was out of her reach.
She had woken up that morning knowing that she had to run. Her first day in 
Poland with her father was bound to be difficult. She would need all the 
endorphins that running gave her. She had arranged to meet Edek for breakfast at 
eight a.m. Eating with her father was full of pitfalls. She had to make sure 
that she was as balanced as she could be. She already felt much better than she 
did when she woke up. She turned into Al. Jerozolimskie. At least there were 
some , people in the street, now.
Max had called her at five o'clock this morning.
'I knew you'd be up,' Max had said, brightly.
'What's up, Max?' she said.
'Nothing's up,' Max said. 'I've just got a couple of small queries. Nothing 
you'll have to spend a lot of time on. I know you need this time to yourself.'
'Max darling, edit,' she had said. 'I'm lying in bed with a stomachache.'
'I knew this trip would be too much for you,' Max said.
'I've got a stomach-ache because I'm pre-menstrual,' said Ruth. She had been 
lying in bed, holding her stomach, and thinking about her mother.
Jewish women in Auschwitz had had no periods, her mother had told her. They had 
been given medication to stop their menstruation. 'We called it brum, this 
medicine,' her mother had said. 'They gave it to us in the grey stuff they 
called soup. I could taste the brum even in the stinking taste of the soup.'
'I'll be quick,' Max said to Ruth. 'Can we do a letter about the morning after?'
'The morning after what?' Ruth asked.
'You know, the morning after,' said Max. 'The morning after sex. A female client 
wants a "You-were-great-in-bed-last-night letter". She's used us before, we did 
some thank you letters for her.'
'Tell her we'll be graphic but not pornographic,' Ruth said.
'Will you do it?' Max said. 'I mean will you do the letter, not will you tell 
her.'
'I figured that out, Max,' Ruth said.
'We don't have any letters about sex on file,' said Max.
'I'll do it,' Ruth said. 'Get me the basic information-names, place, et cetera, 
and some very general details.'
Thanks,' said Max. 'I've got only one more question. I've dealt With all the 
regular stuff while you've been gone, but we seem to have had more irregular 
requests than usual since you left.'
'I've only been gone for three days,' Ruth said. 'What's the Question?'
 


'Right,' Max said. 'The guy in the architect's office upstairs wants to know if 
we'll do a love letter.'
'Well, what's the problem?' said Ruth.
'He wants to send it to another guy, and I wasn't sure I could adapt one of the 
heterosexual love letters we've got on file,' said Max.
'I don't think it should be too difficult,' Ruth said. 'They're all letters from 
one person in love to another.'
'I'm not sure I can do it,' Max said.
Ruth could tell that it had been a mistake to let Max know where she was. When 
Max couldn't contact her Max was fine. She managed the business with surprising 
efficiency. With access to Ruth, the more indecisive parts of Max flourished.
'I told the architect we did all sorts of letters,' Max said. 'I didn't want him 
to think we discriminated against minorities.'
'Send me the details of the love letter he wants to send,' Ruth said.
'Thanks a million, Ruthie,' said Max.
Max was the only person, apart from Edek, who called her Ruthie. It had 
disconcerted her at first, but she was used to it now. She had been right, after 
all, she decided, to give Max her itinerary. She wasn't sure that Max could 
handle a homosexual love letter on her own-Ruth had certain rules about letters 
that she had tried to drill into Max. 'Don't gush if you're praising somebody,' 
she had said to her. 'Don't grovel if you are apologising. Avoid all 
philosophising in & letter of sympathy, and minimise the use of personal 
pronouns in condolence letters.'
Ruth had devised a different set of rules for business letters. Business letters 
were more straightforward. Max did most of the business letters now. But Ruth 
still had to do all of the company's love letters-Max was too creative with love 
letters. She injected them with an intensity that appeared ominous. Ruth thought 
that Max was probably too young to do a good love letter.
Ruth liked writing the love letters. She often made herself cry writing a love 
letter. She would become so immersed in the letter that she would get a jolt 
when she realised that the sentiments that were making her cry were of her own 
fabrication. That the love that she was writing about had nothing to do with 
her. They were not her love letters. They were, for her, business letters.
Ruth hoped that she would never meet the recipients of some of the longer love 
letters that she had written. She felt she had shared too intimate an intimacy 
with these strangers. Ruth had had two particularly intimate letters to write, 
in the week before she left New York. A letter from a mother to her daughter. 
The mother wanted the letter to be included in her will. She wanted her daughter 
to know how much she loved her. The mother was fifty-five and looked in good 
health, to Ruth. She had noticed Ruth staring at her. 'I'm not dying,' she had 
said. 'I'm just making preparations for the event.'
When I am no longer here, Ruth had written in the letter to the woman's twenty-
two-year-old daughter, I want you to know that I will still be with you. Part of 
me will always be part of you. I have not left you. You have occupied a large 
part of my heart. The best part of my heart. You will never have to miss me and 
you will never have to have regrets. I will be with you. You gave me all of your 
heart from the day you were born and you took all of me, my good and my 
difficult pans, into your heart. You will have me, forever, darling. And you 
will live a good life knowing that you knew me well. There will be no unanswered 
questions, nothing unsaid that should have been said. We had each other, in the 
best possible way, and we will always have each other. The woman had wept when 
she had picked up the letter. Ruth, to "her embarrassment, had wept, too.
The other unusually intimate letter was also, coincidentally, connected with a 
will. Her client, Graham Long of Graham Long Bridal designs, a large Long Island 
bridal wear company, often requested letters. The bridal business, Ruth had 
learnt, was prone
 


to ardent and overwrought transactions. Mr Long's recent request had been for a 
letter which would explain the discrepancy between the amount that he was 
planning to leave to his daughter, in his will and the amount that his son would 
receive. Mr Long wanted his daughter to be the main beneficiary of his will. For 
some strange reason, this had pleased Ruth.
Ruth had no idea why Mr Long wanted his will to favour his daughter. Ruth never 
asked more questions of a client than she needed to know. It was partly out of 
efficiency, but also because she didn't want to clutter her head with other 
people's turmoil. She had enough disarray of her own to deal with.
Ruth encouraged her clients to be bold in all correspondence but particularly in 
letters to be read after their death. 'Once you're dead you can really say 
whatever you want to say,' she would say to clients. 'And you need never know 
the response.' The religious clients felt that they would be present in one form 
or another, after their death. They would, they felt, hear what was being said 
about them. An advantage of being religious that Ruth had not previously 
considered.
The clients mostly took Ruth's advice. They were direct, and said those things 
they hadn't been able to say in person. Mr Long had told Ruth he felt much more 
tolerant towards his son, after he had set things out on paper.
'Our relationship is already better,' he said to Ruth.
'Well, you can always discard the letter and change the will if you become best 
friends,' Ruth had said to him.
'You're so funny,' he had said. People often said that to Ruth. She didn't think 
she was all that funny. She thought that she was just being sensible.
Ruth felt that letters could spread a goodwill that was hard to achieve in 
person. In a letter, you could eliminate your own awkwardness and the 
distraction or diversion of the recipient's response. Letters enabled you to be 
the best you could be. If you found a lesser
ft of yourself creeping through, you could censor it.
You could consolidate good feelings, in a letter. You could confirm
warmth and an intimacy that was embarrassing for most people to communicate 
verbally. And a letter made endings less blunt. The end of a meal, the end of a 
meeting, the end of an evening, the end Of a phone call. Ruth hated the sudden 
severance of intimacy that endings had. If she had enjoyed a meal with someone, 
she wanted to call them as soon as she got home. After an enjoyable phone call 
she often wanted to call straight back. She restrained herself, most of the 
time. She didn't want to look like a lunatic.
It seemed to Ruth that the closeness that could accumulate between people during 
an evening or a phone call disconnected itself so easily. That it was hard to 
stay plugged in to that connection. She felt that in the next call, or in the 
next meeting, the easiness that had developed, dissipated. And you had to start 
from scratch.
The problem was probably more pronounced in Manhattan. In Manhattan people 
seemed to skirt around each other. This detachment was carried out with 
considerable friendliness and an excess of endearments. The word 'love' was 
bandied about with abandon. We love you, I love you, I love her, she loves me, 
they love me. You could hear this on the street, in cafes, in restaurants, in 
offices and in buses and subways. You would have to be dead to avoid being the 
recipient of several of these emphatic announcements each day. Everyone spoke 
like this. It appeared, if you didn't know any better, that love was in the air 
in Manhattan.
The truth was that it was hard to progress further than a formal relationship in 
New York. Further than a casual formality. The sort of formality that is forced 
upon people who know very little about each other's lives.
You never knew when you met someone, in New York, what they
had been doing or what they had been through, since you last met.
You didn't hear about the good things and you didn't hear about
 


the bad. If you were lucky, you heard their bad news after it had been 
rectified. In New York, you couldn't talk about an illness until you had 
completely recovered. You could talk about the job you lost, as long as you were 
safely ensconced in a new job. New Yorkers hated bad news. They switched off 
more easily to bad news than they did when they discovered that someone couldn't 
be of use to them. Usefulness, in New York, was often defined as career 
furtherment.
Ruth liked to know about people's illnesses and difficulties. It made friends 
and acquaintances more real to her, more three-dimensional. In New York, it was 
easy to think of people's lives as one efficient, if frustrating, transaction 
after another. She felt bad if she discovered that someone she knew had been ill 
and alone in their apartment. An Australian journalist who lived close by Ruth 
had been bedridden for two weeks last year with a respiratory infection. 'Why 
didn't you call?' Ruth had said when the journalist told her she had felt so 
sick that she had thought she was going to die. 'I didn't want to bother 
anyone,' the journalist had said. 'Will you promise to call, if it happens 
again?' Ruth said. 'Okay,' the journalist had said. But Ruth knew that she 
wouldn't. And she knew that she, too, would remain mute, if she was in trouble. 
It just seemed to be the way, in New York City.
On the rare occasions in New York when Ruth had felt at home in someone's 
company or in someone's home, she had wanted to stay. Like a child who didn't 
want to go home after a party. Or a kid who couldn't bear to be wrenched away 
from a friend. But adults couldn't just say, 'Can I stay -with you?' Adults were 
supposed to be able to separate. Supposed to be separate.
Max had had trouble separating from her, this morning, Ruth thought. Max had 
phoned her three times. The last call seemed really unnecessary. 'We need 
someone else to do handwritten letters,' Max had said. 'I don't have the time.'
'What about Bern?' Ruth said.
'His handwriting is hopeless,' Max said.
'I'll think about what to do when I get back,' Ruth had said.
In the background, Ruth had heard Bern. 'To send flowers you only have to pick 
up a phone. Everyone knows that. When people get a letter they know that you 
have put a lot of yourself into that letter,' Bern was saying to somebody. He 
was a smart boy, Ruth thought. She had liked him from the first day she'd met 
him. She had asked him why he didn't stop smoking. 'I'm not a quitter,' he had 
replied.
Ruth stopped at the traffic light on the corner of Krakowskie Przedmiescie and 
Krolewska. She had managed to miss every red light so far on her run this 
morning. She loved missing the red lights. It made her feel lucky. The lights 
changed. She started running again. Another ten minutes and she'd be done.
'I can see you do not know still with whom you are speaking,' the voice said. 
Ruth's heart started racing. This couldn't be happening to her, again. 'I will 
make it easy for you,' the voice said. 'My name is Rudolf.' Ruth broke into a 
sweat. Sweat ran down her face. Her whole body felt damp. She stopped running.
'The name Rudolf is surely familiar, to you,' the voice said. Ruth took off her 
earphones and looked around her. There was no one there. 'Rudolf,' the voice 
said. Ruth put her hands over her ears. 'You do not hear me through your ears,' 
the voice said.
Ruth felt as though she was going to vomit. She had felt this feeling of 
biliousness before, when she had stopped running too suddenly. She was, she 
decided, tense about her father. There was no one talking to her. There was no 
voice. There was nothing but a normal Warsaw street.
I can see that it will be necessary for me to introduce myself,' the voice said. 
'I am Rudolf, Franz, Ferdinand Hoss.' Ruth leaned against the building she was 
standing in front of. Maybe if she did vomit she would feel better. 'Rudolf 
Hoss,' the voice said. 'Commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943.' Ruth tried 
to take deep
 


breaths. She was obviously more anxious than she realised. She had experienced 
anxiety symptoms before. And she had dealt with them This voice was just another 
manifestation of her anxiety. She would deal with this. She would -walk back to 
the hotel, and have a long bath. A long bath would soothe her.
'Please do not confuse me with Rudolf Hess,' the voice said. 'I hate this when 
people confuse me with Rudolf Hess. He has only been here since 1987. And he 
chose to come. He committed suicide as you of course know. He was ninety-three. 
He was supposed to be so shy and introverted and insecure and dependent on an 
idealised father figure, Hitler, of course. It took Hess forty-two years to kill 
himself. How introverted and insecure could he be?
'Enough of Hess. It is irritating enough to have him in the same hemisphere as I 
am in, again.' Ruth vomited into the gutter. She felt a bit better. 'What are 
you frightened of?' the voice said. 'Nobody is frightened of me, anymore.' The 
noise of her heart thumping almost drowned all other sound out. 'Let me tell you 
about myself,' the voice said. 'Let me tell you what has happened to me.' Ruth 
started walking. 'I need to tell you this,'the voice said. 'I need to not hear 
it,' Ruth said.
'I knew that you would speak to me, very soon,' the voice said. Ruth wiped her 
face with the tissues she always carried in her pocket. She walked slowly in the 
direction of the hotel. Her mouth felt foul. She had forgotten what an awful 
taste vomit left. She had only vomited two or three times in her life. She must 
have food poisoning, she thought. Food poisoning would also explain the 
hallucinations. There were so many strange bacteria in food today. Once, food 
poisoning was a simple thing. Now it could cause bleeding, paralysis, brain 
damage. She would have to look after herself, today, and make sure that she 
drank plenty of water and ate nothing but dry crackers. She would ask room 
service for some plain crackers-'I saw you arrive in Poland,' the voice said. 'I 
have seen many
People arrive in Poland. But I knew you were the one. I knew you were the one.'
'Where are you?' Ruth said, suddenly. She was shocked when she heard the words 
coming out of her mouth.
'I am in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' the voice said. 'They call it the second camp 
of heaven. A sub-branch of heaven, a satellite camp. My English is good, no?' 
Ruth stopped walking. 'Some people like to call it Zweites Himmel's Kamp,' he 
said. 'It has a more soft feel. lager is a more militaristic word. But I know it 
is a Lager. I know, after all, about Lagers. Some of the other inhabitants here 
do not.
'I know also it is not Zweites Himmel's Lager. It is not heaven. They refuse to 
call it what it is. Who do they think they fool? Most of us, up here, know that 
it is hell. Do not look so surprised. Hell is up here. Hell is not under the 
ground. That is a myth. It was a clever idea to put hell up here. It is next to 
heaven. People are not too sure where they are going when they come here. After 
all, who would go of their own free will under the earth? Nobody.'
Ruth didn't know that she had looked surprised. She had thought that she was 
dazed. Expressionless.
'You're Rudolf Hoss?' she said.
'Of course I am Rudolf Hoss,' the voice said. 'Who would pretend to be Rudolf 
Hoss?' He paused. 'I am not who I used to be, however. I have arthritis in my 
right shoulder, something is wrong with my leg, my stomach gives me trouble and 
my bones hurt.
Stop looking so surprised. You can feel your bones, in Zweites Himmel's Lager. 
Even if you have been cremated. You can still feel all parts of you. It is 
terrible. If you are in Zweites Himmel's Lager you cannot get anything fixed up. 
If you have an ailment, there is no treatment. This is not the case in Himmel. 
In heaven, I see dead People in very good condition. I have tried for many years 
to get out of Zweites Himmel's Lager, but it is not easy.
there were not many Jews here when I arrived,' he said. 'The
 


Jews seemed mainly to be in the main camp, heaven. That was a relief, to me. 
Now, there are quite a few Jews in this sub-camp, Zweites Himmel's Lager. They 
do not express any more hostility towards me than anybody else.'
'If I can talk to you,' Ruth said, 'why can't I communicate with my mother?' It 
was a trick question. A question she hadn't thought up an answer to. A test, to 
see if she was really talking to herself. To see if she had slipped over that 
fine line that separates sanity and
insanity.
'I have worked harder to get through to you,' Hoss said.
'Are you suggesting my mother doesn't want to speak to me?' Ruth
said.
'I am not suggesting anything,' Hoss said.
'Why am I asking you about my mother?' said Ruth.
'Because I am closer to her than you are,' Hoss said.
'Physical proximity is meaningless,' Ruth said. 'Otherwise you'd be close to 
people every time you were in a crowd. Anyway, you're dead. You haven't got a 
physical being so how can you have physical
proximity?'
'If I have not got a physical being, how can my bones hurt?' Hoss
said.
'I don't know,' she said. 'You're the one with all the answers.'
'Why do you stop walking when you talk to me?' Hoss said. 'I am still here when 
you walk. I am not standing in one place. Zweites Himmel's Lager-I should really 
call it what it is-hell, is everywhere.'
'I can't do two things at once,' Ruth said. 'I've always had trouble 
concentrating on more than one thing at a time.'
'Maybe you are not such a clever Jew,' Hoss said. 'That of course is a joke.' 
Ruth didn't laugh. 'It should be acceptable to make a joke about Jews,' Hoss 
said. 'It is not possible to see Jews only in a serious or tragic way. Jews are 
supposed to have a sense of humour. They always had a reputation for humour. 
Although we never saw Jews
being amusing or funny in Auschwitz. It has only been since I was cremated and 
shipped to Zweites Himmel's Lager that I have seen what was meant by this Jewish 
sense of humour. You are not offended by my talking about Jews like this? Even 
Germans should be permitted, now, to laugh at Jews.'
'Laugh at,' Ruth said, 'is where you have slipped up. Laugh with, maybe.' Ruth 
heard a series of groans and grunts. 'Scheisse,' Hoss said, 'I will never get to 
Himmel if I make bad mistakes like this.'
'I know what scheisse means,' Ruth said. 'Shit.'
'I did not mean to say scheisse, and I did not mean to say laugh at.' Hoss said. 
'I meant to say laugh with, of course.'
'Of course,' Ruth said.
'I have not managed to graduate yet from the sensitivity-training class in 
Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss said. 'It is a requirement, a pre-requisite that 
one graduates from this class before they will even consider a request for 
transfer to Himmel, to heaven. I have studied this class for fifty-one years and 
eight months.
'They forced me to enrol, the day after my execution. Sensitivity training. What 
a subject. It was not very sensitive of the Polish military tribunal to decide 
that I should be executed in Auschwitz, right next to the house where I lived 
with my wife and five children. Only two of these tribunal members are up here, 
with me. I have looked for the others.'
Ruth realised, with a shock, that she no longer felt ill. She felt almost 
normal. Suddenly, it seemed normal to be talking to someone who wasn't there. 
Something must be wrong with her, she thought.
 


'Why can I hear you?' she said to Hoss.
Some people are more sensitive to what is around them than others,' he said. 
'You are sensitive. You would probably pass the sensitivity-training class that 
I have this trouble with. Being able to ear people who have departed is just an 
ordinary aspect of sensitivity. there is nothing out of the ordinary about this 
ability. It is a sensitivity.
 


I  know a lot about sensitivity. Don't forget I have studied the subject for 
nearly fifty-two years.'
'"Departed" is a stupid word,' Ruth said. 'People die, they don't depart. 
Anyway, you don't know that much about sensitivity. You fail the class year 
after year.'
'They discriminate against me,' Hoss said. 'The judges, as soon as they see me, 
they say, "fail". I see plenty of unintelligent people who pass this class. And 
I can see that I am more sensitive. I can definitely sense more things than I 
used to. I can sense, I think, that you have an understanding of what has made 
you so sensitive.'
'What are you talking about?' Ruth said. She knew that she was always 
interpreting and translating words and actions, always exploring and observing 
facial expressions and physical gestures.
'I am talking about sensitivity,' Hoss said. 'It is a very irritating topic. 
"You are so sensitive," someone said to Himmler recently. Of course you know 
Himmler, Miss Rothwax?'
'You know my name?' Ruth said.
'Of course I know your name,' said Hoss. 'A name is the easiest thing to know 
about a person. I was talking, was I not, about Himmler. Heinrich Himmler, 
Reichsfuhrer-SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS. The second most powerful 
man in Nazi Germany. Sensitive indeed! Just because he is a small man who looks 
like a bank clerk, they think he is sensitive.' Hoss sighed. 'Nobody talks to 
me, here. For years nobody has talked to me. Even my former colleagues pretend 
that they do not know me.'
Ruth realised that she had been blinking her eyes and tapping her leg rapidly. 
She wondered if Hoss had noticed.
'What is that action you are making with your leg?' Hoss said.
'Nothing,' she said. 'It's just a nervous mannerism.' She steadied her leg. 
'It's funny to hear you use the word "action",' she said. 1 saw the sign AKTION 
in a store in Germany once, and I was shocked. I found out it means sale. But to 
me, an aktion, by a German, means
only one thing. The elimination of more Jews. The butchering, the shooting, the 
gassing, the burning, the-'
'There is no need to continue with this description,' Hoss said. 'I am familiar 
with the subject.'
'Oh God,' Ruth said. 'I have to go. I have to meet my father for breakfast.' She 
started to walk back to the hotel. She felt surprisingly
well.
'God?' Hoss said. 'Surely you do not believe in God? Not after what you have 
seen?'
'What did I see?' Ruth said. 'I wasn't there.'
'Sometimes you do not have to be in a place in order to see,' Hoss said. 'I 
think that you know this.'
'That's absurd,' Ruth said. 'I only know a fraction of what happened to my 
mother and father.'
'You do not have to know everything in order to know that there is no God,' Hoss 
said.
'Funny, that's what my mother said, "There is no God",' said Ruth.
'If there was a God,' Hoss said, 'do you think that I would speak about him in 
this way? Of course I would not. It would ensure that I would never obtain a 
place in heaven.'
Ruth noticed that there were more people on the street now. Krakowskie 
Przedmiescie was a main street, and people were hurrying to work, or to 
university. Several people looked at her. She didn't mind. She felt peculiarly 
calm. 'Who runs heaven if there's no God?' she asked Hoss.
'Different groups of people,' he said. 'I can see them from here, one of the 
main difficulties of being in Zweites Himmel's Lager is can see into Himmel. 
Different groups of people rule Himmel. There are still political appointments, 
of course. It is politics as usual, in Himmel. Just like the rest of the world. 
Himmel and Zweites l's Lager are, after all, part of the world. Different 
countries
 


have different representatives in power at different times in Himmel.1
'That's a lot of "differents" to use in one sentence,' Ruth said.
'What?' said Hoss.
'Sorry,' said Ruth. 'It's a habit I have, of correcting repetitions in other 
people's sentences.' She couldn't believe that she was apologising to Rudolf 
Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, the man who was, by his own admission, 
responsible for the death of millions of people. Ruth knew that when the Hoss 
family had left Auschwitz, several freight cars were needed to transport all the 
property the Hosses had acquired during Hoss's posting. She knew that when Hoss 
went to Hungary to help Eichmann organise the transportation of Hungarian Jews 
to Auschwitz, he sent his wife, who stayed behind in their house in Auschwitz, 
whole crates of wine.
'What you are thinking about, is not true,' Hoss said.
'What am I thinking about?' said Ruth.
'Nothing that I am prepared to discuss,' Hoss said. 'I was talking to you about 
Himmel and the political system, when you stopped listening to me.' He paused. 
'It is an interesting subject. Germany is not yet allowed a place in the 
hierarchy which rules Zweites Himmel's Lager. It will be only a few years longer 
like this. I can see already people take a different attitude to Germans. Not to 
me, though. Unfortunately I still have to tolerate much hostility. Even in hell.
'In Himmel, too, life is not perfect. In Himmel they do not have separate 
boundaries and borders, yet the Italians still stick together, the French won't 
even try to speak English, and the Japanese keep completely to themselves. 
Nothing changes. The Germans still think that they are more cultured and 
superior to the Poles, and from what I have myself observed, the Germans are, as 
usual, right.'
Ruth looked up at the sky. The whole time that she had been talking to Hoss she 
had been looking at her feet.
'You cannot see me,' Hoss said to her. 'And you will not be able to see me until 
you come to Zweites Himmel's Lager. But I do not
know if this will be your destination. Maybe you will go to Himmel? And in 
Himmel, people cannot see into Zweites Himmel's Lager. In Himmel, people are 
spared those sights which are too disturbing.' Ruth looked back down at her 
feet. Her feet looked just the same. The same as they were before she was 
involved in this conversation with Rudolf Hoss, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer. Her black 
and green Nike Air Max shoes were still slightly spotted with mud from her run 
yesterday in the Saxon Gardens. Her socks were still just socks. Part of her 
had, briefly, wondered if she had died. She patted her face. Her face was warm, 
despite the cold. She felt her hips. They were still the large hips she was 
always trying to diminish. 'Let me get back to why I lost my faith,' Hoss said. 
'Maybe I don't want to hear about it?' Ruth said. 'I think you can be truthful 
with me,' Hoss said. 'You want to know about me. I can see it on your face. I 
had my reasons for choosing you. Even though I am restless, with not too much to 
do, in Zweites Himmel's Lager, I would not waste my time with just anybody. I 
chose you because I knew that you wanted to know.'
Hoss cleared his throat. Ruth found it interesting, that in hell, you still had 
to clear your throat. It added validity to Hoss's claim that he could still feel 
his bones. If you couldn't feel your vocal chords, why would you clear your 
throat? Hoss must be telling the truth about that, she thought.
I was thirteen years old when I lost my faith in God,' Hoss said, is came about 
as a result of a completely innocent episode in my . I accidentally pushed one 
of the boys in my class, at school, the stairs and he broke his ankle. You can 
imagine how many hundreds of schoolboys had fallen, without harming themselves, 
flown those stairs. I, myself, fell down those very stairs and was not hurt. I 
was very unlucky that this boy was hurt. The incident occurred on a Saturday 
morning.'
I thought you were at school?' Ruth said.
 


composed. I said to myself: "My first dead man." For me, the spells was broken.'
'The spell of thinking that to kill is difficult?' Ruth said. 'Precisely,' said 
Hoss. 'I think you know something yourself about spells and superstitions and 
illusions.'
'I know nothing about killing people,' Ruth said. 'At least nothing about really 
killing them.' Ruth knew that most children of survivors felt as though, with 
just one wrong move, they could kill their parents. This killing had nothing to 
do with guns or warfare It was connected to simple, everyday activities. 'You 
are killing me,' was a refrain children of survivors often heard. 'Hitler 
couldn't kill me, but you will,' was another popular saying by survivors, 
together with 'If you do this,' and 'this' could refer to an infinite number of 
things, 'it will kill me.' 'We killed each other with love,' she said to Hoss.
'My very first real love affair saved me,' Hoss said. 'Sexual intercourse 
without genuine affection became an unthinkable act, for me. I was thus saved 
from a life of casual flirtations and brothels.' 'Do I have to hear about this?' 
Ruth said. 'I thought you were interested in moral issues?' Hoss replied. He 
sounded hurt. 'This is a moral issue,' he said.
'Not for me,' Ruth said. She was starting to feel tired. 'Don't leave me,' Hoss 
said.
Ruth was surprised. 'I didn't know I could leave,' she said. 'During the war, I 
kept thinking about my parents' desire for me to be a priest,' Hoss said. 'I 
was, as you know, disillusioned about the priesthood, but even if this had not 
been the case I would have questioned my suitability for the priesthood. In the 
last letter my mother wrote me, before she died, she told me never to forget the 
path my father had chosen for me. My guardians and in fact all of my relatives 
pressured me to go immediately to a training college for priests. I did explain, 
did I not, that the war I am referring to is of course the war before the one in 
which your parents were involved.'
"That's the best use of the word "involved" that I've ever heard,' Ruth said. 
'My parents were not "involved". My mother was starved and beaten and raped and 
brutalised in about as many ways as your people could devise. I don't think that 
that could be termed "involved". You'll have to improve your English.'
Ruth felt herself feeling shaky, again. 'You are very concerned about words, 
aren't you?' Hoss said. 'Some words make me feel sick,' she said. 'It was not an 
easy time for me, this time that I am talking about,' Hoss said. 'The full 
significance of my mother's death hit me, just after she died. I realised that I 
no longer had a home. My relatives had divided out our possessions. They were so 
sure that I would become a missionary and my sisters would remain in the convent 
to which they had been sent. I knew then that I would have to battle my way 
through the world alone.'
Ruth looked around her. Krakowskie Przedmiescie was quite crowded, now. She must 
look odd, she thought. She must look as though she was talking to herself. The 
Poles thought her exercise clothes were odd enough. Now, she must look like 
someone from another planet.
You are not listening to me,' Hoss said. 'I can see you are concerned with what 
other people think of you.' 'Well, I must look pretty strange," Ruth said. You 
do not need to be self-conscious,' Hoss said. 'Nobody else can hear what I am 
saying to you.'
They can hear me,' Ruth said. 'I obviously look as though I'm talking to 
myself.'
when you speak to me, it is not so apparent to other people,'
said.
That doesn't make sense,' said Ruth.
Not very much in the world makes sense,' Hoss said, 'I think you know that.' 
Ruth's head started to spin. She felt exhausted. 'Don't
 


worry,' Hoss said. 'You worry more than is strictly necessary. You will be all 
right. Nobody will arrest you. I was arrested myself for a very unfortunate 
incident when I was a young man. It was June 28th, 1923. I remember the date 
exactly. I am very good with numbers.'
'Is this a long story?' Ruth said.
'No, not at all,' said Hoss. 'I was in the Freikorps. The Freikorps were 
volunteer soldiers who were formed to guard the frontiers and to prevent 
internal disturbance.'
'"Internal disturbance",' Ruth said. '"Internal disturbance" sounds like a 
gastric disorder.' What a stupid thing to say, she thought. She could tell that 
she was no longer thinking clearly. She had to get back to the hotel.
'What a stupid thing to say,' Hoss said. 'I will ignore it. The German 
government needed the Freikorps for those situations in which the police force 
and later on, the army, was too weak to deal with the trouble. The government 
had to deny our existence for complicated political reasons which I will not 
explain as I can see you are in a hurry.'
'Thank you,' said Ruth.
'The result was that they could not punish offences committed by the Freikorps,' 
said Hoss. 'So we administered our own justice. Treachery was punished by death, 
and there were many traitors. Our murder trials were modelled after the 
Vehmgericht, medieval courts which sat and passed sentence in secret. This 
worked very well for us. But I was unlucky. A Vehmgericht murder trial in which 
I was involved became known, and I was brought to trial at the state court for 
the Defence of the Republic. We had killed a man who had betrayed one of us to 
the French. Schlageter, who was betrayed, was as a matter of fact an old comrade 
of mine.'
'Could you edit this story?' Ruth said. 'I'm not feeling well.' did she ask Hoss 
to shorten his story? Why was she listening to
at all? Surely she could just walk back to the hotel.
'I will be brief,' Hoss said, 'you do not look well. I was, of course, there 
when the traitor was killed. But I was most certainly not the ringleader. During 
our interrogation I saw that the comrade who did the actual killing would be 
incriminated by my testimony so I took the blame myself.'
'I wondered how long it would take you to get on to your innocence, again,' Ruth 
said. 'First, you accidentally pushed a boy downstairs, now you say you're 
innocent of a murder. I can't wait to hear what else you are going to come up 
with.'
'How can you speak to me in this way?' Hoss said. 'I am trying to tell you the 
story of my innermost being. The psychological heights and depths of my life.'
'What a prospect,' Ruth said.
'I am trying to be as truthful as I can,' said Hoss.
'I can appreciate how hard that is for you,' Ruth said. Hoss didn't seem to 
notice the irony in her voice.
'It is painful for me,' Hoss said. 'Remember that in Zweites Himmel's Lager we 
feel pain.'
'That is one of the most interesting things you've said to me,' Ruth said. 'I 
wouldn't forget that.'
'On March 15th, 1924,' Hoss said, 'I was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment 
for the murder of this traitor. Let me tell you that serving a sentence in a 
Russian prison is not an experience which 1 would recommend.'
'It's not something that I've planned,' Ruth said.
'Let me finish the story,' Hoss said. 'As a political prisoner I was kept in 
solitary confinement. This was what saved me. I escaped the violence that is 
directed in prisons towards those who are not members of the criminal 
fraternity. I thought I knew about human
Saviour, then, but the criminals in this prison made me see how little I knew 



 


'I watched my fellow inmates from my window. I watched them exercise in the 
courtyard. I watched them in the washhouses or getting their hair cut. I 
listened to them talking to each other every night. I listened to their warped 
minds, to their monstrous thoughts, their depravities, their odiousness, and 
their aberrations. A world I did not know existed opened before my eyes. I had 
the time, in prison, to reflect on my life. To think about mistakes I had made 
and weaknesses that I had shown.
'I made a promise to myself. I would do everything in my power to ensure that 
the future would be as rich and rewarding for me as possible. I slowly adjusted, 
to the crude language of the prison guards and to the despicable, vile, squalid 
and sordid language of the prisoners. But I could never adjust to the cynicism 
with which the prisoners treated all things of beauty. They used their 
reprehensible, filthy language to describe things which many men view as sacred. 
I learnt too, from observing myself, that a sensitive prisoner suffers more from 
unjustified hostile spiteful words than from any physical cruelty.'
'Fuck, shit, arsehole, dickhead, piss-face,' Ruth shouted. The words flew out of 
her mouth and left her stunned. Where had they come from? 'Mother-fucker,' she 
shouted at Hoss.
'This does not offend me,' Hoss said. Ruth thought that she detected a 
puritanical pinch to his consonants and syllables.
'In English these atrocious words do not sound so bad,' Hoss said.
'You like the word "atrocious"?' Ruth asked.
'Yes I do,' he said.
'You must have heard a lot of it in a different form,' she said.
'What do you mean?' Hoss said.
'I mean, the word "atrocities",' said Ruth.
'Of course,' said Hoss. 'Why do you try to upset me? I do not do anything to 
upset you. Despite what you think I can be easily upset.
'That's good to know,' Ruth said.
'I think you must be feeling better,' said Hoss. 'The colour in your face is 
greatly improved.' Ruth didn't answer. 'I had a very upsetting time at the end 
of my second year in prison,' Hoss said. 'I became unable to eat or to sleep. I 
could not concentrate on anything, and all day I paced up and down in my cell. 
The doctor diagnosed it as prison psychosis. I was given tranquillizers and put 
on an invalid diet. One night I saw my dead parents standing next to me. I spoke 
with them. I have never told anyone at all about this episode.'
'I've got to go,' Ruth said. 'I have to have a shower and change my clothes 
before I meet my father, for breakfast.'
'It is not very sensitive of you to choose this moment to leave,' Hoss said. 
'Anyway, I was lucky. A majority was created in the Reichstag by a coalition of 
the extreme right and the extreme left when I still had five years of my 
sentence left to serve. Both parties wanted political prisoners to be set free. 
An amnesty act was passed on July 14th, 1928. I was a free man.'
'Hooray,' said Ruth.
'It is useless to use sarcasm,' Hoss said. 'It does not affect me. The freedom 
was not so easy for me, at first. I went to Berlin. Kind friends there insisted 
I go to films and theatre and all sorts of parties. It really was too much for 
me. I longed for peace. I needed to get away from the noise and the rush of the 
city. I was lucky. After ten days I left Berlin to take up a job as an 
agricultural officer. I wanted to live on the land. I wanted to rebuild Germany. 
In prison I had decided that I would fight and work for one thing only. To own 
my own farm, and to live there with a large and healthy family."
 


'Nothing,' she said.
'I needed to escape the frivolous, unhealthy and morally corrupt, life of the 
cities,' Hoss said.
Ruth realised that she didn't have enough time to shower before breakfast. 'I 
found the woman I had longed for during all my years of loneliness,' Hoss said. 
'It felt like we had known each other out whole lives. This compatibility and 
unity and harmony stayed with us throughout our life together. We were like this 
during the hardships and during the good times and during the bad times. We were 
not influenced in our love for each other by anything that happened in the 
outside world.'
'Hey,' Ruth said. 'I don't have to listen to this.'
'What is wrong with what I am saying?' Hoss said.
'You wouldn't understand,' Ruth said. 'Anyway, you used the word "during" three 
times in the one sentence.'
'I understand much more than you think,' Hoss said.
'I'm going,' said Ruth. She had had enough. She turned sharply on her heel and 
walked away. Hoss screamed. It was the cry of a man in pain. She turned back to 
where she imagined he was. 'What's wrong?' she said.
'Nothing, nothing at all,' Hoss said. He sounded fragile.
'Then why hold me up?' she said. 'I'm in a hurry.' She turned and walked away, 
again. Hoss screamed, louder. Ruth tried to stand in a position that she 
imagined might be facing Hoss. 'What's up?' she said very firmly. 'Can't you 
bear farewells?'
'I can tolerate everything,' Hoss said. Ruth turned away, in disgust. The scream 
that came from Hoss hurt her ears. She stopped.
'This has nothing to do with anything that you are doing,' Hoss said.
'Really?' Ruth said. She went over her previous movements slowly-She dug her 
heel in the ground, as though she was going to turn-Hoss cried out. She tried it 
again. He screamed.
'This has nothing to do with anything that I am doing?' she said. Hoss was 
silent.
'I'm going,' she said. She walked briskly along Krakowskie przedmiescie. She 
felt good. 'You sound like a superannuated hippie,' Ruth said. 'What?' said 
Hoss. He seemed startled, as though he'd been somewhere else. Obviously, she had 
interrupted a bucolic reverie he had been having. 'What did you say?' Hoss said.
 


chapter five
Ruth almost didn't see her father. He was sitting in an armchair, in the foyer 
of the Bristol Hotel. He was almost buried in the stuffed and puffed-up body of 
the chair. His shoulders were slumped. His head was bent. His chin touched his 
chest. His cheeks and his mouth had slipped and shifted to a lower position on 
his face than they usually occupied. He had the stillness of a corpse. For a 
moment, Ruth was alarmed. Then, she saw his eyes move. He watched her walking 
towards him.  'What are you doing, Dad?' she said
'Waiting for you,' said Edek. 'We did have an arrangement that I should meet you 
at eight o'clock.'
'But why are you waiting here?' Ruth said. 'Why didn't you go into the 
restaurant?'
'I am very comfortable here,' Edek said. 'Why should I go into a restaurant by 
myself?'
'Oh, okay,' she said. He looked tired. 'Are you alright?' she said.
'Of course I am alright,' Edek said. 'What is not to be right?'
'The way you were sitting,' Ruth said. 'I thought that something might be 
wrong.'
'What should be wrong?' Edek said. 'I am here in Poland, with my daughter. Just 
like you wanted. It does not always have to be something wrong.' He stood up and 
looked at Ruth.  'You look shocking,' he said. 'Maybe it was not such a good 
idea to come to Poland?' He looked at her again. 'You do not look heltzy, he 
said. 'We can call the whole trip off. We can have a dinner in a  restaurant 
tonight, maybe some pierogi, then we can change tickets. I will come back to New 
York with you for one week or maybe two weeks.'  Edek's pronunciation of healthy 
usually made her laugh. She had  tried to teach him the correct pronunciation 
many times. 'Healthy,' he said. 'Heltzy,' he always replied. It didn't make her 
smile this morning. 'If you really want to leave Poland, we can leave,' she 
said. 'I never wanted to force you to be here.'  'I don't think about calling 
the whole thing off for myself,' Edek said. 'I am fine- There is nothing wrong 
with me. You look terrible.'  'I think I ran for too long, this morning,' Ruth 
said. 'I was out for over an hour.'
'A meshiga'as, this running,' Edek said. 'To run to somewhere where there is no 
need to run is a meshiga'as. People should run if they are in a hurry, but to 
run just for nothing is meshige.'  Thanks, Dad,' she said. Meshige was one of 
the first Yiddish words she'd learnt. It meant stupid, mad. A meshiga'as, was a 
stupidity, a madness.  Ruth looked at herself in the mirror, in the foyer. She 
looked pale, but not terrible.
'You look shocking,' Edek said. She looked at Edek. He looked tired. Years older 
than he had looked when he had stepped off the plane, last night.  'Are you 
alright?' she said.
What is wrong with you?' Edek said. 'I been in Poland not even one day, and you 
did ask me already, a dozen times, if I am alright. I am alright. I am telling 
you this for the last time. I am alright.'  'You think I look shocking,' Ruth 
said. 'You look less than sprightly yourself.'
'I look what?' Edek said.
Less than sprightly,' Ruth said. 'Sprightly means animated, lively,  vital.'
 


'I should be this way in Poland?' Edek said. 'Are you crazy?'
She hadn't phrased that well, she thought. She should have said he looked flat 
and tired and depressed. But then, he would have denied that, too. She knew her 
father. Nothing was ever wrong with him. Edek had endless lists of complaints. 
He just didn't connect his complaints to his wellbeing. After each complaint he 
would say, 'It is not so important to me. I can put up with anything.'
'You did run for more than an hour?' Edek said. 'That is why I did have to wait 
for you in this chair.' Ruth looked at her watch. It was two minutes to eight.
'I'm not late,' she said. She knew she wasn't late. She was always punctual. She 
tried hard not to be obsessively punctual. But she couldn't help it. She was 
perpetually punctual. It didn't matter how rushed she was, she was still never 
late for anything.
Ruth thought that her inability to be late was unhealthy. She had tried to do 
something about it. She had tried to be late for a few unimportant events, but 
she had been unable to succeed. The anxiety of the tardiness had been too much 
for her. She had modified her ambition. She had tried to curb her need to be 
early. 'You're always early,' the podiatrist, the dentist, the dry cleaners and 
anyone else she had appointments or arrangements with, said to her. She had 
given up. She had accepted that it was her destiny to be on time.
She kept up her attempts to curtail other obsessive aspects of herself. Daily or 
weekly rituals that seemed obsessive, or was it compulsive? She could never 
remember which was which. They were both disorders she would prefer to avoid, 
although obsessive sounded less worrying than compulsive. Compulsive had a 
mentally ill ring to it-
She tried not to be obsessive about being orderly. She knew that if she didn't 
watch herself, she could easily spend ten minutes making sure that the sheets 
and pillows and bolsters on her bed were perfectly centred and straight each 
morning. And she could fuss and fidget for a long time aligning everything on 
her desk.
She also tried not to weigh herself more than once a week. She had had to force 
herself not to step on to the scales in the bathroom at the Bristol Hotel this 
morning. She knew that the Bristol's scales would be in kilograms, and she had 
forgotten exactly how to convert kilograms into pounds. She knew that one 
kilogram was 2.2 pounds. But was it approximately 2.2 pounds, or exactly 2.2 
pounds? She didn't know. And she couldn't tolerate having a rough approximation 
of her weight.
She had been tempted to weigh herself. She was always tempted to weigh herself 
when she thought that she might weigh less. She wanted to rush to the scales on 
mornings when she had had a particularly good bowel movement, or had sweated 
excessively during her workout.
This morning, after she had vomited up what appeared to be most of last night's 
meal and a large amount of body fluid, had seemed, to Ruth, an ideal time to 
step on to the scales. But she had resisted. She was proud of herself for that. 
At home, she was proud if she forgot to exhale before weighing herself, or if 
she inadvertently left her watch on, while she was on the scales.
'Let's go and have some breakfast, Dad,' Ruth said. She felt quite hungry.
'I do not want anything,' said Edek. 'Maybe one egg and something to drink, and 
that's it.'
'Oh, God," Ruth said. 'I forgot to tell you not to drink from the tap or brush 
your teeth in tap water.'
'You did tell me, maybe ten times before I did leave Melbourne,' Edek said.
'But I forgot to remind you,' said Ruth.
'I am not so old that I forget what someone did tell me ten times,' said.
'So, what did you brush your teeth in?' she said.
'The water that my daughter did order for me,' Edek said.
 


'I'm glad the hotel remembered,' Ruth said.
'They remembered all six big bottles,' Edek said. 'Six bottles for one day.'
'I didn't want you to feel worried about running out of water' Ruth said.
'I would have more to worry about if I did drink all the water,' Edek said. 'I 
would burst. I did pack the other five bottles, in my suitcase, to take to 
Lodz.'  Ruth chose a table, near the window, in the Bristol's restaurant 'This 
looks like a good table,' she said.  'A table is a table,' Edek said. 'Buffet or 
a la carte?' a waitress asked them.
'I will have a boiled egg please,' Edek said.
'Dad, this hotel does one of the best buffet breakfasts I've seen,' Ruth said.
'I am not so hungry,' said Edek.
'Dad,' she said. 'I want you to look at the buffet.'
'Is there a boiled egg on the buffet?' Edek asked the waiter
'Yes, sir,' she replied.
'In that case, I will get my egg from the buffet,' he said. 'See how I listen to 
my daughter?' The waitress smiled at them both.  'It is lucky that you have got 
me here,' Edek said. 'I can speak to all the waiters and waitresses for you.'  
'You were speaking to her in English,' Ruth said.
'Oy cholera,' said Edek.
Edek stood transfixed in front of the selection of fish on the buffet-There was 
smoked trout, smoked mackerel, smoked salmon, white-fish, fresh sardines, and 
several varieties of herring.  'I will take a piece of fish,' he said 
eventually. He put one piece of smoked salmon in the middle of his plate. "  
'Dad, we're paying for this,' Ruth said, 'so we might as well eat it.' 'That is 
right,' said Edek. He put several slices of mackerel and  whitefish on his 
plate.
'Look what's over there,' Ruth said. 'Polish ham.' 'Not for me,' Edek said. 'I 
have some fish and that's it.' 'But you've talked about Polish ham for years,' 
said Ruth. 'I don't eat so much for breakfast anymore,' Edek said. 'I'll take 
some ham to our table and you can decide if you want  it,' Ruth said. 'And look 
at the bread. The Poles make great bread.
Look at that rye bread! Doesn't it look stunning? I'll get some for  you.'
'No, no, no,' Edek said. 'I don't eat so much bread. You want me to get fat? I 
watch what I eat, today. I have to be careful. Get me only one piece of rye 
bread.' Ruth chose a small slice of rye. 'Where is the boiled eggs?' Edek said.  
'You want a boiled egg?' Ruth said.
'I always have a boiled egg for breakfast,' Edek said. They found the eggs.
Ruth carried Edek's food to their table. She went back to the buffet to get her 
own breakfast. When she got back Edek had finished his plate of fish. 'This fish 
is out of this world,' he said.  'I'm so glad that you enjoyed the fish," she 
said. 'It looks wonderful.'
'What are you eating?' Edek said. 'What is that?'
'It's muesli,' she said. 'I've added flax seed and sesame seed to it.'
 'This stuff is for birds to eat, not for people,' Edek said. 'Why don't you eat 
some scrambled eggs? They got plenty of scrambled eggs. As a matter of fact it 
looks out of this world.'   I  don't like eggs,' she said.
What is not to like about an egg?' Edek said. 'An egg is just an egg Everybody 
eats an egg except my daughter. She pays twenty-five dollars to eat some seeds 
what birds eat.'  Are you trying to make me feel bad?' Ruth said.
 


'I am trying to make you feel better,' Edek said. 'If you eat thing normal you 
will feel better.'
Edek was quiet while he ate the rest of his meal. Ruth was grateful for the 
silence. She ate her breakfast, slowly.
'That's it,' Edek said, suddenly. He pushed all of his plates away from him. 'I 
did finish,' he said. Ruth looked over at him. 'That's it,' he said, again. 
'Finished, for me.' There was nothing left on any of Edek's plates. All the fish 
was gone, all the ham was gone, the eggs were gone and there was no sign of the 
rye bread.  'Would you like tea or coffee, sir?' the waitress asked Edek. Ruth 
had already ordered a chamomile tea.
'Do you have a hot chocolate?' Edek asked the waitress.
'Of course, sir,' she said.
'I will have a hot chocolate,' Edek said. 'Maybe I will have a piece of cheese 
with my hot chocolate?' Edek said to Ruth. 'The cream cheese looks especially 
good. They did have always a very good cream cheese in Poland.' A few minutes 
later Edek returned with a mound of cream cheese and several slices of bread. 
'It is a very good cream cheese,' he said.  Ruth finished her muesli. Eating had 
made her feel better. Food often did. Jews were more attached to food, she 
thought, than most other people. She had noticed, in a photograph of the 
Knesset, the Israeli parliament in session, that most members had food on the 
table in front of them. Jews rarely held a meeting or function of any sort 
without catering the event. And the food seemed to be of equal importance to 
anything else on the agenda.  At the few Jewish fundraising events Ruth had 
attended in New York, the quality of the food served seemed to captivate the 
guests imagination more than the amount of money raised. She had expected New 
Yorkers to be more sophisticated than that. But they were as engrossed in the 
merits of the stuffed chicken breast and roasted red peppers as any Jews in 
Melbourne.  'We've got three-and-a-half hours before we leave for Lodz,' Rut 
said to her father. 'The driver is picking us up at twelve-thirty p.m.'  'I know 
that,' Edek said. 'I did organise it.'
'I was just reminding you,' Ruth said.
'You think I am so old, I forget everything?' Edek said.
'Of course not,' said Ruth. 'There's a small remnant of the wall that surrounded 
the Warsaw Ghetto, left standing,' she said. 'I'd like to go and see it.'  'You 
want to see a piece of a wall?' Edek said.
'You don't have to come with me,' Ruth said.
'I will do what you do,' Edek said.
'Oh good,' she said. 'Let's go for a walk around Warsaw first.'
'What for?' said Edek.
'Just to look around and see what's here,' Ruth said.
'You know already what is here,' Edek said. 'A city and some Polish people.'
'Dad, you don't have to come,' she said. 'Stay here and read a book. There's a 
very nice library in the hotel.'
'I got my own books with me,' he said.
'I won't be long,' she said. 'Not more than an hour. Then I'll pick you up and 
we'll go to the ghetto wall, together.'  'Okay, I will walk a bit, with you,' 
Edek said.
'Dress warmly,' Ruth said to him. 'It's cold.'
'This cold, I told you, does not get to your bones,' Edek said.
'I'll meet you, in the foyer, in fifteen minutes,' said Ruth. She decided that 
she would buy her father an overcoat, while they were out walking. By the time 
she found a menswear shop, she thought, he would be cold enough to agree to the 
purchase.  Ruth thought that she would have to walk more slowly with Edek 
accompanying her. But Edek strode briskly in front of her. He walked too fast to 
see anything. 'Slow down, Dad,' she said. 'What for?' he Said. She gave up and 
let him run ahead. She walked briskly in order
 


to keep Edek in her line of vision. She walked along Krakowskie Przedmiescie, 
Nowy Swiat and Aleje Ujazdowskie. She passed the monument to Adam Mickiewicz, 
the Polish romantic poet. She passed the eighteenth-century Carmelite church, 
Kosciol Karmelitow, the Museum of Caricature, the Potocki Palace, the Radziwill 
Palace, the Church of the Nuns of the Visitation, the Ethnographic Museum, the 
Kazimierz Palace, the Holy Cross Church, the Staszic Palace, the monument to 
Nicolaus Copernicus, the Ostrogski Palace, the Zamoyski Palace, and the Polish 
Army Museum.
Edek hadn't looked up, once. He had been running, with his head facing the 
ground. Suddenly he stopped outside a restaurant. 'Look,' he said, pointing to 
the Restauracja Hoang Kim. 'A Chinee restaurant. A Chinee restaurant in Poland.' 
He started to laugh.
'A Chinese restaurant, in Poland, does look pretty funny,' Ruth said.
'It is pretty funny,' Edek said. Two minutes later he stopped again. 'Look this 
restaurant has flaki and kapusta,' he said, and read the rest of the menu out 
aloud. 'I did not have flaki since Mum died,' he said. Ruth liked flaki, tripe, 
too. 'Maybe we'll have flaki one night for dinner,' she said.
'Maybe,' he said.
'Pierogi}' Edek shouted a minute later. 'Meat pierogi, cheese pierogi, potato 
pierogi, mushroom and cabbage pierogi.' He was standing outside a small bar, the 
Bar Pod Golebiami. Bars, in Poland, were not primarily for drinking. They were 
small, cheap eating establishments.
'Would you like a pierogi?' Ruth said.
'No, not for me,' Edek said. 'Why don't you have one?'
'I'm not really hungry yet,' she said.
'I am not hungry, too,' he said. He looked into the window of the bar. 'They 
make a schnitzel and a barley soup,' he said.
'Why don't you have something to eat?' Ruth said.
'No, not for me,' he said.
'I know it's only been an hour since we finished breakfast, but you've walked a 
long way, and you were walking pretty fast,' Ruth
said.
'It has been one hour and a half, not one hour,' Edek said.
'Have a couple of pierogi,' Ruth said.
'Okay, okay, I'll have one pierogi,' Edek said.
He ran into the small bar. Ruth followed him. She sat at a small table against 
the wall while Edek ordered his pierogi from the bar. He came back carrying a 
plate of pierogi on a tray. The steam was still rising from the pierogi. They 
smelled good. Edek had ordered two meat pierogi and two potato pierogi.
'You don't want one?' he said to Ruth.
'I'll have some, another time,' she said. Three minutes later Edek pushed the 
plate away from him. 'That is it,' he said. 'That is enough for me for a whole 
day.'
'Were they good?' Ruth said. Edek wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'They was out 
of this world,' he said.
Edek and Ruth walked towards the University of Warsaw. Edek was still walking 
ahead of her. They passed a men's clothing store. 'Dad,' Ruth called out to 
Edek. He walked back to where she was. 'I'd like to buy you a coat,' she said. 
'Please, it's cold, now, and it's going to get even colder.'
'You want to drive me crazy?' Edek said. 'I do not need a coat. I told you 
before, this cold does not get to your bones. If you want to buy a coat, buy 
yourself another coat.'
'Well, can I buy you some gloves? Please?' Ruth said.
Edek sighed. 'Okay, okay,' he said.
 


They went into the store. Edek spoke to the assistant. It seemed a long 
conversation to have about a pair of gloves, Ruth thought. She recognised some 
of the phrases. Edek was complaining about her, to the shop assistant. They 
settled on a pair of brown leather
 


gloves. Edek looked quite pleased with them. He put them on straight away. Edek 
walked next to Ruth, for a while, admiring his gloves.  'Have you been in 
Warsaw, before?' she said. 'Did you ever come here, from Lodz?'
'Once or twice,' he said.
'You've never mentioned that,' she said.
'Why should I mention everything?' Edek said.
It was so hard to ask even the most innocuous questions about the past, Ruth 
thought. Any question about the past could unleash an unpredictable volatility 
in both of her parents. There were no simple questions or simple answers about 
their pasts. All simplicity seemed to have been erased from their experience. 
There was little that could be said without provoking an intensity that could be 
frightening to everyone in its orbit. Ruth had learnt, at a young age, that an 
ordinary query could produce a very bad reaction in both Edek and Rooshka. Ruth 
used to see the strain on her mother's face as Rooshka struggled to contain the 
eruptions and explosions that she lived with. She saw her mother battle to keep 
them to herself. To not let the tumult spill out and pollute and infect those 
around her.  'I don't need to know everything,' Ruth shouted to Edek. He had 
rushed ahead of her, again. She caught up with him. 'I just want to know a few 
things,' she said. 'Nothing too personal. Sometimes it seems to me that you 
don't want to tell me anything. It almost seems secretive, as though you don't 
want me to know.'  She felt upset. Why couldn't he talk normally about a simple 
thing like being in Warsaw, before the war? The answer was there, in those two 
words, 'the war'. The war. The war changed everything. Made all simple things, 
complicated. Made all ordinariness extraordinary' Nothing was left that was not 
adulterated and tarnished.  'War' wasn't even the right word. It wasn't a war 
for Jews. It was murder. But 'murder' or 'slaughter' were not large enough words  
either. 'Genocide' sounded too antiseptic. 'Holocaust' too tidy. There was no 
single word that was adequate. Even a string of the most powerful and potent and 
hefty words wouldn't be eloquent enough.  'What don't I want you to know?' Edek 
said with irritation.
'I don't know,' Ruth said.
'There is nothing to know,' he said. He strode in front of her. Suddenly, he 
turned back. 'Look,' he said. He was pointing to the end of a small walkway off 
Krakowskie Przedmiescie. 'Pontshkes.' At the end of the walkway was a small cake 
shop.  'Where can you see pontshkes? Ruth said.
'In the window,' Edek said.
'I can't see them,' she said.
'Maybe my eyesight is not so bad,' Edek said.
'It must be pretty good to spot a pontshke that's more than fifty feet away,' 
Ruth said.
'It is more than one pontshke what I can see,' Edek said.
They got closer and Ruth saw that he was right. Half of the window was filled 
with fresh pontshkes. Edek loved pontshkes. The round, deep fried doughnuts were 
filled with jam, and dusted lightly with icing sugar.  'Shall we buy one, Dad?' 
she said.
'Why not?' he said. 'Just one.'
'Can you order a cup of tea for me?' Ruth said. 'Ask them if they've got 
chamomile tea.'
Why don't you have a cappuccino?' said Edek.
'A cappuccino in Poland?' she said.
'Why not?' said Edek.
I feel I need a chamomile tea,' Ruth said.
Okay, okay,' said Edek.
Coffee was the last thing Ruth wanted. Her stomach still felt fragile  " a bit 
acidic from throwing up, this morning. She probably  shouldn't have had the 
muesli for breakfast. She probably should
 


have had something less fibrous. But she had felt fine at breakfast Unexpectedly 
fine.
A puff of icing sugar powder blew out over the table as Edek bit into his 
pontshke. 'This pontshke is better than all the pontshkes in Acland Street,' 
Edek said, with his mouth full of pontshke. Acland Street was a street of cake 
shops, European cake shops, in Melbourne. 'This pontshke is something out of 
this world,' he said. 'It has got such a dark jam in it, not like that red jam 
they put in the pontshkes in Melbourne.' Edek looked happy.  'Have another one, 
Dad,' Ruth said.
'Okay, one more and that is it,' Edek said. Ruth looked at her watch. It was 
ten-thirty a.m.
'I think we should catch a taxi to the ghetto wall,' Ruth said, when they were 
on the street again.
'Why don't I give a ring to the driver who is going to take us to Lodz?' Edek 
said. He can pick us up a couple of minutes early and we can stop at the Wall, 
on our way?'  'I don't want to rush to the ghetto wall when we're on our way to 
Lodz,' she said.
'Why not?' said Edek.
'It just doesn't seem right,' she said.
'You can stay for how long you want,' said Edek. 'You can afford it. You can 
afford for the driver to wait all day.'
'I don't want to do it that way,' Ruth said. 'You don't have to come with me, 
I'll take you back to the hotel and I'll catch a taxi.'  'I will come with you,' 
Edek said.
'We're near the Marriott Hotel,' she said. 'There'll be plenty of taxis there.'
Edek ran ahead. 'I will organise it,' he said.
Ruth took a deep breath. She was determined to get on well with her father. 
Determined not to be angry or irritated. If she ended up railing against him, it 
would be a sign, to her, that she had not matured  despite all the trappings of 
maturity that a bit of money could provide.
All couples travelling together must experience friction, she thought. She was 
glad that she was not more of a part of a couple than she was at the moment. 
This coupling with Edek was about as much as she could tolerate. Coupling? Why 
had she called it a coupling? Coupling had a sexual connotation she hadn't 
intended. She felt queasy. She took a few more deep breaths.  She was outside 
the Marriott Hotel. She couldn't see Edek. She looked in the door of the hotel. 
He was there, talking animatedly with someone, the concierge, she thought. She 
decided to wait outside. Edek probably needed a break from her, anyway.  She 
stood outside the hotel and watched people walking by. She was glad to have a 
few minutes on her own. She was used to spending time on her own. She enjoyed 
it. She never complained about the loneliness that many single people complained 
of. She wasn't that lonely. She liked being single. It allowed her to live in 
exactly the way she wanted to live. She didn't have to accede to anybody else's 
needs. She didn't have to explain or justify. She didn't have to apologise. And 
she had as full and as satisfying a life as any married person she knew.  She 
read a lot. She unwound every night, with a book. She read  mostly non-fiction. 
Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, accounts  of a youth or an old age. She 
read political biographies and historical
Biographies. Sometimes, if she was very tired, she read a celebrity  biography. 
Over the years she had accumulated a lot of information  about a lot of people. 
It was not very useful information. She sometimes thought that she could have 
taught herself quantum physics  or something equally intellectually challenging 
with the volume of  reading material she had squandered on biographies. She 
wondered  whether quantum physics was intellectually challenging or merely  
mathematical skill? She could barely comprehend ordinary physics.
She had no idea what quantum physics was.
 


Ruth read for at least an hour, every night. Reading relaxed her It was as 
essential to her wellbeing as running and lifting weights She looked after 
herself in other ways, too. She had pedicures and manicures. She had her 
eyebrows shaped and waxed and her legs waxed. She had her hair cut, and she had 
her hair coloured. All of these processes and procedures had to be repeated 
regularly. This preservation and conservation may have appeared excessive 
somewhere else, but, in New York, it seemed the norm.
Attending to this maintenance created a ritual and a pattern to her life. The 
women who worked on her toes and fingers and brows felt like family to her. 
'Hello honey,' was the way that Olga, who had been giving her pedicures for ten 
years, greeted her. 'Hello honey, how are you?' Olga would say and all of Ruth's 
tension would melt at the sound of her thick Russian accent.
Christine, the Chinese woman who shaped and waxed Ruth's eyebrows, was as blunt 
as any mother. 'Your eyebrows look terrible,' she would say if she hadn't seen 
Ruth for a while. Recently Christine had plucked a thick black hair from Ruth's 
chin. 'Chinese women don't have much facial hair,' she'd said, 'But you are 
going to get more and more hairs on your chin as you get older. Make sure you 
pluck them.' Great, Ruth had thought. A beard. Another thing to look forward to. 
'I'll pluck them, when I see them,' Christine had said. Ruth had felt mothered. 
The fact that she didn't have to watch out for her own beard hairs had soothed 
her.
Ruth was rarely left with nothing to do. She read several newspapers a day, she 
went to the theatre and occasionally to a movie. She saw friends every now and 
again and talked to acquaintances when she bumped into them. She was on the co-
op board of the building she lived in and she attended all board meetings. And 
she worked. That constituted as good a life as anyone she knew. As good a life 
as anyone with a husband, two children and a two-car garage.
Ruth had very little time to feel lonely. She made sure that she
as out of town on days like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Days when
everyone was out of town. Days when everyone was with their family. She 
vacationed in cities where there was something to do. She sent postcards from 
these vacations. In the cards she described cafes and listed interesting 
museums.
Even after the most pleasurable vacations, Ruth looked forward to returning to 
work. She was happy with her life. She had Edek and she was grateful to have 
him. She had Max, and she had Bern. She had plenty. Every now and then she 
contemplated getting a pet for company. But she always decided against it. She 
found it hard to feel attached to anything that didn't have verbal skills.
Unlike many single people, Ruth didn't mind going out with couples. She didn't 
feel left out. She mostly came home from these outings glad that she was on her 
own. The negotiation and discussion and compromise involved in being part of a 
couple seemed ill-defined and uncomfortable. Ruth's life was tidy. She paid her 
bills on time, got up exactly when she wanted to, and had only her own bad moods 
to contend with. She had routines she looked forward to. On Friday mornings, she 
had breakfast at Jerry's, in Prince Street. Jerry's had the best oatmeal in 
Manhattan, and it was a very large serving. She watched the wheelings and 
dealings of the New York art world while she ate her oatmeal at Jerry's.
On Tuesday nights, Ruth ate at II Carallo, a small Italian bistro. At II 
Carallo, they steamed her broccoli with garlic and lemon juice and grilled her 
fillet of snapper with no fat. It was easy to be single, in New York. No one 
thought twice about a woman eating out, alone, "plenty of people ate out on 
their own. It was not considered a sign of loneliness or a sign of a lowly 
social stature to be dining by yourself. Women who ate in restaurants on their 
own had a sophistication about them, Ruth thought. She herself never took a book 
or a newspaper into a restaurant with her. She was happy with her own thoughts 
for company.
 


She often daydreamed in cafes and restaurants. She daydreamed at home, too. Her 
apartment was a sanctuary, for her. An oasis of quiet in a noisy city. She had 
photographs of Edek and Rooshka in the living room. Photographs of Edek and 
Rooshka at dinner dances, at the beach, outside their house. The photographs 
were photographs of a normal life. Edek and Rooshka were doing what normal 
people did. They were standing outside their front fence, smiling. They were 
sitting in someone's garden. They were talking. In one of the photographs, her 
mother was laughing. All the abnormality was erased in these photographs. The 
nightmares were not there, the fear was not there. The tears were not there.
In a corner of the lowest rung of the bookshelves in her study, Ruth had a 
photograph of Norman. It was the only photograph of Norman that she had kept. 
Norman was smiling. Ruth knew he was smiling at her. She had taken the 
photograph. Norman's large, dark, brown eyes were looking at her. There was a 
happiness in his being that was almost palpable. Once, she had touched the 
photograph and imagined that she could feel his joy. On the desk, in her study, 
was a photograph of Edek. He was smiling. It made her smile.
Everything in her apartment was in its place. And everything had a place. Her 
apartment was as well-ordered as her life. On the first Monday of every month 
Ruth took Max out to dinner. Ruth brought a list with her, to these dinners. It 
was a list of things to be discussed and straightened out. A list of minor 
differences of opinion, unresolved disagreements, small conflicts, as well as 
points of praise, advice and suggestions for the future. It was a checklist to 
keep things in check.
Two years ago, Max had begun bringing her own list. She listed her grievances 
and her concerns. Ruth and Max discussed each on both lists over hors d'oeuvres. 
They were then free to enjoy rest of the meal. And they did. They both looked 
forward to dinners.
Ruth let Max choose the restaurants and make the bookings. Max had become a 
formidable connoisseur of New York restaurants. They had eaten at Bouley Bakery, 
Balthazar, the Blue Ribbon, Nobu, and other hard-to-get-into restaurants. They 
had eaten in the East Village, in Chelsea and in Chinatown. One of Ruth's 
favourites was the Ukrainian Restaurant, on Third Avenue. The decor was less 
decorous than it could be. Plastic flowers and plastic wood. The waiters had 
jaundiced complexions and nervous mannerisms. Ruth was puzzled by how at home 
she felt there. Ruth thought that these dinners with lists should be compulsory 
for married couples. She was sure that a monthly airing of everything that could 
be put on a list would lower the divorce rate.
When Ruth thought about her life, she thought that it was as fulfilling a life 
as any married woman's life. She had sex infrequently, but so did most of the 
married women she knew. In New York, it seemed, sex was not a high priority. At 
least not for married couples. People spent themselves at work. Their passions 
were expended in the office and in the boardroom. When they got home at night, 
they needed to unwind in front of the television, before they dropped into bed, 
exhausted. Couples in their thirties made jokes about their lack of sex. It 
seemed to be an acceptable condition of married life in the city.
She must remember, she thought, to ask Max what was happening with the man Max 
had been going out with for six months. He was a married man, and Ruth had 
strongly advised Max to leave him. He is a liar, he has to be,' she had said to 
Max. 'He's lying to his wife and if he can lie to her, he can just as easily lie 
to you.' Max hadn't looked pleased.
Ruth suddenly realised that her father had been gone for over ten "minutes. She 
went into the Marriott to look for him. He was just coming out. A man was 
following him. 'I got a car,' Edek said. 'It is not so good like the other one. 
It is a bit smaller.' He led her
 


around the corner to the side street. 'Look,' he said. He was pointing to a car. 
A Mercedes.
'We want to go to the ghetto wall,' Ruth said to the driver. 'It's not far. It's 
at sixty Zlota Street.' Edek repeated what she had said, in Polish. The driver 
nodded. 'Do you know where it is?' Ruth said. 'Yes, I know,' the driver said. 
Edek repeated the question, in Polish. The driver said, yes, yes, in Polish.
'Why were you so long?' Ruth said to Edek.
'I wanted to look around a bit at the Marriott,' Edek said. 'It costs nearly the 
same as what you are paying at the Bristol, and to tell you the truth it looks a 
bit nicer to me.'
'Well, I'm happy with the Bristol,' Ruth said.
'The Marriott has a different theme in the restaurant every night,' Edek said. 
'One night is Polish, one night is German, one night Indian, one night something 
else.'
'You don't like Indian food,' Ruth said.
'Just the carry I don't like,' said Edek. He always pronounced curry this way.
'Indian cuisine is made up of curry,' Ruth said. She looked around her. Where 
were they? 'Are you sure you're going in the right direction?' Ruth asked the 
driver.
'Yes, yes,' he said. Edek asked him again. The driver sounded less certain. His 
reply, in Polish, involved more words.
'The former Jewish ghetto,' Ruth said. 'Where they took all the Jews of Warsaw 
and imprisoned them,' she said. She had enunciated each word slowly. The driver 
turned towards her. He looked bewildered. 'The ghetto,' she repeated.
Polish people knew very little about Jews and the place they had occupied, in 
Poland. A Polish historian had recently released a report that demonstrated that 
Polish textbooks usually omitted the Holocaust, and Jewish history in Poland 
from the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Holocaust was 
depicted as one
of a planned extermination of the Polish people. No textbooks mentioned German 
or Polish anti-Semitism.
'He probably has no idea what I'm talking about,' Ruth said to Edek. 'They teach 
them nothing in schools, about what happened
to Jews.'
'Shsh, shsh,' said Edek.
'I've got a map in my bag,' Ruth said. She took out the map. Edek looked out of 
the car window.
'We are on Swietokrzyska,' he said.
'Then we're very close,' Ruth said. The driver slowed down. Ruth showed him the 
map.
'Yes, yes, yes,' he said. 'I know now where you want to go.'
'How much will you charge to wait fifteen minutes for us while we look at the 
wall?' Ruth asked him.
'Fifteen minutes?' Edek said. 'Why fifteen minutes? It is only a piece of wall. 
Five minutes will be plenty.' Edek proceeded to discuss minutes and zlotys with 
the driver.
'Five zlotys!' Edek announced. 'Not a bad price to wait for five minutes.'
'Tell him, I'll pay him ten zlotys and we'll be ten minutes,' Ruth said.
Edek and Ruth walked through the archway at sixty Zlota Street and into a 
courtyard. On the right, at the end of the courtyard, was a three-metre-high red 
brick wall. This wall was part of the wall that had imprisoned four hundred and 
fifty thousand Jews. One hundred and fifty thousand per square kilometre. The 
daily nutritional rations for the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto added up to two 
hundred and thirty calories a day. Two hundred and thirty calories was less than 
three apples or three eggs or three slices of rye bread. But the Jews in the 
Warsaw ghetto had no apples, no eggs, and very little bread.
 


They had turnips, potato peels, some flour, and some sugar, if they were lucky.
By the end of 1941, less than two years after the ghetto had been formed, over 
one hundred thousand Jews had died of exhaustion and starvation. By September 
1942, three hundred thousand Jews had died or been transported for liquidation. 
Imprisoning the Jews in the ghettos killed them as effectively if not quite as 
efficiently as the concentration camps.
Ruth and Edek stood in front of the wall. Ruth wanted to cry. She looked at the 
bricks. They looked like such ordinary bricks. Held together with ordinary 
mortar. These bricks had done a good job. Very few Jews had escaped the grip of 
these bricks. Two bricks were missing from this wall. They were in the Holocaust 
Museum, in Washington D.C., a sign said. Ruth wasn't sure what the display of 
these two bricks would do for visitors to the Holocaust Museum. Most of the 
visitors would never know how drenched in disgust for Jews much of the world 
was. And that this disgust was why they had bricked the Jews up before disposing 
of them.
It was just too difficult to grasp the extent of the anti-Semitism that existed 
then. It was too hard to understand the hatred that allowed small babies and 
young children to be starved and shot and gassed and butchered. It was too 
difficult to comprehend the enthusiasm with which people embraced the murder of 
a race. It seemed incomprehensible.
In 1943, in Warsaw, an exhibition was mounted to explain more clearly to the 
Polish people how dangerous the Jews were. The exhibition explained and 
demonstrated, in slides and lectures and films that Jews, by their very nature, 
carried typhus in their blood, and lice on their bodies. If you touched a Jew, 
if you touched Jewish flesh, you would be poisoned, the exhibition reiterated, 
over and over again.
School children in Warsaw were required to attend this exhibition-
a children were frightened to walk through the exhibits. They stood clear of the 
charts and diagrams and photographs in case they were contagious. It was a 
popular exhibition. Fifty thousand people passed through, before the show was 
packed up and toured to other
Polish cities.
Ruth wept. 'It is just a wall,' Edek said. 'It is just a wall,' he repeated. But 
the expression on his face was at odds with his language and his tone. He looked 
as if he was crying. His face was fixed in an expression of grief. His eyes and 
mouth and nose were depressed and bereft. He didn't know he was crying, Ruth 
decided.
'There is a man near that door,' Edek said, pointing to the only other occupant 
of the courtyard. The man stood up from the step he had been sitting on and 
walked towards Edek and Ruth. Edek moved closer to Ruth. The man spoke to them. 
Ruth couldn't understand what he was saying. He smelled of alcohol and his 
clothes were ragged. 'He is asking if we want him to take a photograph of us,' 
Edek said. The man's eyesight was obviously sharp, Ruth thought. Her camera was 
tiny.
'I told him no,' Edek said. The man looked at Ruth. 'Why not?' she said to Edek. 
'It would be nice to have some photographs of this trip.'
I don't think we should give him the camera,' Edek said.
He's not going to run off with it,' Ruth said. 'He looks in pretty decrepit 
condition, anyway. I could easily outrun him.'
'We shouldn't let him have it,' Edek said.
'It only cost two hundred dollars,' Ruth said. 'If he steals it, I'll buy 
another one.'
'For you, two hundred dollars is nothing,' Edek said.
1 hat's not true,' she said. 'I just wouldn't mind a photograph of
us.'
'Okay, okay,' Edek said.
He spoke to the man. The man smiled and nodded. Ruth stepped
 


forward and handed the man the camera. He stank. She moved back next to Edek. 
The man held the camera up to his face. He stepped back. Edek stepped towards 
him.  'Dad, he's not running away,' Ruth said. 'He's stepping back so that he 
can get us both in the photograph.'
'I am staying here,' Edek said. 'He looks like such a type to me'
'Like what type?' Ruth said.
'Like such a type who will steal,' Edek said. 'And who knows what else he will 
do to us.'
'Dad, I'm twice his size,' Ruth said.
Edek spoke to the man. 'What did you say to him?' Ruth asked.
"I told him just the heads will be enough,' Edek said. Ruth saw that her father 
was genuinely nervous of this thin, drunk, dilapidated man. She stepped forward.  
'A head shot will be fine,' she said to Edek.
Edek beamed for the camera. 'I don't think we need to look cheerful,' Ruth said. 
'We're not at Luna Park.' Edek continued to smile. He smiled straight at the 
camera. All of his teeth were displayed, in the smile. Ruth wished that he would 
get a better set of teeth. He refused to spend any money on his teeth. He had 
them made by some semi-qualified dental technologist in an outer suburb of 
Melbourne. She had begged him to buy better teeth. But he wouldn't. She could 
always tell when he had a new pair. His new false teeth whistled for the first 
few months. Edek beamed broadly at the camera.  'One more for good luck,' Edek 
said to the man. The man looked blank. Edek repeated himself.
'I think Polish would be better,' Ruth said.
'Oy cholera,' Edek said. He spoke to the man, in Polish.
Ruth didn't want to touch the man or the camera, after the man had touched it. 
She held her sleeve over her hand when he handed the camera back to her. Edek 
took out some zlotys for the man-'Don't touch him,' Ruth said. 'Drop the zlotys 
into his hand.' Edek  Ruth walked back to the taxi. 'It was a very moving 
experience, the ghetto wall,' Ruth said.
'Why do you wear such a school bag?" Edek said, looking at her backpack.
'It's a backpack, Dad,' she said. 'School children aren't the only ones who wear 
these now.'
'I'm glad we came here,' Ruth said, in the car. Edek looked out of the window.
'Do you know anybody in the Wiedergutmachung place?' he said. Wiedergutmachung 
was what the Germans called the minuscule amount of reparation money that was 
paid to the few Jews who had survived Nazi concentration camps. 
Wiedergutmachung. Literally translated, it was 'to make good again'. Ruth found 
the word offensive. Surely they could have thought of a more plausible word. 
Even an imbecile had to acknowledge that not a fraction of what was done could 
ever be made good, again.  'How would I know anyone, in Germany, with a 
connection to the Wiedergutmachung department?' Ruth said to Edek.
'You told me you had a German client,' Edek said. 'I thought maybe the client 
knows someone, in Germany. The Wiedergutmachung people refused me an extra 
hundred dollars a month. They give some people a bit extra if a doctor says they 
need it. I told the doctor I couldn't sleep. So he wrote a letter for me.'  
'You've needed sleeping pills for years,' Ruth said.
'But I did not know they did pay extra,' Edek said.
'Why did they say no?' said Ruth.
'They did not tell me,' Edek said. 'That is why I asked you if you did know 
somebody in Germany.'
'My client is a Lufthansa executive,' Ruth said. 'I don't think he'd know anyone 
in Germany. He's been in New York for years. I flew Lufthansa once,' she said. 
Edek interrupted her.  'They are the best,' he said.
 


'You haven't flown Lufthansa,' she said.
'But I know they are the best,' he said. 'For sure.'
'Well, they certainly know how to take off,' Ruth said. 'They take off like no 
other airline I've been on. This Lufthansa plane went straight up into the sky. 
At such a steep angle, I felt sick. Each leg of the flight was the same. 
Straight up, into the sky.'
Edek shook his head. 'They are the best, for sure,' he said.
'How come we're admiring the Germans?' Ruth said.
'Because they are very good,' said Edek.
'You think maybe they had reason to believe that they were the master race?' she 
said. She had meant this as a joke. Edek didn't laugh.
'Maybe,' he said.
An hour later, they were on their way to Lodz. It was a relief to be on the way 
to Lodz. Ruth thought that maybe Edek would calm down now. He had been restless 
and eager to leave Warsaw from the moment that he had arrived. He had been so 
impatient and so edgy that she had forgotten to show him the Wedel chocolate 
shop. She made a mental note to take him there when they got back to Warsaw.
Edek was quiet. When the driver had arrived at the Bristol to pick them up, Edek 
had rushed out to greet him. Edek shook hands with the driver and put his arm 
around him, in an affectionate gesture. 'There's no need to embrace him,' Ruth 
had said to Edek. Edek had glared at her. 'He understands English,' Edek had 
said to her, in Yiddish. Ruth wasn't fluent in Yiddish, but she understood most 
ordinary, everyday, domestic Yiddish. She knew how to say I'm tired, my head 
hurts, I've got a stomach-ache, and my children are killing me. Not a very 
useful set of phrases and sentences. 'He understands English,' Edek repeated, in 
Yiddish.
Edek sat in the front of the Mercedes with the driver. They were half an hour 
out of Warsaw. He had been quiet for most of the trip-
Ruth was relieved when he started to chat to the driver. The driver seemed 
happy, too. He switched off the radio as soon as Edek began
talk. Ruth tried not to listen to the conversation. She checked her bag to make 
sure she had taken everything out of the Bristol's safety deposit box. Her 
passport and Edek's passport were still in the manila envelope she had packed 
them in. Her wallet was there. Her travellers' cheques, and both sets of airline 
tickets were there. She was relieved.
Edek and the driver were now talking flat out. The talk was of highways and 
expressways. Ruth couldn't understand most of it. She heard Edek say 'Long 
Island Expressway'. Why, Ruth wondered, would Edek be talking about the Long 
Island Expressway to the driver? Edek was animated. One sentence poured out 
after another. He sounded as if he was having the time of his life.
They passed a building that looked like the ruins of a medieval castle. She 
tapped Edek on the shoulder. 'Can you ask the driver what that is?' Ruth said, 
pointing to the ruin. The driver looked in the direction that Ruth was pointing. 
He spoke to Edek. They conversed for several minutes. Each time Edek went to 
relay the information to Ruth, the driver added another detail.
'He said it is an old building,' Edek said, eventually.
'I can see that,' Ruth said.
'He says no one lives there anymore,' Edek said.
'Really?' Ruth said. 'What else did he say?'
'That is what he said,' Edek said.
He said it's an old building? You were talking about it for ten minutes,' Ruth 
said.
'He said it is old, and that sort of stuff,' Edek said.
That sort of stuff' was one of Edek's favourite phrases. There was nothing that 
couldn't be described as 'that 


sort of stuff', or alternatively, 'this sort of stuff. Ruth gave up. She settled 
back into the back seat. It was a very comfortable back seat. Clearly Mercedes 
knew what they were doing when they built cars.
 


They drove past several small farms. Polish people were very neat farmers. 
Everything was meticulously laid out. Perfectly square fields of potatoes. 
Parallel rows of cauliflower and rows and rows of beans. Rows of green cabbage, 
next to rows of red cabbage. The spaces in between the rows were scrupulously 
clean. Ruth couldn't see a stray twig or weed in farm after farm. The animals 
looked just as tidy. The black and white cows had shiny pelts. Even the pigs 
looked spick and groomed.
There must be something soothing about growing your own food, Ruth thought. Her 
own life was so far removed from the planting and gathering of essential 
sustenance. What did she do? She provided expensive letters for people who could 
no longer form their own words. She felt very flat.
She was jolted by the sudden, raucous laughter coming from the front seat. Edek 
and the driver had been chuckling, quietly, but now they were laughing out loud. 
Edek roared with laughter. He turned around to Ruth. 'He told me a not so nice 
joke,' he said. 'Should I tell you?' 'No thanks,' she said.
They were on the outskirts of a small town. Ruth could see the town, ahead of 
them. They passed a large industrial building. On the side of the building 
someone had drawn a penis. A Star of David was drawn across the testicles and 
the initials LKS were written along the length of the penis. Ruth had seen anti-
Semitic graffiti, in Poland, before. It had shocked her, each time. They had 
removed the Jews from Poland but anti-Semitic graffiti had stayed and thrived.
She tapped Edek on the shoulder and pointed to the graffiti. 'Ask him what that 
is?' she said to Edek. Both men looked out of the window. The driver offered 
Edek an explanation. 'He says it is a joke,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Does he think 
it's funny?' Ruth said.
'Of course not,' said Edek. The driver added something else. He says they didn't 
mean anything bad by it," Edek said.
'LKS is the local soccer team, and they're losing,' Ruth said. 'So, the locals 
put Jude, Jew, or a Star of David on references to the team.' Edek didn't say 
anything. 'Do you understand, Dad?' she said. 'They're using the Star of David 
to signify the weak ones, the losers.'
'I understand,' Edek said. They drove in silence for several miles.
'Would you like to stop at the house of Chopin?' the driver said, loudly, to 
Ruth.
'No thanks,' she said.
'Zelazowa Wola, Chopin's home, is very interesting,' the driver
said.
'No thank you,' Ruth said.
'Why not?' said Edek.
'Because we'll never get to Lodz,' said Ruth.
'Come on, we'll stop for five minutes,' Edek said.
'I'll stay in the car, then,' she said. 'I've seen Chopin's home. I've seen 
Chopin's piano, Chopin's mother's piano, Chopin's bedroom, Chopin's mother's 
bedroom, Chopin's bathroom and Chopin's garden.' Edek ignored her.
At Zelazowa Wola, Ruth stayed in the car and read. The two men returned from 
their tour of Chopin's house in good spirits. The driver was humming La 
Polonaise. Edek asked Ruth if she would take a Photograph of him and the driver, 
in Chopin's garden. She got out of the car and took the photograph. 'Take one 
more photograph in front of the Mercedes,' Edek said. She photographed both men 
in front of the Mercedes. They looked so happy together. They looked like 
brothers.
Edek and the driver started talking as soon as they got back into car. The 
driver was telling Edek something about Chopin's mother. Edek was also 
discussing Chopin. Ruth didn't know he knew anything about Chopin. The two men 
talked and talked.
Ruth was puzzled. Edek was never as garrulous as this in Australia, then it 
dawned on her. Of course, in Australia he was forced
 


to speak English. A halting, faulty English. Here he could speak Polish Perfect 
Polish. Polish, the language of his childhood, the language of his mother and 
father. No wonder, he was at home, here. He was at home. It was a sobering 
thought.
'Is it nice for you to be able to speak as much Polish as you want to?' she said 
to her father.
'It is all right,' he said. 'I can speak Polish, I can speak English, I can 
speak German,' He paused. 'Do you know what they called the path to the gas 
chambers? Himmel Weg. The road to heaven.' 'What made you think of that?' Ruth 
said. 'What, are you stupid or something?' he said. 'What else am I thinking of? 
You think I am not thinking about things. This morning it was a big trauma for 
me.' 'What was?' said Ruth.
'What do you think I am talking about?' Edek said, exasperatedly. The ghetto 
wall, of course.'
'Why didn't you tell me at the time?' Ruth said. 'Why should I tell you every 
little thing?' he said. 'That wasn't so little,' said Ruth.
'It is enough of this stuff,' Edek said. He turned back to the driver. They were 
almost on the outskirts to Lodz, now. 'We're getting close to Lodz,' Ruth said 
to Edek. 'I do not recognise it yet,' he said. His voice sounded frighteningly 
flat.
'We're going to be all right, Dad,' she said.
'Of course,' he said.
She wished that the driver would start chatting to Edek. As though he had read 
her mind, the driver said something to Edek. Edek answered him. Soon another 
conversation was under way. It seemed to be about cars and mileage. And 
Mercedes. Edek started to sound" like himself, again.
'Jesus, look, more graffiti,' Ruth said. They had passed a wall with
several Stars of David criss-crossed with the LKS initials of the losing polish 
soccer team. As soon as she had spoken, she had regretted interrupting Edek and 
the driver. 'I do not think you should say Jesus,' Edek said.
'Children do this. It is just children,' the driver said, looking back at the 
graffiti.
They were in Lodz proper, now. Ruth didn't want to cause another disturbance by 
announcing that they had arrived. Edek seemed unmoved. He had opened the 
glovebox of the Mercedes and was admiring the smooth way it opened and shut. 
Edek and the driver were agreeing that the precision of German engineering was 
hard to beat.
Lodz looked as bleak and as grim as Ruth remembered it. They were in the centre 
of the city. In the streets people had pallid faces and blank expressions. Lodz, 
an industrial city built on the textile industry, was often called the 
Manchester of Poland. Lodz, Ruth thought, made Manchester look like Monte Carlo.
They pulled up outside the Grand Victoria Hotel. The doorman rushed up to open 
the car doors. He collided with the driver who was also in a hurry to open the 
car doors. The doorman opened Ruth's door, with a flourish. He peered inside. 
'Please let me help you with anything that you need,' he said to her. He was 
revolting. She hunched her shoulders so that she would be as far from him as 
Possible while she got out of the car. He hovered around the car door. 'It is a 
pleasure to be of help to such a beautiful woman,' he Said as Ruth was halfway 
out.
He really was repulsive, she thought. He had a very thick neck on top of a very 
thick body. Several thick gold chains hung around his thick neck, and revolting 
wads of hair were growing out of his ears and nostrils. Ruth flinched. How could 
men like this not realise
how unattractive they were? Maybe it took a lot to make a man feel unattractive.
 


'I shall come to your room, personally, to make sure that everything is in order 
for you,' he said to Ruth. 'No thank you,' she said, loudly. He really was 
disgusting. Awful enough to make anyone change their minds about the value of 
genocide. Someone should have shot him, years ago. She smiled to herself at the 
outrageousness of that thought.
Ruth looked at her father. He was handing over what looked like voluminous 
amounts of zlotys to the driver and shaking his hand. He said his final goodbye 
to the driver and followed Ruth into the hotel. Edek smiled at the doorman and 
introduced himself. 'Dad, I've just got rid of him,' Ruth hissed into Edek's 
ear. 'He's revolting.' Edek glared at Ruth and moved away from her. He started 
talking to the porter. Ruth went to the reception desk. She requested rooms 
close together. She heard Edek laughing.
The Grand Victoria Hotel had seen grander days. There was wear and tear and a 
general shabbiness everywhere. Even in the foyer. The porter came up to take her 
bags. His collar was covered with dandruff. His hair was filthy. Slicked in its 
own grease. Ruth grimaced and moved a foot further away from him. It was funny, 
she thought, that you could tell the difference between dirty hair, and hair 
that was designed to look dirty, with layers of gel, mousse, thickeners, 
relaxers, styling creams and foaming strengthened.
She felt her own hair. All the curls were curling the way she liked them to 
curl, into little ringlets. Her hair had been looking good, lately. These good 
looks came at a price. A hundred and fifty dollars a haircut, to be precise. 
Geoffrey, at the John Frieda salon on Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, 
always did a good job on her hair-He was English, and she liked the familiarity 
of his accent and his phrases. He was playful with her. He was the youngest of 
ten children. and handled her hair with the confidence and intimacy of a man who 
has always been around women.
Geoffrey was always asking her if she was in love. No, she say. 'Neither am I,' 
he would reply. 'Here I am, in New York, in
heaven and I can't get a date,' he would say. 'It's a city in which it's 
impossible to meet real people,' she would say. Sometimes she went to the movies 
with Geoffrey. Ruth had her hair coloured at the John Frieda salon, too. Bryan, 
her colourist, was one of the most relaxing men she had ever met. She almost 
went into a coma when Bryan coloured her hair. She had her hair coloured every 
three weeks. That way she need never know if she was going grey.
Hair was complicated for most women. Ruth had had her long curly hair cut by the 
local barber when she was twelve. Her mother had taken her to Mr Brown, who had 
a barber shop across the street from them, in Carlton. Mr Brown cut and cut. 
Ruth emerged with a short back and sides. Mr Brown had even clipped the back of 
her neck with his clippers. With her new haircut, Ruth looked like a pinhead. 
She had looked in the mirror when she had got home and known that Rooshka hadn't 
meant to make her ugly. Something out of her mother's control had driven Rooshka 
to have Ruth's hair cut off. Ruth knew that it must have been connected with the 
chopping off of her mother's own long, thick plaits, in Auschwitz.
When they emptied Auschwitz, there were fifteen thousand pounds of human hair 
left behind. The Nazis were too busy in the last days of the war to ship this 
particular shipment of hair. The hair was packed in fifty-five-pound bags, ready 
to be shipped to Bavaria to the factories that processed the hair. The factories 
converted the hair into fabric. Lining to be used in men's overcoats. the 
factories paid twenty-five pfennigs a pound for this hair which emerged as rolls 
of lining. Tailors stitched the hair into men's suits as well. Somewhere in 
Germany, men had walked to work her mother's hair. The hair contained traces of 
hydrogen Zyklon B, the gas they used to kill the owners of the hair, but the 
Germans weren't bothered by that. After all, this hair didn't touch German skin.
It was big business, this crating and shipping of people's bits and
 


pieces. Gold and platinum pulled from teeth were melted and moulded into ingots. 
Watches were sent to Oranienburg and spectacles were shipped to the SS Sanitary 
Office. An office that didn't appear to have been too sanitary. Clothes were 
forwarded to the Ministry of Finance. When the Germans fled Auschwitz they left 
behind eight hundred and thirty-six thousand, five hundred and twenty-five 
women's dresses, among other things.
Ruth felt trapped and restless in her room at the Grand Victoria Hotel. She 
needed to get out. It was four o'clock, and almost dark. She thought that she 
would probably feel better, even if she only sat in the lobby. She picked up her 
bag and walked to the door. The door handle wouldn't turn. It was stuck.
She called Edek's room. 'I'm stuck,' she said. 'I can't get out of my room.'
'What happened?' he said.
'The door handle won't budge,' she said. Edek started to laugh.
'It is not such a good hotel what the Bristol is, that is for sure,' he said.
'It has seen grander days, the Grand Victoria,' she said. He laughed again.
'You was always clever with words,' he said.
'Dad, can you call the porter and explain the problem to him, in Polish?' she 
said.
'Of course,' he said.
'The porter, not the doorman,' Ruth said.
'You want me to come and see if I can fix it?' Edek said.
'No, just call the porter,' she said.
'You are right,' said Edek. 'I am not so good in such things. as a matter of 
fact Norman did come and help me when I needed to put such a rail what you hold 
on to, on my bath.'
'Norman put a bath rail in for you? Why?' Ruth said.
'He wanted to,' Edek said. 'I was going to get a handyman, but Norman said he 
was coming to Melbourne and he would do it. As a matter of fact he is not such a 
good handyman. The bar what he put in is three foot long. It looks pretty 
stupid.'
'You shouldn't have let him,' Ruth said. 'I'm sure he's got plenty to do when he 
comes to Melbourne.'
'It did take him only two or three hours and then we did go to Scheherezade for 
a cholent,' Edek said. 'He is the only boy I know who does like a cholent. Then 
we did have a piece of apple cake each.'
'You don't need him to fix things in your apartment,' Ruth said.
'I do not need him to fix things,' Edek said. 'But I like to be with him. And to 
tell you the truth, he likes to be with me. I can feel it.'
Ruth knew that Norman was no handyman. He had the large, broad hands of a 
handyman, but he was hopeless. Things he built fell apart. Although he worked 
with his hands every day, he just didn't have a knack for renovations or 
repairs. Ruth thought about Norman's hands. Sometimes she remembered moments of 
their love-making. She remembered their sex with extraordinary clarity. Maybe 
because it had made her feel so good. Nourished, whole, replete. On the whole, 
she didn't think about sex much. Maybe she just wasn't a highly sexual person. 
Or, maybe sexual thoughts had to come attached to love, for her.
She caught herself. How could she be thinking about sex, with her father on the 
other end of the line?
Let's go for a walk, Dad,' she said. 'Ring the porter and get me out of here, 
and let's go for a walk.' Edek hesitated. 'Okay,' he finally Said. 'Okay, let's 
walk a bit. I did see a McDonald's not far away. McDonald's does do a very good 
chocolate thickshake.'
I can't believe you've spotted a McDonald's already,' Ruth said.
thought you were busy talking to the driver.'
 


'I did talk to the driver and I did see a McDonald's,' Edek said 'Can you 
believe a McDonald's, in Lodz?' Ruth said. 'It is something hard to believe,' 
Edek said.  It took the porter fifteen minutes to unstick the stuck door handle. 
Ruth was looking for a couple of zlotys with which to tip the porter when the 
phone rang. It was Max.  'Where are you?' Ruth said to Max. 'You can't still be 
in the office. It must be after ten p.m. for you.'  'I'm at home,' Max said.
'We have to be brief,' Ruth said. 'I'm just about to go out with my father, and 
it's going to be the first time he's walked in the streets of Lodz since he was 
twenty-three.'  'Okay,' Max said. 'I've only got one question. I wouldn't have 
called you except that this seemed to be something you would want to know about. 
I haven't wanted to intrude on your very emotional time with your father.'  
'Max, ask the question,' Ruth said.
'Mr Kendall wants to know if he can buy the copyright to the refusal-to-lend-
his-name-to-the-fundraising letter we did for him, Max said. 'He said it was 
such a brilliant tactic to praise the charity lavishly in the first paragraph.'    
'He wants to own the rights to that letter?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Max.
'I'm not sure about that,' Ruth said. 'I should have thought about this issue 
before, really. Possibly he already owns the copyright as it's his letter.'  
'But you wrote it,' Max said.
'I know,' said Ruth. 'Nothing is simple anymore. Not even owning your own 
letters.'
'But whose letter is it?' Max said. 'Yours or his?'
'It's his letter and my letter,' Ruth said. 'Why does he want to own it anyway?'
'He said he doesn't want anyone else to use exactly the same letter,' said Max. 
'I told him it would be very expensive. He said that was  fine.'
'Tell him he'll have to wait until I get back,' Ruth said.
'By the way, Mr Newton was very pleased with the thanks-for-your-thoughts-while-
I-was-ill letters,' Max said. 'You faxed me sixteen, so I gave him the extra one 
for no charge.'  'I'm glad he was pleased,' said Ruth.
'He sounded in very good shape for someone who has just had bypass surgery,' Max 
said. 'In better shape than my neighbour's dog.'  'What are you talking about?' 
Ruth said. As soon as Max started answering her Ruth regretted that she had 
asked the question.  'My neighbour's labrador had a bypass operation,' Max said. 
'It was done at Michigan State University's Veterinary Hospital, which is 
recognised for the quality of its open-heart surgery.'  'Open-heart surgery for 
dogs?' Ruth said.
'Of course. It's a veterinary hospital,' Max said. 'You can have dialysis for 
cats and pacemakers for dogs. This labrador was on Prozac for months before he 
underwent his surgery. You can get your cat's teeth straightened, too. 
Orthodontics for dogs and cats is big, at the foment.'  'Hew do you know all of 
this?' Ruth said.
My neighbour who owns the labrador told me,' said Max.
'I have to go,' Ruth said.
'Take care,' said Max.
I'm trying,' Ruth said. She called Edek's room. 'I'm ready,' she "aid.
 


Ruth and Edek walked along Piotrkowska Street. Not many people were out. Ruth 
felt flat. They walked without speaking. She resisted asking her father how he 
felt. She didn't want to annoy him. There was a blank passivity in the faces of 
the people in the street. Ruth found it depressing. It was five o'clock on 
Saturday night. 'Let's go to McDonald's,' she said to Edek. They walked, in the 
direction of McDonald's.
The acrid smell of coal smoke filled the air. Ruth's eyes began to sting. 'Are 
your eyes hurting?' she asked Edek. 'Nothing is hurting,' he said. Every second 
person who passed them seemed to be coughing, and spitting. It must be the smoke 
from the coal fires, Ruth thought. Lodz really was an oppressive city, she 
thought. It was dark, now. Very dark. And still. The black air hardly moved.
Where was the moon? Ruth wondered. In mourning? There was not much sign of life 
in the streets, as though Lodz had swallowed its people for the night. Squat, 
grey buildings sat on either side of the black tram tracks. There seemed to be a 
lot of dog shit in the streets. 'Be careful you don't step in dog shit,' she 
said to Edek.
'Look,' he said. 'The McDonald's.' The McDonald's in Piotrkowska Street was as 
garish as any McDonald's anywhere. Ruth was so happy to see it.
Edek sipped his chocolate thickshake. She and Edek were the oldest people in 
McDonald's. The rest of the customers seemed to be teenagers. Ruth didn't mind 
the teenagers. She had never been in a McDonald's. She felt oddly at home.
'This chocolate thickshake is very good,' Edek said.
'I'm pleased,' she said.
'Maybe I will try an ice-cream tomorrow,' Edek said. 'In Polish ice-cream is 
lody. The lody in Poland was always very good.'
Ruth had heard this from him, before. She had heard it in stories about Edek 
hiring a doroszka to take him to the ice-cream shop-And stories about Edek 
buying ice-creams for all of his friends. &
must have been such a playboy, Ruth thought. She looked at him. He looked so 
happy with his chocolate thickshake. She wanted to cry. 'We'll buy lots of lody 
tomorrow,' she said.
'Piotrkowska Street used to be full of people on Saturday night,' Edek said. 
'People walking up and down. It was such an excitement in the feeling of the 
street. Young boys and girls walked together. Couples walked together. Everybody 
was talking. Everybody was happy. Look outside now. No one is there. There is 
nobody.' He was quiet for a minute. He looked out at the street. 'You cannot 
imagine what Piotrkowska Street was like,' he said to Ruth. 'Everybody was 
dressed up. Girls went to meet boys. Boys went to meet girls. Who is there now? 
Nobody.'
'Did you go there on a Saturday night?' Ruth said.
'Of course I did,' he said. 'All the young people did.' He looked sad. 'The most 
beautiful girls were the Jewish girls,' he said. 'And your mum was the most 
beautiful of them all.'
Thinking about her mother on Piotrkowska Street on a Saturday night was too much 
for Ruth. She started to cry. She tried to hide her tears from Edek. Maybe this 
trip was a mistake, after all.
'There is no Jews here, now,' Edek said, and shook his head.
Remind me to buy some bottled water to brush our teeth in, on the way home,' 
Ruth said, after five minutes.
 


chapter six
'It is funny, is it not, how many of our names begin with the letter "H"' Rudolf 
Hoss said.
Ruth was in a cafe directly across the road from the Grand Victoria Hotel. 'I 
can't believe it's you again,' she said.
'I am referring, of course, to my colleagues. To my former colleagues, of 
course,' Hoss said. 'It is of great interest to me this preponderance of names 
amongst us beginning with the letter "H". Hoss, Hess, Hanfstaengl, Harlan, 
Hauptmann, Heyde, Heydrich, Himmler, Hoffman, Hugenberg, Hossbach and the most 
obvious one, naturally, Hitler.'
'I can't believe it's you again,' Ruth said. 'I thought you must have been a 
figment of my imagination, or a bad dream.'
'Both of these could be said to be correct,' said Hoss.
'Are you trying to be mystical?' said Ruth. She felt miserable. This was Rudolf 
Hoss and she, Ruth Rothwax, could hear him.
'You do not believe in mysticism?' Hoss said.
'I don't believe in you,' said Ruth. 'I was sure I had made the whole thing up. 
I was sure I had imagined it. I thought it must have been my lack of sleep that 
made me think I had spoken to you. Or too much stress. Or something I ate.'
'I have not been brought about by indigestion or an acid stomach, Hoss said.
'Why can't you leave me alone?' said Ruth.
'I do not cause you any pain,' Hoss said. 'I do not hurt you. I do not disturb 
you.'
'That's a joke,' Ruth said. 'I find you very disturbing. Can't you go away? I've 
had a long day.'
6
'I know this,' Hoss said.
'I wouldn't have gone out on my own if I'd known you were going to appear,' Ruth 
said.
'You do not have to be alone,' said Hoss. 'I can speak to you anywhere.'
Ruth looked around her. No one had appeared to notice that she was talking to 
herself. There were not many people in the cafe. It was still early. Surely, 
even, in Lodz, this cafe would fill up soon. It was Saturday night.
She hadn't told Edek that she was going to go out. He had looked so tired. And 
he had asked her several times if she was going to go straight to bed. He seemed 
to need to know where she was. She had told the hotel operator to call her in 
the cafe if Edek called her room. She had known that she wouldn't be able to 
sleep. She knew she had to try to unwind. Cafes usually relaxed her. She could 
drift off and daydream. She had also needed to see some sign of life in Lodz.
A young woman in an evening gown was playing a selection from My Fair Lady on a 
piano, just beside the refrigerated selection of cakes. The cafe had the white 
crocheted lace curtains of a country inn across the windows and elaborate 
plastic chandeliers above each table. Ruth had been admiring the lack of 
restraint in the decor when Hoss had broken up her thoughts.
Do you not find this interesting, Miss Rothwax?' Hoss said. Ruth Carted. She had 
forgotten that he knew her name. She wasn't sure why this should startle her. It 
certainly wasn't more startling than he fact of his presence. Or his presence in 
her life, to be more precise.
Don't I find what interesting?' she said.
The fact of so many of our names beginning with the letter "H",' he said, o, I 
don't find it interesting,' Ruth said. 'There are so many of
 


]you, so many Nazis, that you could look up any letter of the alphabet and find 
many major Nazi figures.'
'So many H's. What does it mean?' Hoss said.
'A better question would be so many Nazis?' Ruth said. 'So many members of the 
party, so many vociferous supporters and so many silent followers and informal 
friends? So many dependants and adherents and appendages. So many flunkies.'
'I know this word flunky,' Hoss said.
'A person of slavish or fawning obedience,' Ruth said.
'I am familiar with the term,' said Hoss. He coughed uncomfortably.
Was he coughing in discomfort at the thought of himself as a flunky? Ruth 
thought. She shook her head. She couldn't believe she was thinking about Rudolf 
Hoss's thoughts. The thoughts of a dead, long-departed, former tiller of the 
soil, former agriculturist, and Nazi.
'Himmler, that skinny little failed chicken farmer, looked like a flunky,' Hoss 
said. 'But he was not. His pedantic mannerisms and excessively courtly manners 
made him look like a flunky. A humble flunky. Or are all flunkies, by necessity, 
humble?'
'I'm not sure,' Ruth said. 'You could possibly have an arrogant flunky. Is this 
skinny chicken farmer you are referring to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfiihrer SS?'
'Failed, skinny little chicken farmer,' Hoss said. 'He had a diploma of 
agriculture. He was a salesman for a firm of fertiliser manufacturers before he 
went into the poultry farming business.'
'Like you, he was the son of a very pious and authoritarian Catholic father, 
wasn't he?' Ruth said.
'What has this got to do with anything?' Hoss said.
'I don't know,' said Ruth.
'Himmler was not discouraged by his failure to farm chickens, Hoss said. 'The 
fact that his chickens failed to breed did not
dishearten or dismay him. He did not see this failure as an obstacle to tackling 
human genetics. It was Himmler who established Lebenshorn. You know what 
Lebensborn is?'
'Sure,' said Ruth. 'It was the program for the creation of a pure Aryan life. 
Lebensborn. Spring of life. You had good terminology, you Nazis. Spring of life. 
And its twin, Lebensraum, living space.'
'Thank you,' said Hoss. 'Himmler was a first class organiser and administrator, 
I must admit. He took a subject of limited interest like racism and turned it 
into an organisational tool with which to build up Germany. It became essential, 
if you were a patriotic German, to understand the good that can become of 
racism.'
'They had to hate everyone else in order to preserve themselves,' Ruth said.
'Very succinct,' said Hoss. 'The state-registered human stud farm that Himmler 
set up was a necessity. We had to breed greater numbers of pure Germans. Himmler 
passed a procreation order on October 28th, 1939 to the entire SS. Soldiers had 
a moral duty to procreate with German women and girls of good blood. Soldiers 
came from everywhere to couple with the German girls that were selected for the 
breeding. I must say that they chose the young women very well. They all looked 
Nordic.' Hoss sounded excited at his recollection of the obligation to procreate 
with German girls of good blood. Ruth felt nauseated.
'Himmler set up Dachau in 1933. It was the first concentration camp,' Hoss said. 
'You know this?'
'I know that,' said Ruth.
'Himmler studied the inmates of Dachau,' Hoss said. 'In 1937 in January, as a 
matter of fact, he gave a speech. "There is no more living proof of heredity and 
racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, 
squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews. A considerable number of inferior 
people!" Himmler said. It Was quite a good speech.'
 


Ruth said nothing. She wasn't feeling well.
'Himmler was always described as a man without nerves,' Hoss said. 'They said he 
was unemotional. Yet he nearly fainted at the sight of a hundred Jews who were 
executed for his benefit on the Russian front. What sort of strength does that 
show? He should have eliminated himself from his own breeding program,' Hoss 
laughed.  'Himmler suffered from a lot of psychosomatic illnesses,' Ruth said. ' 
He had severe headaches and terrible intestinal spasms.'  'This is true,' said 
Hoss.
'Himmler was also fanatical about homeopathy, herbal remedies and health food.'
'I'm not interested in homeopathy or herbal remedies,' Ruth said.
'You drink herbal tea,' said Hoss.
'How do you know that?' she said. 'Don't bother to answer,' she said. ' I 
couldn't care less.'
'I was living on the land when Himmler's call to join the ranks of the active SS 
came,' said Hoss. 'Three of our children had already keen born ready to be part 
of the bright future we were planning. It was June 1934.1 am normally very 
decisive, but it took me a long time to make my decision about joining the SS. 
In the end the temptation to be a soldier again was too strong. It was stronger 
than the doubts that my wife voiced. My wife was concerned about whether the 
profession of being a soldier would give me total fulfilment and self-
satisfaction.'  'Well, she was wrong, wasn't she?' Ruth said.
Hoss overlooked her remark. 'Today I very much regret that abandoned my former 
life as a farmer,' he said. 'It was not a road to wealth and riches, so today I 
would be equally without a horns and other material possessions of my own.'  
'What do you mean without a home of your own?' Ruth said-thought nobody owned 
property where you are?'
'I am speaking of time in a general way,' Hoss said.
'Well, it confuses me,' said Ruth.
'See how interested you are,' Hoss said.
'Don't flatter yourself,' she said. 'I am not that interested.'
'You are interested,' Hoss said. 'It is your destiny.'
'You think that it is my inevitable fate that I have to have this contact with 
you?' Ruth said. 'A predetermined course of events? I don't think so.'  'You and 
I have a connection and we cannot escape that,' Hoss said.
'You would be the master of imprisonment,' Ruth said, 'so you must know 
something about escape.'
'I know how to make escape impossible, that is true,' Hoss said.
'I can easily escape,' Ruth said. She stood up, turned, and dug her heel into 
the floor. Hoss howled in pain.
'Shall I continue?' Hoss said after a couple of minutes.
'It's very polite of you to ask,' she said. 'Okay, continue.'
'I was talking about destiny,' he said. 'Who among us can see the complicated 
course of a man's destiny?' Ruth settled back into the chair, in the cafe. This 
sounded like a long story. 'When I read Himmler's invitation to join the ranks 
of the SS, I took no notice of the fact that the unit I would be joining would 
be guarding a concentration camp. The whole notion of a concentration camp was 
foreign to me. To me it was merely a question of being once more an active 
soldier. I went to Dachau.   I  remember the first flogging that I was a witness 
to very clearly. two prisoners who had stolen cigarettes from the canteen were 
sentenced to twenty-five strokes of the lash. This was 1934. June 1934 you 
understand, and Dachau was not yet a death camp.'  'Death camp", that's very 
straightforward language for you to use.' Ruth said.  there is no need for 
sarcasm,' said Hoss, 'I was purely asking you a simple question.'
 


'Purely asking a simple question? Pure and simple? That's you?1 Ruth said. 'Of 
course I know Dachau wasn't quite the death factory then, that it turned out to 
be. They dispensed with lashes pretty promptly once they had expanded their 
notion of camps and death They dropped all the detours. They went straight to 
death.'  'I do not need you to display your knowledge on this subject,' Hoss 
said. 'I was in the middle of telling you the reaction that I had to my first 
flogging.'  'I'm sure it was remarkable,' said Ruth. Hoss appeared to overlook 
her sarcasm. He was obviously impatient to get on with the story.  'The first 
prisoner made no sound,' Hoss said. 'He was a small man, a petty criminal. The 
other prisoner, a big, physically strong politician, cried out and tried to 
break free at the very first stroke. He screamed loudly throughout the lashings. 
When this prisoner began to scream, I felt myself shudder. I became very hot and 
then very cold.  'Later on, I witnessed my first execution. But the execution 
did not have nearly such a big impact on me as the lashings.'  'In June 1936, 
Himmler and Bormann visited Dachau,' said Hoss.
'Himmler the skinny, failed chicken farmer?' Ruth said.
'Do not interrupt me, please,' said Hoss.
'Thank you for saying please,' said Ruth. She yawned again. She was tired. It 
had been a long day.  'Himmler and Bormann recommended me for a promotion,' said 
Hoss.
'Congratulations,' Ruth said.
'Bormann was the head of Hitler's chancellery,' Hoss said.
'I know,' said Ruth. 'He also worked on a farm when he was young-
'How do you know this?' said Hoss.
'I've been researching what working on farms does for people Ruth said.
'I did not know this,' said Hoss.
'It was a joke,' said Ruth.
'Not a successful one,' said Hoss.
'No, not as successful as your promotion,' Ruth said.
'I was transferred to Sachsenhausen in May 1938,' Hoss said.
'I'm glad we're moving through the story,' said Ruth. 'I'm tired.'
'Many of the SS men regarded the viewing of corporal punishment as an excellent 
spectacle,' Hoss said. 'But not me. The sight of corporal punishment was not for 
me.'  'Don't backtrack,' Ruth said. 'We've been through that. Anyway I wouldn't 
waste any time on trying to figure out why you were bothered by corporal 
punishment.'  'You are right. It is a waste of time,' Hoss said.
'So few things, apart from crude language by prisoners, bothered you, that it 
was probably good for you to be bothered by something now and then,' Ruth said.  
'I do not think that it is concern for my wellbeing that you are expressing.'
'Do you mean expressing on this trip in Poland, or expressing in that particular 
comment?' Ruth said.  'You are very pedantic for such a young woman,' Hoss said.
'Pedantic,' Ruth said. 'You said Himmler was pedantic.'
'I said he had pedantic mannerisms,' Hoss said.
'I'm not so young,' Ruth said. 'You were only five years older than me when you 
died.'  'But I was not supposed to die at that age,' Hoss said.
'Oh yes you were,' said Ruth. 'You were meant to die.'
I do not want to talk about my own death yet,' Hoss said.
'You mean, I have that to look forward to?' said Ruth.
Yes, very much so,' said Hoss.
Do you mind if I order something to eat?' Ruth said.
"'Why should I mind?' said Hoss. 'I have to watch people eating the finest 
quality food, in Himmel, while I myself in Zweites Himmel's
 


Lager have to make do with food not fit for human consumption.'
'In that case I'll order an apple strudel,' Ruth said.
She ordered a slice of strudel and a glass of chamomile tea with lemon. The 
waitress was as offhand, and rude to her, as most waiters and waitresses in 
Poland were. Ruth thought this proved that she must look as normal as any other 
customer. She hadn't unnerved the waitress. She must not appear to be talking to 
herself.
'I do not know why the Polish are rude,' Hoss said. 'I have always observed the 
habits and behaviours of people I have worked with, and the Poles are a harsh 
people.'
'Unlike the Germans,' she said.
'Exactly,' said Hoss. 'Quite unlike the Germans.'
'Germans are hardworking, too, aren't they?' she said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'Quite unlike the Poles.' Ruth laughed. 'You like to laugh at 
the Poles?' said Hoss.
'Sometimes,' said Ruth.
'I have worked hard, all of my life,' said Hoss. 'I very much enjoyed hard work. 
I feel no satisfaction with myself unless I have done a
good job.'
'Well, you definitely did a very good job,' Ruth said.
'Your strudel will be here soon,' said Hoss.
'Good,' she said. 'I need the sugar. I didn't expect to be giving you a job 
appraisal.'
'I carried out my duties, in a scrupulous and conscientious manner,' Hoss said. 
'I had been a prisoner myself, do not forget. I was firm and sometimes severe, 
but I was sensitive to the needs of the prisoners. I had a deep concern about 
some of the things taking place in the camp. I was never indifferent to human 
suffering. But because it was not possible in my job for me to show any weakness 
I had to overlook these feelings. I should have gone to the Reichsfuhrer SS and 
explained to him that deep in my being I knew I was not really suited to 
concentration camp service. But I could not find the
courage to do this. I had become too attached to the black uniform to relinquish 
it.'
Hoss's words soured the taste of her strudel. Ruth pushed the plate away- Hoss 
sounded wistful at the memory of the black uniform he had been so attached to. 
He was quiet for a minute. 'Of course with all the H names, the one that I am 
most confused with is Rudolf Hess,' Hoss said, eventually. 'It is extremely 
agitating for me to be confused with Hess. We are as distinctly different as two 
people could be. Hess was introverted and shy. He joined the army when he was 
twenty to escape from the domination of his father. As a matter of fact he was 
also in the Freikorps. However, any similarity between Rudolf Hess and myself, 
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss, is shallow and superficial.'
'You both volunteered for the army, joined the Freikorps and then the Nazi 
party,' Ruth said. 'That doesn't sound so trivial or cursory a coincidence.'
'You know nothing,' Hoss said. 'In the early days, Hess was Hitler's private 
secretary. He had a dog-like devotion to Hitler that was most embarrassing to 
observe. He was not an intelligent man. Ha! What an understatement that is. Hess 
got where he got because of his blind hero-worship, his ardour and fervour and 
fidelity to the Fuhrer'
'Weren't you all like that?' Ruth said.
Hoss cleared his throat. 'We were loyal and faithful followers,' he said. 'But 
that quite disgusting Hess was slavish in his servility and subservience and 
reverence for Hitler. Hess was a secretary,' Hoss said, disdainfully. 'He took 
down most of the dictation for Mein Kampf. Hess made only one original 
contribution. The concept of Lebensraum.'
'That's quite a large contribution, isn't it?' Ruth said.
'He gave a name to a concept that many of us Germans had been winking about,' 
Hoss said. 'That is not such a 


big contribution. It was also Hess's job to announce Hitler at mass meetings. 
His eyes
 


used to open so wide when he made these announcements. He looked like a deranged 
zealot.'
'Didn't you all?' said Ruth.
'Why are you interrupting me with these very annoying asides?' said Hoss.
'I'm not really trying to annoy you,' Ruth said. 'I'm just stating the obvious. 
You talk about Rudolf Hess and his pitiable pliability, and allegiance and 
ardour. It seems to me you were all like that."  'He was stupid,' said Hoss.
'Oh, that's the difference,' she said. 'I didn't realise.'
'Hess described Hitler as "pure reason in human form",' Hoss said. 'Even at the 
Nuremberg War Crimes trial, in 1946, Hess said, "It was granted me for many 
years to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation had brought 
forth."'  'Sounds as though Hess was in love with Hitler,' Ruth said.
'Now you are being stupid,' said Hoss. 'Hess was so stupid. He ended his career 
with a most sensational act of stupidity. In May 1941 he parachuted into 
England. He landed near to the home of a duke he had met just once. He hoped the 
duke would convince the British to overlook Hitler's activities. He assured them 
that Hitler had no intention of destroying Britain, a fellow Nordic nation. The 
British, of course, made him a prisoner of war. Hitler declared him deluded, 
deranged and insane,' Hoss laughed. It was a particularly unattractive laugh. A 
high-pitched squeal. A cross between a giggle and a snicker.  'Most of us major 
SS leaders did not ourselves look like the Aryan prototype,' he said. 'Himmler 
looked like a diffident accountant, or a petty bureaucrat, and shy, insecure, 
nervous, stupid Hess was hardly the model Hitler had in mind to take over the 
world. The only one of us who could satisfactorily fit the description of a true 
Aryan was Heydrich. Reinhard Heydrich. Head of the Reich Security Office. Th" 
architect, in organisational terms, of the Final Solution.'  'The son of a 
Dresden music teacher,' Ruth said. 'He was also in the Freikorps.'
'You know more than I thought you knew,' Hoss said.
'That's a relief,' said Ruth. 'It gives me the creeps to think you know 
everything about me.'
'You look less disturbed than you did when we first met,' Hoss said.
'You can see me?' said Ruth.
'Of course. I have told you this before,' said Hoss.
'When did we first meet?' she said.
'That is open to discussion,' Hoss said. 'There is no set answer to that 
question.'
'Let's give the philosophical twists and interpretations a miss,' Ruth said. 
'What were you saying about Heydrich?'  'Heydrich had the physical attributes of 
a true Aryan,' Hoss said. 'He was tall and slim. He had blond hair and very 
blue, deep-set eyes. He carried himself also very well. Good posture, and a 
military bearing. He was an also exceptionally athletic man. An outstanding 
athlete, as a matter of fact. He was an excellent fencer, a superior horseman 
and a first-class pilot. He was as well a talented violinist.'  'Wow, what a 
man,' Ruth said.
'I am engaged in a serious discussion with you,' Hoss said. 'I would very much 
appreciate it if you would not be frivolous.'  This doesn't feel like a 
frivolous engagement to me,' Ruth said.
Hitler was very impressed with Heydrich's discipline and orderly
Ways,' said Hoss. 'But on the other hand, Heydrich worked very hard  to make 
himself indispensable to the upper echelon of the Third
Reich Underneath that perfect Aryan exterior all was not what it  appeared to 
be. Heydrich was a greedy man. Greedy for power.
Ruthless and cold.'
Wasn't that what you were aiming for? Tall, blond, ruthless and ' Ruth said.
 


'We did not want a nation of cold, calculating ruthless and morbid people,' Hoss 
said.
'Heydrich was morbid, was he?' Ruth said. This interested her She didn't know 
this.
'He was morbid and suspicious,' said Hoss. 'He saw deceitfulness and duplicity 
everywhere. He suspected manoeuvres and machinations and schemes.'
'You haven't considered the possibility that Heydrich was right,' Ruth said. 
'That he was accurate in his assessment of his peers and his environment.' Hoss 
ignored her.
'Heydrich accumulated enormous files on everyone,' Hoss said. 'Not just dossiers 
on the enemies of our beloved party, but personal files on colleagues he 
considered to be too competitive with him. There was some justification for some 
of his suspicion. It was rumoured, although never proved, that Heydrich was 
half-Jewish. So of course he was blackmailed by his rivals for power.'
'How hysterical,' Ruth said. 'The most Aryan of you all was a Jew.'
' "Hysterical" is not the correct word,' Hoss said. 'And, in any case, the 
allegations were never proved. It was Heydrich who ordered all the Jews to be 
amassed in ghettos, as a matter of fact. It was Heydrich who provided all the 
administration and organisation to enable so many people to be murdered.'
'I'm glad to hear you use the word "murder",' Ruth said.
'"Operation Reinhard", our code name for the extermination of the Polish Jews, 
was named after him. After Reinhard Heydrich, the possible half-Jew.'
'Extermination and murder,' Ruth said. 'You're getting bolder.' Hoss didn't seem 
to hear. He seemed to be absorbed in the discrepancies and inconsistencies and 
contradictions and collisions of Heydrich. Absorbed in the perversity of 
Reinhard Heydrich, the almost perfect Nazi.
'Heydrich was killed by gunfire and a bomb, in Czechoslovakia,
on May 27th, 1942,' Hoss said. 'Heydrich thought he had charmed all the Czechs 
and had no need for security. He was alone when he was killed.'
'Well, it wasn't too tragic,' Ruth said. 'After all, he'd done most Of his most 
important work.' Hoss didn't answer her. He was clearly still in the thrall of 
the story of the golden boy. The imperfect perfect human specimen.
'Hitler and Himmler delivered the eulogies at Heydrich's funeral,' said Hoss. 
'As a reprisal for the murder, we razed the village of Lidice to the ground and 
we executed all of the male population. A German court-martial was also held in 
Prague in which just under one thousand Czechs were condemned to death."
Ruth felt tired. She should have stayed at home, she thought.
'You did not sleep well last night,' Hoss said to her.
'No, I didn't,' she said.
She had tossed and turned all night. She had had one of her recurring 
nightmares. The worst one, the one in which she was a mother. The children were 
nearly always babies. Every now and then, one of them was a toddler, able to 
walk. In these dreams she lost her babies or starved them. She misplaced them. 
Left them on buses or trains. She left them in department stores and in parked 
cars. The abandonment in her dreams was never intentional. She simply forgot 
that she had given birth to and brought home a baby. When in her dreams she 
realised what she had done, she was mortified. Horrified at herself. In some of 
the dreams she had set up a beautiful nursery, then left the baby there, to die. 
In other dreams she couldn't feed the baby. Her breasts would be dry or she 
would have run out of formula. Sometimes she had the breast milk and the formula 
but simply forgot to feed the baby.
She always woke up in a sweat from these dreams. Lately the dreams had improved. 
In the last few years she had managed to save the child, in the last minute. She 
had wondered whether the approach
 


of menopause in her real life was tempering the nightmares. The nightmares were 
so vivid they would stay with her for days. For days she would feel the shock of 
her own neglect, her own irresponsibility her own cruelty.
In one particular dream, the baby was a boy. A baby boy born not quite right. 
Something was wrong with him, but in dream after dream what was wrong was not 
clear. The baby always disappeared by the end of the dream and she was left 
searching for it. Ruth sometimes woke up crying, after this dream. The dream had 
started when she was twenty. She had told Rooshka about it, once. Her mother had 
left the room. Ruth knew that her mother had had too much real loss to take in 
people who went missing in dreams. Ruth knew that her dreams were made up of 
imagined absence, and she knew that what was only imagined, was nothing to worry 
about. 'I did not sleep so well myself,' Hoss said. 'You sleep?' said Ruth
'Of course I sleep,' Hoss said. 'Dead people can be asleep and awake. I myself 
am forced to sleep on a wooden bunk without even a straw mattress to lie on. I 
have a bare light bulb hanging above my bunk, and drab sacking which sags 
terribly draped across my window.' 'You have windows in hell?' Ruth said.
'Of course we have windows in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' said Hoss. 'We have 
inside and outside. We look outside through our windows.'
'No wonder your bones hurt if you have to sleep on a wooden bunk,' she said. She 
kept the glee out of her voice. It was an effort. 'It is harder to sleep in 
Zweites Himmel's Lager,' said Hoss. 'It is very noisy. People are crying. Some 
of them are sick. If you do not take care, they can be sick on you, and then you 
get sick. And you stay sick. There is no medical treatment, as I have mentioned 
to you-and there is no relief, in death. In Zweites Himmel's Lager, we are all, 
of course, already dead."
Hoss sighed. 'In Himmel they have the very best doctors in the
world And new doctors are constantly arriving. They bring with them the very 
latest advances in medical science. The newest medical breakthroughs, 
unfortunately, no longer come from Germany. They seem, all of them, to come from 
America.'
'Are many of the doctors Jewish?' Ruth said.
'There are again, yes, many Jewish doctors in the world,' Hoss said. 'Many of 
them are in Himmel. I will when I get to Himmel not have so wide a choice of 
personal physicians as other people because of this.'
'Are you saying the Jewish doctors are prejudiced against you?' Ruth said.
'I am not saying anything against Jews,' said Hoss. 'I was never planning, when 
I get to Himmel, to become a patient myself of any of the German doctors who are 
Jews, of course. Most of them have been in Himmel for a long time but I doubt if 
one of them has forgotten me.'
'Don't natter yourself,' Ruth said. 'I'm sure they've got more in their lives, 
or their deaths, than you.'
'I read books written by Jews,' Hoss said. 'It is compulsory, for me. Why do 
Jews write so many books? Why do Jews have this obsession with words?'
'Because we talk so much,' Ruth said. 'We need all the words we can get.'
'That is a rude comment, is it not?" Hoss said. 'It is fortunate for you that 
you do not have to pass this sensitivity-training class.'
'It's not rude if I say it,' Ruth said. 'There's a difference between we saying 
something about Jews and your making a similar statement. " you don't know the 
difference you're going to be in Zweites Himmel's Lager for a long time.'
Ruth got up. She had to go to the bathroom. She pressed her heel down more 
firmly that she needed to. Hoss screamed.
 


'Could you please not turn so quickly?' he said.
'You've got a low threshold of pain, have you?' she said, and dug her heel into 
the carpet again.
'I do not have a low threshold of pain,' Hoss spluttered. 'It {5 merely that I 
do not like the unexpected. I am orderly, like you.'
Ruth was fed up. This aligning of herself and Hoss was giving her a headache. 
Why couldn't he leave her alone? This trip would have been stressful enough with 
only her father to contend with. 'What are you going to do?' she said to Hoss. 
'Follow me around Poland?'
'I do not have to follow you,' Hoss said. 'I am part of you.'
'No you are not,' she said, and twisted her heel on the carpet. Hoss must have 
held his screams in because there was no sound.
'We are all part of each other,' he said, eventually, a bit breathlessly.
'Don't give me that crap,' Ruth said. 'You are not part of me or part of anyone 
who has anything to do with me. You're not part of any Jew. Alive or dead. Which 
parts of you went up in smoke? It wasn't your soul. That had already 
disintegrated. It wasn't your heart, your heart wasn't there.' She stopped for a 
moment. Her throat was sore. She felt as thought she was shouting. She couldn't 
have been shouting. No one in the cafe was paying any attention to her. 'You are 
not a part of me,' she shouted. 'You are apart. Do you understand that? Apart. 
The same letters but no separation between the first vowel and the first 
consonant.' Hoss was not part of her. He was not the criminal in her. He was not 
the Nazi in her.
'Calm down, calm down,' Hoss said.
'Well don't give me that animistic shit,' Ruth said. 'You and I are not part of 
the same anything.'
'You would subscribe to an existential notion then?' Hoss said.
'I wouldn't think existentialism and individual responsibility and morality 
would be something that you would know much about, she said.
'Germany produced an existential philosopher who was considered to be one of the 
greatest thinkers of all time,' Hoss said. 'Have you noticed by the way that I 
am overlooking all of your accusative barbs? 'I didn't bring you here to argue 
with you.'
'You didn't bring me here?' Ruth said. 'What do you mean by
that?'
'Why do you think you have visited Poland twice already?' Hoss said. 'You have 
been trying to get to me. I have been beckoning you.'
'I have not been trying to get to you,' Ruth said. 'No one in their right mind 
would want to get to you. I'm here with my father. I want to be here, on this 
piece of earth, where it all happened, with him. Side by side.'
'And you think that he wants this?' said Hoss.
'I think I know more about what he thinks than you do,' she said. She called the 
waitress over and asked for the bill. She pushed the uneaten apple strudel out 
of her reach. Having Hoss with her had at least saved her some calories.
'Heidegger's writings about angst and dehumanisation even in 1927 were a clear 
indication of his link to the Nazi party that was to come,' Hoss said.
'Are you trying to impress me with the quality of your colleagues?' she said. 'I 
know about Heidegger's emphasis on blood and intimacy. He was the Rector of 
Freiburg University in 1933. He called Hitler a genius and praised him for 
showing the German people the way out of "rootless and impotent thinking". 
Heidegger continued to lecture and to publish throughout the Third Reich. I've 
been to Freiburg myself. I saw that beautifully picturesque town with its 
steeples and churches and riverbanks. I saw the Freiburg University, too. I've 
read Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung, Holderlin, and the Essence of Poetry, 
published in 1936, and 


Platans Lehre von der Wahrheit,
a Discourse on Truth, published in 1942, and Von Wesen der eit, The Nature of 
Truth, published in 1943.' 


'You know a lot about Heidegger,' Hoss said. 'You know more  than I do.'
'The allied powers prohibited Heidegger from teaching in any public capacity 
from the years 1945 to 1951,' she said. 'It didn't hurt him. In 1951, he was 
appointed an honorary professor at Freiburg University and went back to his 
teaching.'  'He never spoke about his involvement with the policies of the Third 
Reich," said Hoss.
'You wanted him to speak up for you?' Ruth said. 'He did, posthumously,' she 
said. 'He recorded an interview with Der Spiegel, a decade before he died, on 
the condition that it would not be published until after he died.'  'He died on 
May 26th, 1976,'Hoss said. 'Der Spiegel came out, with the interview, exactly a 
month later,' Ruth said. 'Heidegger, the genius, said he hadn't been able to see 
any alternative to Nazism in order for Germany to thrive and prosper. He had 
nothing at all to say against Hitler's National Socialism. He didn't 
philosophise either on the nature of any of the atrocities committed during the 
Third Reich.'  'These H's are interesting, are they not?' Hoss said. Ruth could 
feel that she was red-faced. She found it hard to reconcile the adulation and 
respect and recognition accorded Heidegger and the lack of interest in his Nazi 
affiliations. It always disturbed her when public figures were conveniently 
forgiven their pasts. 'You do agree that the H's are interesting?' Hoss said.  
'You could take any batch of Nazis and find much that is of interest,'  said 
Ruth.
'That is true,' Hoss said. 'But I maintain my belief that the H's  are of even 
greater interest.'
'You can maintain whatever belief you like,' Ruth said. 'I don  care.'
'Why are you upset?' Hoss said. 'You are more upset about  than you were about 
that deficient chicken farmer,
'I think you've got a thing about Himmler,' Ruth said. 'You deride him, 
continually.'
'Are you defending Himmler?' Hoss asked.
'God no,' she said. The question made her laugh.
'I thought we were eliminating God?' Hoss said.
'Well, you're the master of elimination,' Ruth said. 'Go ahead.'
'Let us get back to the H's,' Hoss said. 'What about Harlan. Veit Harlan. The 
filmmaker. He was the son of the novelist Walter Harlan.'  'Novelists can 
produce very difficult children,' Ruth said.
'Veit Harlan married the Swedish actress Christina Soderbaum,' Hoss said. 
'Harlan made all his best films with her. His films were very useful for us. He 
displayed his complete commitment to Nazi ideology in the films. Have you seen 
Werwehte Spuren, Fading Tracks, which was made in 1938 or Das Unsterbliche Herz, 
The Eternal Heart, which he made the following year?'  'No,' said Ruth.
'I am surprised,' said Hoss.
'I am relieved I can surprise you,' Ruth said. 'I thought you knew everything 
about me.'
'One of Harlan's movies was of particular use to us,' Hoss said. We showed it 
every time there was a liquidation or a deportation of Jews planned.'  'That was 
Jud Suss, the Jew Suss,' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'Harlan made this film in 1940.'
The anti-Semitism in Jud Suss was just out of control,' she said.
'Can you have anti-Semitism out of control?' Hoss said.
You are never going to pass that class,' said Ruth.
Of course, of course,' Hoss shrieked. 'How stupid of me. It was a Philosophical 
question. I was trying to say that all anti-Semitism
 


is bad. All racist thinking is bad. There are no degrees of racism that are 
acceptable."
'You sound like a parrot,' Ruth said. 'Are they lines from your
textbooks?'
'Of course,' Hoss said. 'It is these lines that I have had to study,
to memorise.'
'Well, you'll never understand them, so you might as well memorise them,' she 
said. 'Did you know that Harlan was imprisoned after the war, but finally tried 
and found not guilty of crimes against humanity? Harlan continued to make films, 
all starring Soderbaum, until the year before he died, in 1963.'
'Yes, I knew of course that he was found not guilty,' Hoss said. 'Harlan was 
found not guilty and I was executed.'
'You should have filmed your Jews, not shot and gassed them,' Ruth said.
'Is that not an anti-Semitic sentiment?' Hoss asked. 'No,' she said. 'You really 
are hopeless. Don't they have classes in bigotry and prejudice detection in 
Zweites Himmel's Lager?'
'They do, of course,' Hoss said. 'But I have to pass the sensitivity-training 
class before I can enrol in bigotry and prejudice detection.' 'You've got a long 
way to go,' said Ruth. 'I used to be so good at things,' Hoss said. 'It can be 
difficult to change careers, particularly in middle-age,' Ruth said.
'That is true,' said Hoss. 'I was promoted to the position of adjutant at 
Sachsenhausen on August 1st, 1938. I was only thirty-eight.'
'I'm wildly impressed,' Ruth said. Hoss seemed to think she was being sincere.
'My inner questions and concerns about my qualifications and readiness and 
suitability for concentration camp life receded into the background now that it 
was no longer necessary for me to come into such direct contact with the 
prisoners,'
'How handy,' Ruth said. Hoss appeared not to hear.
'The first execution of the war was carried out in Sachsenhausen,' said. 'I was 
extremely busy with the preparation and planning of the execution. I only 
realised what had happened when it was already over.'
'You seem to have been a slow learner even then,' Ruth said. Hoss ignored her.
'All of the officers who attended the shooting were, of course, deeply 
affected,' he said.
'Of course,' she said.
'But in the days to come we were going to have many more of this kind of 
experience,' said Hoss.
'It was a tough job for you?' Ruth said.
'Yes, absolutely, a very difficult job,' Hoss said. 'We had many Jehovah's 
Witnesses in Sachsenhausen. Many of them had refused to do military duty. The 
Fuhrer ordered their death.'
'More executions to have to struggle through,' Ruth said.
'I learnt many things from these executions which took place in Sachsenhausen 
early in the war,' Hoss said. 'People went to their death in many diverse ways.'
'How surprising,' said Ruth. She felt agitated that Hoss appeared oblivious to 
her sarcasm. Why was she attempting to irritate a dead Nazi with slivers of 
sarcasm, she wondered. She decided it was a useless pursuit.
'The Jehovah's Witnesses went to their death with a strange sense of peace and 
composure,' Hoss said. 'They had a state of grace, and sanctification, their 
eyes shone. It was almost a euphoria. They were very sure that they were about 
to enter the Kingdom of Jehovah. Among the other prisoners, the political 
prisoners, the conscientious objectors and the political demonstrators against 
the regime went to their death calmly and quietly with an acceptance of the 
inevitability of what was to come.'
 


'The Polish government realised this,' Hoss said. 'They have passed the 
synagogue on to the Jews who live in the nearby town of Bielsko-Biala.'
'That's going to be handy for them," Ruth said. 'Jews have to walk to synagogue. 
How many miles is Bielsko-Biala from Oswiecim?'
'Quite a few,' said Hoss.
'They used to have twelve synagogues in Oswiecim,' Ruth said.
'You appear to know everything,' said Hoss.
'I wish I did,' she said. She was close to tears. She had been trying to learn 
all that she could, for so many years. She knew that she would never know 
everything about that soiled and disfigured period of time.
'It was not just us,' Hoss said. 'Why does everybody blame the Nazis? It was not 
just the Nazis. It was all Germans. It is unfair to put the blame on the Nazis. 
Really, I mean this.'
'I'm sure you do,' said Ruth.
'People have said that we went to great lengths to hide and conceal what we were 
doing,' Hoss said.
'They say we did this because we Nazis knew that the bulk of the German people 
would not agree with what we were doing.
'It is most absurd to think that only thousands of individuals were 
responsible,' Hoss said, 'for murdering millions of people. And that those 
thousands were clever enough and had the necessary resources to conceal their 
activities? Simply, simply absurd. The Nazi party allocated very little 
resources for concealment. Why should they? We knew the German people agreed 
with us. This sole apportioning of blame onto the Nazis is the most upsetting 
and unsettling part of the whole thing.'
'If that is what upsets you most, you're never going to get to heaven, Ruth 
said.
'I am discussing something of extreme seriousness,' Hoss said' and for a moment 
his voice echoed the sharp ring and bark of "'
former position. 'The Germans wanted the Jews dead,' Hoss said. 'It was a will 
and a desire of the German people to be rid of the Jews Germans had been told 
that Jews were a threat to their blood for years. A germ, an infection. Jews 
were a disease that would destroy German culture. Germans were told this by 
politicians, by the popular media. They were told this in speeches and in 
literature. Mark my words, Germans were ready to get rid of Jews. We, the Nazis, 
needed their cooperation. We needed their enthusiasm and their participation. We 
needed not just the cooperation but the participation of administrators, 
engineers, lawyers, doctors, architects, manufacturers, and administrators. Are 
you listening to me? Can you hear what I am saying?' Hoss was shouting now. 'I 
am listening,' she said.
'No ordinary accountants or clerks or contractors or engineers or signalmen or 
chemists or physicians who contributed to the killings were ever brought to 
trial,' Hoss said. 'Only those directly connected to the Nazi party or those 
directly involved in the administration of the death camps and labour camps were 
ever brought to trial. All the other Germans developed overnight amnesia.' Hoss 
was very wound up. Ruth could hear he was having trouble breathing.
'I think you should calm down,' Ruth said. Hoss's anger and tension were making 
her nervous.
I am calm, I am calm,' he said. You should see all of the Germans in Zweites 
Himmel's Lager. The place is crawling with Germans. It is infested with them. 
There are more Germans in Zweites Himmel's Lager than any other nationality of 
people.' He started to laugh. 'And even surrounded by all of these Germans, I am 
still unpopular.' He laughed out loud, again. 'Where are you going?' Hoss said. 
'I've got to go outside,' Ruth said. 'I feel sick.' Outside the cafe, on 
Piotrkowska Street, Ruth took deep breaths.
The air felt thick. It wasn't the congestion of the coal smelters and
car exhausts she could feel. The air was clogged and jammed
 


with more than the usual pollutants. The air was congealed. Curdled with ghosts.
'We must not make the mistake of focusing entirely on the Germans,' Hoss said. 
'There were plenty of co-conspirators. Why do you not look well?'
'I feel sick,' she said.
'I feel better than I have felt for years,' said Hoss. 'Can't you take some 
medication?"
'Medication would not be able to remove the cause of my nausea' Ruth said.
'You are referring to me, I can see,' said Hoss. He groaned. 'You are wrong,' he 
said. 'I am not the cause of your nausea. You suffered from psychological nausea 
before you met me.' Ruth unwrapped some Mylanta tablets she had in her purse. 
She chewed on them as Hoss spoke. 'You were born sensitive,' he said. 'You would 
always have had this ailment, regardless of the circumstances of your 
upbringing. It is a mistake to blame the problems in your life on 
circumstances.'
From the cafe came the strains of the Polish pianist tackling On the Street 
Where You Live. The pianist had returned for the third time that evening to a 
tune from My Fair Lady. Hoss and My Fair Lady. It was enough to make anyone 
doubt their sanity.
'Does the name Stanislau Dubiel ring a bell?' Ruth said.
'No,' said Hoss.
'Lying to me will only lengthen your stay in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Ruth said. 
Hoss was silent. 'Dubiel was a prisoner who was employed in the Hoss household 
in Auschwitz,' Ruth said.
'A scumbag, a lowlife, an asocial type,' said Hoss.
'He was your gardener,' Ruth said. 'He reported Mrs Hoss as saying several times 
in his presence, "I want to live here until I die."'
'We had a very comfortable life there,' Hoss said. 'The accommodation and the 
servants came with the job. Why shouldn't my wife be happy with this?'
'Is she in Zweites Himmel's Lager with you?' Ruth said. Hoss didn't answer. 'All 
the prisoners employed in your household were given special underwear,' Ruth 
said. 'Underwear obtained from "Canada", as the barracks for storing possessions 
stolen from the Jews were called. The barracks were named after Canada, a 
country seen as a land of wealth and opportunity. Other prisoners didn't have 
underwear from Canada."
'As Commandant, I had standards to maintain,' Hoss said. 'Our staff had to have 
clean clothes. We couldn't risk infection. After all, we were living in a 
location where infection, especially typhus, was epidemic.'
'Of course,' Ruth said. 'Jews were dropping dead with typhus every day.'
'Household staff must look respectable," Hoss; said. 'They must look decent and 
clean."
'Decency and cleanliness are not what comes to mind in reference to you or your 
wife," Ruth said.
'Can you leave Mrs Hoss out of this?" Hoss said.
'Mrs Hoss was really exceptional,' Ruth said.
Hoss sounded relieved. 'Thank you,' he said. 'I feel this way too.'
'When she received the underwear to distribute among the prisoners who worked 
for her, she kept it for herself. She gave the staff old, worn underwear 
discarded by your family. The Hoss family were wearing the underwear of gassed 
people. Your children were walking around in the clothes of children who had 
been murdered by their father.'
Stanislaw Dubiel was a brazen, Polish braggart. A compulsive liar,' Hoss said.
Dubiel said that Mrs Hoss never gave him any of the money coupons which were 
needed by all the SS in order to buy food, in
 


Auschwitz. She just gave him lists of what she wanted. Meat, fruit, bread, 
sausages, cigarettes. Dubiel let the manager of the food store which of course 
contained food stolen from arriving Jews, believe that he would be promoted if 
he complied with Mrs Hoss's requests' Ruth said.
'That is a blatant lie,' Hoss shouted. 'The manager of canteens SS 
Oberscharfuhrer Engelbrecht supplied everything Mrs Hoss needed'
'And you, Mr Hoss, who were busy setting such a fine example for your fellow 
officers, failed to notice the abundance of foodstuffs on your dinner table 
every night, and at the parties Mrs Hoss gave regularly," Ruth said.
'We had no more than our strict rationing of bread and skimmed milk,' Hoss said. 
'If other food was available we paid for it with the coupons that were 
required.'
'It's a shame that others are saying otherwise, isn't it?' Ruth said. 'It can be 
very irritating when people lie. The underwear details Dubiel revealed were 
fascinating, though, weren't they?' Ruth said, and dug her heel into the ground. 
She covered her ears. She didn't want to hear Hoss's screams. Screaming upset 
her. She heard him, anyway.
'I did not have so much to do with the prisoners,' Hoss said when he recovered. 
'The real ruler of a prisoner's life is the officer in charge of the prison 
camp. Not the commandant. In Auschwitz, because of the size of the camp, I had 
always a first and second prison camp officer-in-charge. The first two were Karl 
Fritzsch and Hans Aumeier.
'I myself was far too busy with other things,' Hoss said. 'I had to leave the 
prisoners in the hands of Fritzsch and Aumeier and other equally unwholesome 
individuals. Because of the generally disagreeable, distasteful and 
untrustworthy people I was forced to work with, I became a different person,' he 
said. 'Before Auschwitz I was always prepared to see only the best in my fellow 
human beings, particularly my comrades. However in Auschwitz my so-called 
colleagues were dishonest and deceitful and disloyal to me. Every day I was 
forced
suffer new disappointments. Slowly, I, myself, began to become .Distrustful and 
extremely suspicious. I became disenchanted, disillusioned. I no longer wished 
to associate with people. I became antisocial. Affection or friendship became 
abhorrent to me. I avoided all social functions at the camp. I retreated into 
myself. I became distant, remote and noticeably harder. It was hard on my wife. 
She was always trying to draw me out of myself. To force me to engage with 
others. For my own good, you understand?'
'I understand her concern,' Ruth said. 'She had good reason to be concerned.'
'She was a very good wife,' Hoss said. 'She would invite people to our home. Old 
friends from outside the camp, comrades who also worked in Auschwitz. Sometimes, 
with the help of a little alcohol, I would pull myself together, for her sake, 
and socialise. Of course there was never once any question of possible neglects 
of my duties because of overindulgence in alcohol. Never.
'That Polish imbecile Stanislaw Dubiel was an incurable alcoholic.'
'The gardener?' said Ruth.
'Yes, yes,' said Hoss. 'He was drunk day and night. You cannot believe a word he 
says.'
'You still see him sometimes?' said Ruth.
'I never speak to him,' Hoss said. 'He has the protection of some pretty rough 
types. Many Poles are rough. And stupid. I think maybe you agree with me about 
Poles?'
Ruth was silent. This communication with Hoss was making her feel grubby. She 
wanted to go back to the hotel and have a shower. To shower the soiled and 
unsanitary smudges she felt were stuck to her skin. She remained silent. She 
didn't want to defend the Poles. Hoss didn't seem to notice her silence. He had 
been quiet, himself, for a few minutes.
'You've left out an obvious H,' Ruth said.
No,' Hoss said, 'I have not. Hitler has already received much
 


attention. Everybody knows Adolf Hitler. The whole world was interested in Herr 
Hitler,' Hoss sounded peeved.
'Does that bother you?' Ruth said.
'No, not at all,' said Hoss. 'But it is disproportionate that Hitler is so 
famous. He is a celebrity. He did not do so much by himself We all worked hard 
and had an equal influence on the course of things. Why should Hitler be so well 
known? Everybody knows everything about Hitler. Everybody knows that he was born 
in Braunau, the son of a fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official Alois 
Schickelgruber Hitler and his third wife, a young peasant girl Klara Poelzl. 
People know every detail of Hitler's life.'
'Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, what a mouthful,' Ruth said.
'Mr and Mrs Hitler were from the backwoods of Austria,' Hoss said.
'Mr and Mrs Hitler? Doesn't that sound funny to you?' Ruth said.
'Not at all,' said Hoss. He still seemed annoyed. 'Why should the world make 
something so special out of Hitler?' he said. 'He was ordinary, like the rest of 
us. He was deeply hostile towards his very strict father and very attached to 
his overindulgent mother. How special is that? He was devastated when his mother 
died in 1908. He was nineteen. Is that so special? No. The Viennese Academy of 
Fine Arts rejected him. Is that, too, special? No. He did, I admit, have a 
talent for public speaking. But that in itself I consider to be a minor talent. 
And he had such a grating voice.'
'You think his histrionic hoarse shouting was public speaking? Ruth said.
'It was in public and he was speaking,' Hoss said. Hoss took a deep breath. Ruth 
could hear him inhale.
'Enough of Hitler,' he said.
'Better late than never,' she said. But Hoss didn't reply. Maybe he hadn't 
understood.
chapter seven
Ruth woke up singing. In a semi-conscious state, half-awake, she had realised 
that she was singing to herself. 'All I want is a room somewhere. Far away from 
the cold night air,' she sang. She had never seen the musical, My Fair Lady. She 
had never known the lyrics to any of the show's songs. Yet here she was, in her 
hotel room, in Lodz, repeating the lines endlessly. It wasn't a languorous 
rendition of the song that she was singing. It was a speeded-up version much 
faster than the composers of the musical, Lerner and Loewe, had intended.
Ruth was copying the tempo of last night's performance. The brisk variation of 
the show tune played by the young pianist in the cafe. One staccato note after 
another. Each note jolly and complete. There was no sign of the wistfulness or 
longing implied in the lyrics. She had to get the song out of her head. It was 
giving her a headache. She moved to get out of bed. Her brain hurt. She knew 
that this couldn't be true. She knew that brain tissue contained no sensory 
nerves. She got out of bed, slowly. 'All I want is a room somewhere. Far away 
from the cold night air.' The words went round and round in her head.
She poured herself some bottled water, and assembled the fifteen different 
vitamin tablets she took every day. She swallowed the pills, then drank some 
extra water. Dehydration could cause headaches. Maybe she was dehydrated? She 
drank some more water.
It was an appropriate song for her to be singing, she thought. Any room would be 
preferable to this room at the less than Grand Victoria. any room, anywhere. 
Nothing in the room worked. Ruth had wanted
 


to have a bath last night. The trickle of water that came out of the bath taps 
would have had to have continued for several days before being enough to fill a 
bath. She had complained about it to the male receptionist. 'Is impossible,' was 
all he could say. 'Is impossible.'
What did he mean? Was it impossible to fix? Impossible to believe? What was he 
saying? Was he being sympathetic? Agreeing that a room without a functioning 
bath was impossibly difficult? Ruth had no idea. 'Is impossible,' he kept 
saying, as she hung up.
Ruth turned on the tap in the basin. Water sprayed over the carpet, and over 
her. This happened with both the hot water tap and the cold water tap. Ruth 
tried to tighten the faucets. They wouldn't budge. The faucets had clearly been 
this way for years. Maybe most guests at the Grand Victoria didn't wash? 
Everything in the room was broken. The dial on the rotary phone moved around in 
fits and starts. The toilet was so energetic it flushed some of its contents 
right out, into the room. The bed sagged at both ends, and inexplicably rose in 
the middle. The pillows were limp and marked, Ruth felt, with the dents of other 
people's heads. She hated this hotel.
'I never seen you look so tired,' Edek said to her when she came down for 
breakfast. He was talking to the doorman. The gold-necklaced thick-necked 
doorman. The doorman seemed engrossed in the conversation with Edek. 'I'll meet 
you in the breakfast room,' she said to Edek. 'No, no, I am coming with you,' 
Edek said. Edek patted the doorman on the back while the two men exchanged 
extensive farewells.
'Don't you find him revolting?' Ruth said to Edek.
'What is wrong with you?' Edek said. 'Why should you call him revolting?'
'I'm tired,' she said. 'I didn't sleep well.'
'I did not sleep so good, too,' said Edek. 'But I am alright. I did read a book 
from four o'clock. I got a bit of a pain in my leg. But. at my age you got to 
take it.'
'You didn't sleep from four a.m.?' Ruth said.
'No,' Edek said. 'But I am not sleepy.'
'Do you think you were nervous about going out into Lodz, today?'
she said.
'Maybe a bit,' he said. 'I got such butterflies.'
'You mean butterflies in the stomach? Nerves?' she said.
'Yes, a few,' he said. 'Inside my stomach I got a few such butterflies.'
'We'll be okay, Dad,' she said. 'We're together. We've got each other.'
'I have got a daughter who does not look so good,' Edek said.
'I found the bed impossible,' Ruth said. 'It was so lumpy. It went up in the 
middle and down at both ends.'
'Mine was the same,' said Edek. 'A bed like this is good for sexual things.' He 
put his hand behind him, in the small of his back to demonstrate how the bed 
could push the pelvis forward. Ruth found the demonstration disgusting.
'Dad,' she said, sternly.
'It is just a normal thing what I am saying,' he said.
'Well, say it to someone else,' she said. 'I'm sure your doorman friend would 
like to know.' She walked off ahead of him. Why were men so disgusting? Couldn't 
her father see the crudity in his comment?
Her mother used to flinch at her father's crudity. Rooshka had expended a lot of 
energy in an effort to eliminate all obscenity and crudity from her existence. 
She had been exposed to too much crudity. It had made her hypersensitive. She 
overreacted to every lewd or coarse joke. She was unable to tolerate ordinary 
lewdness, ordinary coarseness.
An attractive, blonde walked past Edek and Ruth. She was wearing a tailored 
black suit, and carrying a briefcase. Ruth looked at her. She must be meeting 
somebody at the hotel, for breakfast, Ruth thought. The woman looked so out of 
place in Lodz. Her clothes
 


were too sophisticated. Her demeanour was too clean. Her blonde hair was shiny 
and blunt cut. Her complexion was clear. Her fair skin and large blue eyes gave 
her an air of innocence and health. Ruth found her presence reassuring. An 
antidote to the feeling that she was surrounded by obscenity.
The breakfast room was full of men. Polish men. They were already smoking and 
drinking. They talked while they ate. Gold teeth and gold rings flashing. 
'They're peasants,' she said to Edek. He glared at her. He was right. She 
shouldn't call Poles peasants. It was a harsh and unfair assessment. She wished 
she had a better attitude to Polish people.
'I am not hungry,' Edek said.
'Well just have something light,' said Ruth. 'You need to eat, we've got a lot 
of walking ahead of us.' Edek brought two slices of ham, in the middle of a 
large plate, to the table. 'This is not too much?' he said to Ruth. Ruth felt 
agitated. How could two slices of ham be too much? Why did Jews have to be so 
neurotic about food? Fixated by every detail of everything that went into their 
mouths? 'No, it's not too much,' she said to her father.
She looked at the bowl of fruit compote she had in front of her. It looked 
beautiful. Whole plums had been stewed with apricots and prunes and pears. She 
was about to take a mouthful when she felt somebody staring at her. It was the 
blonde woman. She was staring at Ruth. Staring, fixedly. What was she staring 
at?
Ruth checked herself. She had been in a hurry to get out of her room this 
morning. Maybe she had forgotten something. She checked her clothes, her 
pantyhose, her shoes. Everything seemed to be in place. She felt her hair. Maybe 
it was sticking out more that she had intended. No, her curls seemed to be 
protruding and springing at the angles she had manoeuvred them into.
The woman was still staring at her. Ruth looked the woman in the eye. The woman 
didn't appear to notice. She seemed almost in
a trance. Ruth felt unnerved. She looked at Edek. He hadn't noticed anything- 
She turned her back to the woman.
A group of workers were hammering and banging in one corner of the breakfast 
room. The Grand Victoria was undergoing renovations. 'They're badly needed,' 
Ruth had said to the receptionist, this morning. 'Why do they have to do the 
renovations right now?' Ruth said to Edek. 'You'd think they could work on a 
less busy part of the hotel now, and come back here later, when there's no one 
here?'
'First you complain that everything is broken,' Edek said. 'And now you complain 
when they fix it up.'
The men were hammering slowly. One nail at a time. There seemed to be several 
workers for each nail. These renovations were going to be a lengthy process, 
Ruth thought. She looked at her father. He looked happy. He had been back to the 
buffet several times. He had eaten the two slices of ham, four fried eggs, some 
smoked mackerel, some compote and some toast. Ruth hadn't touched her food.
'Shall we walk to Kamedulska Street, this morning?' she said to Edek.
'If you want,' he said.
Kamedulska Street was where Edek had grown up. At number twenty-three. His 
father had owned the whole apartment block and the one next door. Edek and his 
parents had lived on the second floor of number twenty-three. Edek's brothers 
and sister also lived in the building.
After walking along Piotrkowska Street for several minutes Edek announced that 
he knew exactly where they were and what route they should take to Kamedulska 
Street. 'It is not so far,' he said. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes.' He rushed 
ahead of Ruth. 'The next street is for sure Pusta Street,' he shouted back over 
his shoulders to her. At the corner he peered at the street sign, and ran back 
to Ruth 'Pusta must be the next street,' he said, and ran off.
 


Ruth didn't know why he had to run. Why was every event, finding a street, 
buying an ice-cream, tying a shoelace, an emergency? Edek came running back to 
her. He was a bit breathless. 'This one is also not Pusta,' he said. 'It must be 
the next one.'
'Calm down, Dad,' she said. 'We're not in a hurry.'
'I am calm,' he said. 'I am not the one who needs to calm down You are the one 
who looks terrible.' He ran off, again.
Ruth sped up. She couldn't have her eighty-one-year-old father running backwards 
and forwards in the streets of Lodz. He would be worn out way before they got to 
Kamedulska Street. She met him at the next corner. He looked crestfallen. 'I 
thought for sure if the last street was not Pusta then this one would be Glowna. 
He was staring at the signpost. It said Pilsudskiego.
'Maybe Pusta and Glowna are a little further on,' Ruth said.
'I know Lodz,' Edek said. 'I know every street. I do not know what is 
happening.'
'Let's try a few more blocks,' Ruth said. 'If we don't get anywhere, we can go 
back to the hotel for a taxi.'
'Okay,' said Edek. He started to run, again.
Ruth walked behind him. She was too tired to run. 'What's happening?' Edek said 
to her when she caught up to him, three blocks further along Piotrkowska Street. 
'This street is supposed to be Gubernatorska and it is not,' he said. He looked 
very distressed. 'What is happening?' he said, again.
'It's been a long time since you were here, Dad,' she said. 'Its been fifty-
eight years. Things have changed.'
'Nothing has changed,' Edek said. 'I recognise everything.' They were 
approaching another corner. Edek ran ahead, to the street sign- 'Orla,' she 
heard him shout. 'It is Orla Street. It is exactly what I remembered.' He ran 
back to her. 'If this one is Orla then the last one must be Gubernatorska. I 
have to go back to check.' Ruth followed him.
She hadn't expected this. Edek was craning his neck to read a small sign on the 
side of a building. He swung himself around to face her and almost fell over. 
Her father had been wheeling and turning and spinning since they left the hotel. 
Lurching and whirling through the streets of Lodz. It should have been comic, 
but it wasn't funny.
'It says Abramowskiego,' Edek said, steadying himself. 'We never had a street 
called Abramowskiego.' Ruth suddenly remembered something she had forgotten. She 
had a map in her bag. She had several maps in her bag. She had a newly published 
map of Lodz, she had a map of the former Jewish areas of Lodz, and a map of the 
Jewish cemetery. How could she have forgotten about the maps? She always over-
prepared for everything. She got out the maps and studied them. Edek walked back 
to her. 'It seems to me,' she said to him after a few minutes, 'that some of the 
street names have changed.'
The maps of the former Jewish sections of Lodz seemed to have different street 
names from the same configuration of streets on the new map. 'I think,' Ruth 
said, 'that Pusta is now Wigury and Glowna is Pilsudskiego' She wasn't sure of 
this. Maps were not her forte. She considered it an accomplishment that she 
could now read a map. Maps used to give her a headache. For years all maps 
looked like mazes. Criss-crossed, clashing, coloured lines.
'Geography is complicated for you,' her first analyst had said. 'You don't want 
to know about other places. For you, catastrophes happen in other places.'
But I travel,' she had said.
Only to places you know or know about, you are frightened of
the unknown,' the analyst had replied. The unknown that her analyst
 


had been referring to was not a location. It was her parents' pasts.
Ruth had tackled quite a bit of that unknown since then. She had
asked her parents questions. She had read books, and now, here she
was in Lodz, able to read a map. What an accomplishment, she
thought.
 


'Why did you not remember you had such a map?' Edek said to
her.
'I'm sorry, Dad,' she said. She handed him the maps. Edek leaned against a shop 
window and studied the maps.
'You are right,' he said. 'The names of the streets are not the names what I was 
used to. They have changed the names. I told you, I would for sure know where I 
am. And I know where I am. Fifty-eight years and I did forget nothing.' He 
looked excited. He listed a long list Of streets they would be passing on their 
way to Kamedulska and ran ahead of her. She could hear him listing the streets 
to himself as he
ran
The area began to look familiar to Ruth. She remembered some of the streets from 
her last trip. The Jewish areas were all quite close to the centre of Lodz. The 
buildings, like most of the rest of Lodi, were run-down. They looked old and 
decayed. Crumbling walls, dark, cracked windows. Everything about these 
dwellings spoke of departure, past lives, lack of life. '
Tiles and beams and pieces of plaster and chunks of concrete were missing from 
building after building. Windows were wired shut and doors patched up. The Poles 
had not taken care of the buildings. They had taken care not to care about the 
Jews they had replaced, when they moved in to these apartments. The Poles were 
happy, then. Happy with the apartments, the furniture, the china, the clothes 
and all the other accoutrements of life that the Jews had left behind. There was 
not much life left in these fully occupied
dwellings now.
Ruth caught up with Edek. He didn't look tired. He looked well-She felt worn 
out. Exhausted. Maybe she was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. 
Seasonal Affective Disorder was a popular disorder, in America, at the moment. 
S.A.D., as it was called, was a deprivation of daylight which resulted in 
lethargy and depression-The winter light here in Poland was particularly weak. 
She was sure
contained none of what she needed to stave off lethargy or depression.
'Did you call the Jewish Centre?' she said to Edek. She had asked him to call 
the Jewish Centre on Zachodnia Street. The keys for the I wish Cemetery had to 
be picked up from the Jewish Centre. Ruth was interested in seeing the Centre, 
anyway.
'I did call," Edek said. 'I did say we was interested in seeing the Centre. The 
man I did speak to did say he was very busy. Then he did hang up the phone.'
'Busy?' said Ruth. 'There are seven Jews left in Lodz How busy can he be? I'll 
call, myself, tomorrow.'
Ruth knew that the Jewish Centre in Lodz only looked after a handful of Jews. 
All old men. It was set up to maintain the religious and cultural traditions of 
the Jews of Lodz. Edek was a Jew from Lodz. Why would the director of the Centre 
say he was busy? The Centre had another purpose. To revive Jewish life in 
Poland. To reclaim Jewish culture. To give an identity to people who were 
surfacing, now, in Poland, who thought they might be Jewish. Jews who weren't 
sure about their pasts. People who had a grandparent who was Jewish. People who 
were adopted. People whose parents seemed more Jewish than the parents would 
admit. Edek was a real Jew. Not like some of the newly discovered Jews who were 
beginning to turn up in the few synagogues left in Poland. Jews who looked very 
Polish to Ruth.
Maybe the director of the Centre was tired of old Jews passing through Lodz? 
Maybe he was only interested in those who were staying. She hadn't expected to 
be embraced by the Jewish Centre of Lodz, but she hadn't expected to be 
rejected. Too busy. She felt annoyed. Why hadn't he just said he wasn't 
interested? She was sure that his 'too busy' was a lie. Why did he have to lie? 
She felt angry, she caught herself. Why was she so outraged about the man who 
ran the Jewish Centre of Lodz? She was obviously over-tired. She Was glad that 
she hadn't heard from Max this morning. Having to
 


deal with Mr Newton or Mr Long would have been more than she
could handle.
Ruth thought about Max's married lover. Max was sure that he was not lying to 
her. 'He's got no need to lie to me,' she had said to Ruth. 'I'm not his wife.' 
Max hadn't seemed to see the lack of logic in her thinking. But then maybe logic 
played no part in affairs. 'I see him three or four times a week,' Max had said 
to Ruth. 'He's so supportive of me. He spends weekends with his wife. And I 
don't mind that. She doesn't seem to mind if he's out on Monday, Tuesday, 
Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. But he's got to be back with her on Saturday and 
Sunday.'
'I probably help his marriage,' Max had added when Ruth hadn't replied. 'Good 
sex with me probably helps him tolerate routine sex with her.' Ruth had remained 
silent. 'Okay,' Max had said. 'Maybe sex isn't so routine with her. Shit, why am 
I thinking about her?'
'I guess you share something pretty intimate,' Ruth had said.
'Pretty and intimate,' said Max. 'His you-know-what.' They had
both laughed.
Morality was such a complicated question. Ruth dealt with minuscule aspects of 
it in her work life, every day. A client she hardly knew had asked Ruth if it 
would be dishonest of her to become pregnant without telling her partner what 
she was planning.
'How are you going to carry out that plan?' Ruth had said.
'I would inseminate myself after sex, with the contents of the condom,' the 
client had said. 'It's always my job to throw it out.'
'Well he wouldn't have had any further use for it,' Ruth had said. 'You'd be 
using up something that would have just been thrown away.' They had all laughed.
'Would it be dishonest of me?' The client had asked, again.
'Dishonest?' Ruth had said. "I don't know. The world is full of men who 
manipulate women in the name of the law, the government and God. I don't know if 
it would be dishonest.'
Afterwards, she had thought that she had been cowardly. Of course it was 
dishonest. There were degrees of dishonesty in everyone's life, Of course. She 
herself felt a vague discomfort when clients cried at certain things she had 
written. She had caught one of her clients weeping profusely, in the office, 
after he had picked up a condolence letter. 'I thought you didn't like your 
uncle?' Ruth had said to him. 'I never saw this side of him,' the client said. 
Ruth had seen no point in pointing out that she hadn't known his uncle. 
'Everything you've said in this letter is true,' the client had said, and left 
the office, still weeping.
What was the truth and what wasn't, was often impossible to detect. The truth 
had appeared obscure to Ruth, from the time she was a child. She used to lie a 
lot. She made things up. As a six-year-old she spun whole stories around her 
lies. Stories of poverty and hardship. The Rothwaxes were poor, but in Ruth's 
tales they had to endure extreme deprivation. She and her mother and father had 
to share one blanket, Ruth told her school friends, and they slept on old 
newspapers, on the floor. Her school friends were riveted by her stories. The 
school Ruth attended was in an inner-suburban area populated with migrants and 
refugees. Most of the children had no trouble imagining Ruth's poverty. The 
stories became more elaborate as Ruth got older. They became more complex, with 
a better sense of structure and better timing.
Ruth lied as an adult, too. Stupid, harmless lies. As though no reality was 
worthy of repetition. Everything had to be expanded and enhanced. She couldn't 
help it. She was often shocked, herself, at tar lies. Surprised and bewildered 
at the words which she knew not to be true, that came out of her mouth. The 
shock didn't last long.
Ruth's elaborations and embroideries were intricate and authentic, to her. No 
sooner had she uttered them than she began to believe
 


1 what she was saying was the truth. A good liar had to be efficient and 
organised, Ruth discovered. Lies were too difficult to keep track
 


of, otherwise. And a good memory was essential. Good liars had to be able to 
retain the facts of their own existence and the facts of their lies. It wasn't 
easy.
Ruth rarely let herself spin off into meticulously constructed lies or 
fantasies, anymore. She had paid a lot of money to several analysts in order to 
give up this trait. She was happy she was no longer a big liar. The lies had 
entangled and snared and confused Ruth as well as their recipients.
As a child Ruth's lies had been intricate enough. She had made up relatives. 
Aunts, uncles, cousins. She made up cousins she loved and cousins she disliked. 
She had made up favourite aunties, and favourite grandparents. She had invented 
eight grandparents. She knew nothing about grandparents. She had eliminated four 
of the grandparents when she was old enough to know that people rarely possessed 
more than four. She had explained the extraneous grandparents as adoptions. Then 
she had whisked them, briskly, out of the picture. She had known, even then, 
that credibility was a crucial component of storytelling.
Attention to detail was also critical. Ruth knew the physical characteristics 
and personality quirks of all of the fabricated aunts and uncles and cousins. 
She had populated her world with so many made-up people. She had best friends 
and second-best friends and casual boyfriends and serious boyfriends she had 
invented. She had never been lonely.
Sometimes when she thought of the past, she couldn't remember which friends she 
had really had and which friends she had imagined. At least, now, she had a 
better use for her imagination. She made up letters all day. Six days a week. 
From eight-thirty a.m. to seven p.m. By the end of each day, she had had her 
fill of invention and fabrication.
The subject of relatives, her relatives, still occupied her, from time to time. 
When she visited museums or Holocaust memorials, she
saw herself in many of the photographs on display. Ruth knew, of course, that it 
wasn't her in the photographs, but it seemed reasonable to think that she might 
be looking at relatives. She looked at photographs of Jews in the streets of the 
ghettos. Photographs of Jews being liberated from concentration camps. 
Photographs of Jewish families before the war. She saw herself in all of them.
She had asked an official in the Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, if he had 
known the identity of a young woman in a photograph taken in the Lodz ghetto. 
Anyone who knew Ruth could have identified her right there in the centre of that 
photograph. The official didn't know who the young woman was. Ruth had given the 
official a list of people she was related to. The Buchbinders, the Spindlers, 
the Knobels and the Brajsztajns were all related to the Rothwaxes. They were all 
from Lodz. And they were all dead. Ruth had asked the man if it was possible to 
see if any of those names appeared in any of the photographs they had on display 
in the Centre. He had explained that it was an impossible task.
Edek had stopped running. He was walking beside Ruth. They walked past a young 
woman and her child. The mother looked about thirty. She was hitting the child. 
Smacking the small boy, hard. Ruth flinched at the sound of the slaps. What had 
the child done, she wondered? Something that bothered his mother. The mother was 
red-faced and grim. She kept on hitting him. He screamed and screamed. Why did 
people like this have children? Was beating a child one of the pleasures of 
parenthood? Enough parents beat their children.
'We did never smack you,' Edek said. 'Never.'
'Jews on the whole don't use physical violence,' Ruth said. She 'immediately 
worried that Edek may have interpreted her reply as offensive. As though she had 
insinuated that Jews were prone to emotional violence. She looked at Edek. He 
didn't look disturbed.
 


The boy continued to scream. The mother noticed Edek and Ruth She motioned for 
the boy to be quiet. He kept crying.
'You did never want a child,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Even when yon  was a 
teenager.'
'I still don't,' Ruth said. 'All of my nightmares are about children My 
children. I lose them. I leave them on trains and buses and other public places. 
I forget to feed them. I forget I have them. In my dreams, I have a baby who is 
born damaged and he disappears, right after the birth.' Edek stopped walking. 
'What is wrong with the baby?' he said. 'What baby?' she said.  'The baby in 
your dream, of course,' he said. 'I don't know,' she said. 'It's never clear. In 
the last dream someone took the baby away from me.' Edek stared at her. 'What's 
wrong?' she said to him. 'Nothing,' he said.  Something she had said had 
disturbed Edek. But what? Ruth had no idea what it was. She had no idea what 
much of her communications with her mother and father had meant. Things were 
said to her in short ambiguous sentences and semi-indecipherable phrases. Brief 
bursts of almost-comprehensible advice and guidance, warning and orders. Nothing 
was explained at length. Everything was in quick, oblique English. Edek and 
Rooshka were always stumbling and floundering in English, a language that was 
foreign to both of them.  'Why didn't you speak Yiddish to me? Or Polish? Or 
German?'
Ruth said to Edek. 'Why did you and Mum only speak English to  me, instead of 
one of the languages you were really comfortable in.
'Mum was very comfortable in English and I am very comfortable  in English,' 
said Edek.
'You weren't when you had me,' Ruth said. 'You were forty, an you weren't in a 
position to go to English classes.'
'That is true. I was working in factories and so was Mum, he said.
'So why didn't you speak to me in a language that was easy for you?' said Ruth.
'Mum wanted for you to learn English,' Edek said.
'I couldn't have avoided learning English. We were living in Australia,' Ruth 
said.
'It is not so important what language you speak to a child,' Edek said.
'Of course it is,' Ruth said. 'How can you speak intimately to a child when your 
words are limited?'
 'As a matter of fact,' Edek said, 'It was Mum's idea. I was not so keen on it 
myself. Mum said, "We will speak English to this child.'"  To this child?' said 
Ruth. 'The other two didn't last long enough to catch on to language, did they?' 
Why had she phrased that so harshly? She hadn't meant to. 'I guess Yiddish could 
have reminded Mum of the babies she lost, or the past, in general,' she said, 
quickly.  'Mum said she did not want the baby to learn a language of the past,' 
Edek said. 'She did mean Yiddish. And she did not want the baby to learn the 
language of the Polish people. She said this baby is not Polish. And she is not 
German. I did not want to speak to a baby in German, in any case. What Jew would 
speak to a baby in German?'  'But Mum insisted I learn German at school,' Ruth 
said.
That was different,' Edek said. 'She did not speak German with you. German was 
not spoken in our house.'
Yes it was,' Ruth said. 'I was always reciting lines from Goethe, had to 
memorise them for my German classes. Remember I won a Prize for reciting Goethe? 
Mum was thrilled.'  'I remember,' said Edek.
Mum thought that if the Nazis arrived in Australia, I would at east be able to 
communicate with them,' she said.
'That I  is not so funny,' Edek said. 'That is what Mum did feel.'
 


'I didn't say it was funny,' she said.
The mother and child were walking behind Edek and Ruth. The child was still 
crying, but it was a quiet cry now, a whimper. 'I want to say something to that 
mother,' Ruth said. 'How do you say "bully" in Polish?' 'Are you crazy?' said 
Edek. He scurried ahead of Ruth Ruth turned around and glared at the mother. The 
mother looked startled. She smiled at Ruth. Ruth shook her head in what she 
hoped was a gesture of admonition. Why did most mothers become mothers? Ruth 
thought. They looked so unhappy in the job.
Occasionally Ruth liked a burst of mothering. Mothering other people's adult 
children in very small bursts. Sometimes you could experience an exchange of 
intimacy and understanding with a stranger's child. This was a mothering of 
sorts. A transferring of wisdom, however menial the subject matter. Ruth had 
been buying a petticoat in K-Mart on Cooper Union Square, when a young woman, a 
girl, really, she looked about nineteen, had asked her advice about a black 
dress that she was trying on. 'Does it look okay on me?' the girl had said. 'It 
looks gorgeous,' Ruth had said. And it did. K-Mart contained some surprising 
merchandise. 'Is it suitable for a formal dinner?' the girl had asked Ruth. 'Or 
is it too formal?'
'It's just the right degree of formal to be formally formal or formally casual,' 
Ruth had replied. She had helped the girl choose a pair of shoes, as well. They 
had both left the exchange, glowing. 'Thanks so much for all your help,' the 
girl had said. Ruth had almost leaned over to kiss the young girl goodbye. 
Instead, she blew her a kiss. 'Have a wonderful evening,' she said to her.
Ruth loved K-Mart. It was open until ten p.m. every night, and she often went 
there to unwind. K-Mart kept her grounded. It showed her how real people lived. 
At K-Mart you could buy mops and buckets and plastic fly swats. K-Mart had 
detergent in huge containers, and racks and racks of rubber gloves. You could 
buy car jacks and screwdrivers and brooms and brushes and irons and ironing 
boards.
K-Mart stocked irons and ironing boards in the middle of a city
where very few people, Ruth was sure, ever ironed their clothes. Ruth's 
neighbour, an advertising executive, bought a fresh pack of white sports socks 
every week. 'It's not worth washing them,' he said to Ruth. 'They only cost five 
dollars a pack.' Clothes were disposable or dry-cleanable. There were dry-
cleaners on every block in New York Early in the morning and early in the 
evening, in the streets of New York City, men and women walked purposefully, 
holding dry-cleaned clothes aloft, in the air. Nobody ever said that they had to 
leave a meeting, or a meal, because they had to do their ironing.
Americans did seem obsessed with dry-cleaning, to Ruth. Americans living abroad 
who feared the local Parisian or Italian or Turkish dry-cleaners could airmail 
their clothes via Federal Express to Maurice Dry Cleaners, in New York City. 
Maurice cleaned the clothes and Federal Expressed them right back to the 
customer. It cost one hundred and fifty dollars to clean and ship a suede 
jacket. Maurice had customers in other parts of America and other parts of the 
world.
But then, Americans were strange. You could buy Mint Balls, in America. 'No More 
Doggie Breath,' it said on the packet. The manufacturers were not referring to 
human breath. These Mint Balls were breath fresheners for dogs. Two Mint Balls 
cost $3.99. On the front of the packet of Mint Balls was a drawing of a brown 
dog with a large green Mint Ball in his mouth. Ruth thought the idea must be to 
fool your dog into thinking this was a game of catch. The Mint Balls were not 
available in K-Mart.
Ruth loved the cafeteria in K-Mart, too. The cafeteria had the most wonderful 
view of the city. From its enormous arched windows you could see all the way 
along Lafayette Street and across to the East "village The food in the cafeteria 
was not bad at all.
The world of K-Mart was a world so removed from her own daily "'life of 
composing letters for other people. Composing congratulations-on-your-promotion 
letters for someone she didn't know, to arts of
 


send to someone else she didn't know. Composing letters for people who no longer 
knew what to say to each other. No wonder she needed to be soothed by the car 
jacks and the racks of rubber gloves in, K-Mart.
She had been thinking, recently, about opening a branch of Rothwax 
Correspondence in Los Angeles. She already had clients in California. She had 
quite a few clients in L.A. In L.A., they appeared even more in need of her 
services. Most of their brainpower seemed to be expended on their appearance. 
This applied equally to men and to women. 'I can recommend a great plastic 
surgeon,' one of her clients had said to her. Ruth had flown to L.A. to check 
out office space, and she was having lunch with the client. She liked this 
client. He was a thirty-three-year-old scriptwriter. When he had first phoned 
Rothwax Correspondence she had said to him she was sure he could write his own 
letters. 'I can't,' he had said. 'I can write two-and-a-half-minute cop scenes. 
I do those really well. I can write cops in cars, cops on the street, cops 
taking calls, cops speeding and cops in the office. I don't do cops at home or 
cops under suspicion.' Ruth had written several personal letters for him.
'I can recommend a great plastic surgeon,' he had said to her again, at the end 
of the lunch. Ruth thought she must have looked very tired.
'You look great,' the scriptwriter had said, 'but we can all use some help. I've 
just had lipo on my chin.'
'You've had what?' Ruth said.
'Lipo on my chin,' he said. 'Liposuction.'
'Really?' she said.
'Doesn't it look wonderful?' he said. Ruth looked at his chin. It looked exactly 
the same as the chin she remembered him having. She had looked again. She 
couldn't see any difference. But then she had only seen him, in person, twice. 
Most of their communication had been over the phone. 'It looks great,' she had 
said.
'I couldn't sleep for a few nights,' he said, 'but otherwise there was no pain. 
I'm going to go back to Dr Rosen and get my cheeks done.'
Ruth had been bewildered by this predisposition to reposition one's physical 
features. Why were people doing this to themselves? Arid more and more often. 
People you knew suddenly changed in appearance. Looked strange, overnight. One 
week they looked like themselves, two weeks later they looked like their own 
distant relative. People you had known as acquaintances or neighbours, without 
any warning, appeared weird. Slightly altered.
Plastic surgery was being performed in epidemic proportions across America. 
Scalpel knives were slicing their way through people's thighs, chins, abdomens, 
buttocks, upper arms, breasts, eyes and noses. It frightened Ruth. The 
alteration and the mutilation terrified her. Not everyone felt this way. 
Celebrities and other wealthy Americans wined and dined their plastic surgeons. 
They took them, along with their stylists and their personal trainers, to the 
opera, to openings and first nights. Grown people grovelled to their hairdresser 
and their exercise instructor. Grown people couldn't make a move without asking 
someone else what they should wear or where they should place a chair. People no 
longer combed their own hair or trusted themselves to make a decision about 
doing an extra push-up. It was a very strange culture, indeed, when a team of 
personal assistants was essential to your existence.
Edek had turned into Widzewska Street. Ruth followed him. He stopped outside a 
large five-storey building.
'My father used to own this building,' Edek said.
'I didn't know he owned a building on Widzewska Street,' Ruth said.
'He did own many buildings,' Edek said. Edek stepped back and looked at the 
building. 'In this building was thirty apartments.' An
 


elderly man was scraping some rotten wood from the bottom of one of the window 
frames on the ground floor. Edek walked over to the man. 'I am Edek Rothwax,' he 
said to the man.
The man put down his tools. He shook Edek's hand. Edek patted the man on the 
back and said he didn't want to interrupt his work. The man looked pleased to be 
interrupted. 'It's not a bad day, for winter is it?' he said to Edek. The two 
men chatted. Ruth understood snatches of the conversation. They talked about 
Poland and what hard times the country had been through. 'Things are better now 
that the communists have gone, aren't they?' Edek said to the man. 'Better for 
some people,' the man said, 'but not better for everybody.' He told Edek that 
there was much more crime in the country since the collapse of communism.
'Be careful of your car,' he said. 'People steal cars every day. Not even a 
locked car is safe."
'I do not have a car," Edek said.
'Just as well,' said the man.
The man moved on from car thieves to the subject of vandals, a subject both men 
seemed gripped by. Edek looked so comfortable with the man. He was nodding and 
agreeing. They had now progressed onto the subject of the current government but 
Ruth wasn't sure what was being said. She felt tense. Why was Edek speaking so 
enthusiastically to this old Pole? Finally, Edek shook the man's hand. They 
shook hands several times and exchanged goodbyes. Edek hadn't mentioned, to the 
man, that his father was the former owner of this building.
'Why didn't you say anything about your father owning the building?' Ruth said 
to Edek.
'What for?' he said.
'He was old enough to have been living there at the time,' Ru"1 said. 'Old 
enough to have been one of your father's tenants.'
'This man did not give the orders for all the Jews to leave their
homes and move into the ghetto,' Edek said. 'Why should I tell him? what 
difference would it make?'
'I don't know what difference it would make,' Ruth said.
'No difference,' said Edek.
Ruth pushed some hair away from her eyes. Her hair felt dirty despite the fact 
that she had washed it last night. She had washed it in a shower that was barely 
functioning. It had taken her twenty minutes. Yet, it didn't feel clean. She 
hoped it didn't look dirty. She hated the look of dirty hair. Dirty hair 
suggested other dirty body parts. Maybe that was what the blonde woman at 
breakfast was staring at? Her dirty hair. That was stupid, she thought. Her hair 
couldn't be that dirty, and who would stare at dirty hair?
Ruth's mother had screamed when she had first seen herself without any hair. She 
had caught sight of herself, in a reflection, when she was being marched to the 
latrines in Auschwitz. 'I screamed when I saw myself,' her mother had said to 
her. 'I thought I saw my brother. How could I know that with my head shaved I 
would look like my brother?' Ruth's scalp felt itchy. She tried not to scratch 
it.
'Are we far from Kamedulska Street?' she said to her father.
'Not far,' Edek replied. They walked side by side. Where was Kamedulska Street? 
Despite the fact that she had been there before, Ruth had no idea where it was. 
Every part of her parents' past was confusing to her. Even a simple matter like 
recognising a street was full of confusion. Their past, the good parts and the 
bad parts, was delivered to Ruth in fits and starts. And always in fragments. It 
was never whole. It always had to be pieced together. And the missing parts had 
to be imagined.
Ruth had asked her parents many times for the names of their siblings. She had 
almost begged her parents for the names. Yet the names of Edek and Rooshka's 
brothers and sisters came out one or two at a time. Both Edek and Rooshka seemed 
unable to mention any of their siblings in the one sentence. As though even in 
words
 


the family could not appear intact. Ruth felt she had so few names from the 
past. And no faces. No faces to the known names and the unknown names. The 
photographs which would have revealed the faces that belonged to her mother and 
father were destroyed Destroyed in Auschwitz. Those that were left behind in 
Lodz were thrown out by the Poles who moved into the homes the Jews had 
hurriedly vacated.
Who were the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews 
and nieces she had missed out on? What did they look like? She had felt their 
importance all of her life. She had felt their presence. It was a nameless, 
faceless, invisible presence. Parts of these brothers and sisters and uncles and 
aunts were in her. But which parts were they? There was no answer to that 
question.
Most children of survivors had very little idea of their parents' pasts. Their 
pasts before the war and during the war. They had to guess at what had happened. 
The simplest information was never simply offered. Everything was painful. 
Everything was pungent. Charged. Children of survivors were surrounded by 
secrets. The holes in their parents' pasts punctured and perforated the children 
of survivors. It left them with fissures and rifts and fractures. It left them 
with large hollows and cavities of their own.
Ruth had so many gaps and vacancies. The disability with geography and direction 
that her first analyst had pointed out still hampered her. No matter how many 
times she studied the map of Europe, she couldn't remember which country was 
where. It had taken her a year to locate New York and Los Angeles on a map of 
America.
Edek and Rooshka's pasts came out of them in bits and pieces. Sometimes they 
unmasked unasked-for snippets. Sometimes wisps flew inadvertently out of their 
mouths. Sometimes crucial facts had to be excavated and extricated, a task as 
awkward and difficult as any dental procedure. The information that was revealed 
was never
orderly- Each of the factual fragments seemed independent and unrelated to 
anything else. They were compact and self-contained. They stood alone and never 
illuminated other missing links in their orbit.
no matter how hard Ruth tried to order them, the facts about her parents' pasts 
shifted and switched with an alarming disharmony. She knew that her mother had 
lived on Pomorska Street, in Lodz, and attended a school around the corner. But 
one day when her mother was talking to a friend, a school had appeared in the 
house, On Pomorska Street. And a Jewish school, and a Polish school. How many 
schools did her mother go to? Or was Ruth confusing her mother's schools with 
her father's schools?
Ruth had tried to write all of the information down. Written down, it made more 
sense. When she looked at the sentences the information seemed more tangible. 
But as soon as she looked up from the page everything left her again. She had 
tried to memorise a list of her mother's and father's brothers and sisters. She 
had always had a good memory. She could remember whole tracts of what relatively 
unimportant people had said to her. She could remember phone numbers and 
addresses going back years. She remembered dates. Important dates and useless 
dates. She could memorise whole pages of books she had read and poems she loved. 
But for years she kept forgetting the names of her mother's and father's dead 
brothers and sisters. Just when she felt more sure of them, sure that Felek and 
Abramek and Jacob and Edek were her mother's brothers, new names appeared. Who 
were they? Who were Israel and Luba? Were they her father's parents? How could 
she have forgotten the names of her father's parents? She had asked her father 
so many times. She couldn't ask him again. She would have to wait until she got 
home and could look it up in her notebooks. She thought about other names she 
had heard. Who were Maryla and Yatchka and Fela? And was there a or a Shoolek, 
or were Shoolek and Shmulek variations on
same name? ulek or a Sh
 


Why was all of this so difficult for her to grasp? She had always done well 
academically. And at work, at Rothwax Correspondence she put together people's 
lives with no effort. She never got lost in the details she took from strangers. 
Facts from clients went into her head in a well-ordered and concise manner. Her 
parents' pasts were given to her in unsorted and ill-fitting increments. No 
matter how hard Ruth tried, the information remained disjointed. Maybe a past 
that had been so butchered could never be pieced together again. Maybe too much 
was missing. Missing mothers. Missing fathers. Missing brothers. Ruth realised, 
with a start, that the two babies her mother had lost, had been her brothers. 
She had never thought about them that way. She had always thought of herself as 
an only child. The missing boys were her mother's sons. It was quite a shock to 
think of them as her own brothers.
Ruth looked around for her father. He was so far ahead of her, she could hardly 
see him. She sped up.
When she was fifteen, she had asked her mother about the children she had lost. 
They had been sitting in Rooshka's kitchen. At the white kitchen table with gold 
legs. Rooshka had seemed to disappear when the question came out of Ruth. 'He 
was born with the cord around his neck,' she said, after about ten minutes. 
Which baby was that? Ruth had wondered. The baby born in the first year in 
ghetto, or the baby born later? 'It was your father's fault,' Rooshka said. 'I 
bent down to pick up your father's shoe. That's when it happened.' Ruth didn't 
say anything. How could an umbilical cord slip and knot just like that? How 
could it have been her father's fault? The baby would have died anyway. Most 
babies didn't survive in the ghetto. Why did Rooshka have to blame Edek?
Ruth had waited another ten years to ask about the second baby-All Rooshka would 
say about him was 'he died'. Ruth wondered " this baby boy was the baby who had 
been thrown, alive, on to the excrement cart by a Gestapo officer. Her mother 
had told Ruth about
that incident, once. It was her sister's baby, her mother had said. The story 
had been so difficult to take in that all Ruth could say was, 'Which sister?' 
Rooshka hadn't answered her.
Rooshka also told Ruth about a baby who was thrown out of the window of the 
hospital, in the ghetto, when they were emptying the hospital. Was that her 
mother's other baby? And then there were stories of children. Children with 
holes in their cheeks. Did her mother's baby grow up into one of those children? 
Did he die with holes in his cheeks? Ruth knew she would never know. She 
couldn't ask Edek. Edek was as reluctant to talk about it as Rooshka. It was no 
use asking him. He seemed to have trouble remembering the names of his cousins 
and uncles and aunts. His information was as erratic as anything else she was 
told about that time. Edek was calling her. She ran up to him.
'We did have a factory in this building,' Edek said. They were standing outside 
a red brick rectangular building.
'Really?' Ruth said.
'My father bought cotton and did weave the cotton in a factory outside Lodz,' 
Edek said. 'Then they did bring the material, the fabric, into this factory. 
This factory was a warehouse for the material.' Ruth was thrilled to hear this. 
She had never heard this aspect of the business.
'You had machines and looms and workers?' she said.
"'Of course,' Edek said. 'So you bought the cotton?' she said. 'I just did tell 
you that we did buy the cotton,' said Edek. 'Did you work here?' Ruth said.
'No,' he said. Ruth looked through the windows of the factory. She couldn't see 
anything. The glass was too cracked and grubby. Should we see if it's possible 
to look through the factory while we're here?' Ruth said. 'What for?' said Edek. 
,' Edek said. 'Then
 


'I don't know,' she said.
'There is nothing there,' he said.
Ruth felt a reluctance to leave the factory, but Edek had already moved on. She 
followed him. How amazing, she thought to herself They made fabric out of 
cotton. She had never even seen raw cotton She had seen photographs of the 
fluffy white balls attached to their dark stems and branches. The cotton looked 
as decorative as any flower. Where did the Rothwaxes buy the cotton? She decided 
not to ask now. She felt she had used up her quota of questions for the
moment.
Edek was peering into the back of another building when she caught up with him. 
She looked through a doorway into a large square courtyard. The courtyard was 
empty.
'That building at the back?' Edek said. 'This was a small office. My brother 
Shimek did work here."
'What did he do?' Ruth said.
'Shimek did work for my father, here,' said Edek. 'We did have such a place 
where all the trucks and wagons that did come into Lodz had to be weighed.'
'What for?' said Ruth.
'It was like such a tax what you have to pay to come into a city,'
Edek said.
'Oh, like a weighing station,' said Ruth.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'We did weigh the trucks and wagons and then we did put a 
stamp on the documents for the driver.'
'Wow,' said Ruth. 'Did your father start this business up himself? 'Of course he 
did,' Edek said. 'Who else would do it for him? He came from a poor family.' 'I 
didn't know that,' she said. 'Why should you know this?' Edek said. 'They were 
my great-grandparents,' said Ruth. 'It's interesting to know who did what and 
who made the money.'
'In my family, my father did make the money,' Edek said.
Ruth felt almost giddy. The information felt overwhelming. The plume and the 
content. She forced herself to calm down. They had only been out of the hotel 
for just over an hour. She didn't want to disturb Edek by being too emotional in 
the first hour. She followed him quietly. Edek stopped outside another building. 
He shook his head. He looked sad. The building he was standing in front of was 
clearly a cut above the other buildings. It had interesting proportions and 
semi-ornate architectural details. What connections did this dwelling have with 
her father or his father? Israel Rothwax, that was his name. Suddenly Ruth felt 
sure of that.
'We did live in this palace for two years,' Edek said. So this was the palace 
she had heard her mother mention.
'This is the former Rapaports' Palace, right?' she said.
'How do you know?' said Edek.
'Mum told me,' she said. 'It's a beautiful building.'
'On the ground floor was offices,' Edek said. 'You went through that door and 
did turn left and there was all the offices,' he said, pointing to a doorway.
'Did your father use the offices for his business?' she said.
'No, he did rent these offices to other businesses,' Edek said. 'My father did 
use old offices for his business. He did not have such fancy, posh businesses 
that he needed such offices. You do not need to have offices in a palace to 
write invoices for cotton fabric or do the paperwork for a truck registration 
business.'
'Of course not,' said Ruth.
'Was your father an educated man?' Ruth said. 'Did he go to high school? 



'No,' said Edek. 'He probably did leave school when he was eleven or twelve. To 
tell you the truth my father did not think education was such a big deal. But we 
did all go to school because my mother wanted to let everyone know that her 
children are educated.' Ruth's
 


head was reeling. This was more than she had ever hoped to have revealed to her. 
Her grandfather was clearly a very smart man. Probably smarter than most M.B.A.s 
today.
'My father did own this palace with a partner,' Edek said. 'A Mr Meyer. Mr Meyer 
was a partner with my father in another business.' Another business, Ruth 
thought. She didn't want to ask her father which business this other business 
was. She felt she had expressed far too much curiosity already. 'My father said 
the palace was too big for one family,' Edek said. 'So Mr Meyer and his family 
lived on the second floor and we did live on the first floor.' 'Were you close 
to the Meyers?' Ruth said. 'No,' said Edek. 'Mr Meyer was such a funny type, 
anyway.' Ruth knew from her experience, that 'such a funny type' covered a 
diverse range of traits and characteristics. She restrained herself from 
investigating the phrase, in this context, any further. She was so overexcited 
about what she was being told. And she didn't want anything to curtail the 
revelations.
'So you lived there for two years,' she said. 'Yes,' said Edek. 'Then my father 
did find out that Mr Meyer was cheating him in one of the businesses.' 'Oh, no,' 
Ruth said.
'I told you he was such a type,' said Edek. 'My father wanted to finish the 
partnership. He did offer to buy Mr Meyer's half of the palace, but Mr Meyer 
would not sell it to him. And Mr Meyer could not afford to buy my father's half 
from my father. So they did sell the palace and we moved back to Kamedulska 
Street.' 'Were you sad to leave?' Ruth said. 'No,' said Edek. 'Why should I be 
sad about this?" 'Because it's a beautiful building,' she said. 'We had enough 
rooms for us in the palace and we had enough rooms for us in Kamedulska Street,' 
Edek said. 'A room is a room wherever it is.'
How could her father have such a direct, straightforward approach to habitats, 
she thought, while she fussed and planned about every inch of what she was 
surrounded by in her apartment? Her sheets had to be the right shade of white. 
The walls and the flooring had to match the furniture and anything else in the 
rooms. She chose the canned food she bought according to the colour on the 
label. The can opener couldn't clash with the peeler or any other utensil. She 
bought blue soap, deodorant and shampoo for the bathroom. She was so 
pretentious, she thought. She must try to change when she got back. Maybe she 
could begin with multi-coloured toilet paper and tea towels.
'Mr Meyer did get less for his half of the palace than he would have got if he 
had agreed to allow my father to buy his half,' Edek said. 'I told you he was 
such a funny type.'
'It really is a beautiful building,' Ruth said.
'Look up there,' Edek said. He was pointing to the top floor. Ruth couldn't see 
what he was pointing at.
'When we did buy the palace, it did not have such windows on the top floor,' 
said Edek.
'What was there?' she said.
'Those windows what go toward the ground,' Edek said. 'Not straight windows.'
'You mean attic windows?' said Ruth.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'The windows what are not straight.' Ruth looked at the top 
floor again. She could see, now, that a new section had been added. The walls 
were slightly different in texture from the rest of the building.
'What happened to the attic windows?' she said.
'When they did buy the palace, Mr Meyer did measure every room,' Edek said. 'He 
wanted to make sure each partner did get exactly half. And the top floor because 
of these windows was a bit smaller than the first floor. My father did say that 
Mr Meyer could have the first
 


floor. But Mr Meyer did say it was important that each partner did
have the same.'
'So they ruined the original architecture in order to divide the
palace in half?' Ruth said.
'They did not ruin anything,' said Edek. 'What was ruined? They
did a very good job.'
'They changed the design of the building,' she said. 'So what?' Edek said. 'Is a 
design of a building such a big deal? No.' Ruth didn't want to argue about an 
issue of aesthetics. 'No,' she said. They both stood and looked at the building.
'Fancy owning a palace,' Ruth said, after a few minutes. 'I would have been a 
rich girl if I'd grown up here. If it all hadn't been taken from us.' She had 
never thought about this, before. About the wealth that had been lost.
'You are a rich girl,' Edek said.
'Okay,' she said. 'Anyway, I'm rich because I've got you,' she said.
She took his arm. 'I wouldn't trade you in for all the tea in China.'
'You do not drink such tea,' Edek said. 'You drink only the herbs
rubbish.' Ruth laughed. She looked at him. He looked fragile, and
tired.
'Walk next to me, Dad,' she said. 'There's no need to rush.' They
walked away from the palace. She held onto Edek's arm.
Neither Edek nor Rooshka made much of the financial aspect of their loss. The 
loss of businesses and buildings. There was, she thought, too much other loss 
for them to think about. Her parents lives would have been so different if they 
had been given just a fraction of the wealth that was taken from them. The theft 
had turned them into factory workers. Stolen her mother's dream of becoming a 
paediatrician, and given Edek a perpetual feeling of having failed his beloved
Rooshka.
Would she, herself, have been different if she had grown up wealthy? Would being 
a rich girl have changed her? Would it have
made her calmer? Would she have been calm and rich? Maybe she wouldn't have had 
so many metaphorical twitches? She would have grown up surrounded by family. As 
it was, she was left alone at home lot, as a child. She had always felt it was 
lucky she was able to imagine others around her. By the time Edek and Rooshka 
got home from their factory jobs, they were both worn out. There hadn't been a 
lot of time for games and bedtime stories. But Ruth hadn't minded. She had had 
such an assortment of fictitious friends and relatives around, she had been 
quite tired, herself.
Maybe if she had grown up rich, she wouldn't have had to tap her feet or blink? 
Who knows? Maybe she just would have been rich and neurotic? She knew few 
wealthy people who were happy. It seemed most human beings had to find something 
to be unhappy about. And the wealthy posited their unhappiness in their wealth. 
They blamed the laziness of their children on too much money. They blamed family 
feuds on the excess of money. They saw arrogance or rudeness in their offspring 
as the result of indulgence. The list of the ills caused by money was endless. 
The rich felt that everyone was taking advantage of them, from the maid to the 
doorman. They were always complaining about problems with staff. Yet they bought 
more houses and yachts and travelled and shopped. They seemed to overlook the 
fact that they chose to live like this. If you listened to the rich you would 
think that their lifestyle was forced on them and the number of servants 
required to service that life was simply an unfair and intolerable burden.
Rooshka and Edek had mentioned the material wealth that was stolen from them so 
rarely, that Ruth was an adult before she had understood that Edek's family was 
wealthy. She had known that her rather wasn't poor because he had said many 
times that as a young man he could buy as many ice-creams as he wanted. She knew 
that "her mother's family, the Spindlers, were poor. Rooshka was proud of that. 
Ruth thought that Rooshka 


might even have looked down
 


on the Rothwaxes' wealth. Rooshka's family had intellect, she always said. And 
she let Ruth know that Edek's family didn't.  'I did hire a lawyer,' Edek said 
to Ruth.
'A lawyer?' she said. 'What for?'
'Many Jews have got lawyers to see if they can get something back from the 
Poles,' Edek said. 'So I did get one too. A very nice chap as a matter of fact.' 
Ruth was startled.  'You didn't tell me you were even thinking about it,' she 
said.
'I did not think about it for so long, to tell you the truth,' he said. 'One 
day, I did think to myself, why not?'
'Well it's a big thing,' Ruth said.
'I got plenty of time,' said Edek.
'It could open up too many old wounds,' Ruth said. ,1
'They did never close,' Edek said.
'Who did you get to represent you?' said Ruth.
'A very nice chap, in Collins Street,' said Edek. 'My chap has a partner in 
America what is working on the same things with American Jews. I think that is a 
good thing. American lawyers are the best lawyers.'  Ruth felt shocked. She had 
never even considered the possibility of trying to regain some of what was 
stolen.
'Why do you want to immerse yourself in all of that?' she said. 'I don't need 
the money.'
'I am not doing it for you,' Edek said. 'To tell you the truth I do not know why 
I am doing it.'
'Oh, well, I don't know why I do half of the things I do,' Ruth said.
'The lawyer did tell me,' said Edek, 'that the Union Bank of Switzerland, the 
Swiss Bank Corporation and Credit Suisse made an offer of six hundred or seven 
hundred million to the Jews. This is not so much as what it looks.'  'We had 
money in Swiss bank accounts?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' Edek said. 'In 1934 the Swiss passed such a law which Hid guarantee 
anonymity to all people who did put their money in Swiss banks. My father was 
frightened of what the Nazis would do to our money, so he sent Shimek to 
Switzerland with money many  times.'
'I had no idea,' said Ruth.
'Why should you know?' said Edek. 'The seven hundred million that the banks did 
offer is nearly only the interest of the money they did have from Jews. They are 
not going to give back the money, just the interest, it looks like. And they 
want to give the seven hundred million over quite a few years.'  'So the seven 
hundred million that they are offering barely covers the interest they made?' 
said Ruth.
'That is right,' said Edek. 'After all, they had this money for over fifty 
years. When the Jews who was still alive made inquiries about the money after 
the war, the Swiss bank did say because of this anonymity that they did 
guarantee, they could not reveal any details of any banking accounts.'  'What a 
brilliant use of the law,' Ruth said. 'And of course none of the poor damaged 
and bedraggled Jews who'd managed to live through Bergen-Belsen or Dachau or 
Sachsenhausen or Auschwitz had any of their documents on them.'  'The lawyer did 
say,' Edek said, 'that the Swiss banks say they can find only ten per cent of 
the records for these deposits by Jews.' 'Some people's loss is so handy,' said 
Ruth. She felt furious. 'The Swiss banks did do very good business,' Edek said. 
'They gave the Germans Swiss francs to buy war materials from other countries. 
from Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Turkey. They did give the Swiss 
francs and the Germans gave them valuable possessions from dead Jews. The 
Germans gave them gold from the bodies of dead Jews. The Swiss did not care 
where the gold came from.' 'Doesn't it make you feel sick?' Ruth said.
 


'No,' said Edek. 'It is just facts."
'Well, it makes me feel sick,' she said.
'The Swiss did lend money to the Nazis to build the factories near the 
concentration camp. Like the Buna factory in Auschwitz where I did work.'
'You worked in that rubber factory?' said Ruth.
'It was not a real rubber,' Edek said.
'It was synthetic rubber,' said Ruth. 'I didn't know you worked
there.'
'Many prisoners from Birkenau did work there,' Edek said. 'The Swiss did say 
they did not know that they were financing slave labour.'
'Of course, they knew nothing,' Ruth said. 'Like everyone else.'
Buna, which was the size of a small city, was often called Auschwitz III. The 
grey concrete town with its carbide tower was an arrangement between I.G. Farben 
and the Nazis. I.G. Farben would build the plant. The Nazis would supply I.G. 
Farben with as many prisoners as they needed for their workforce. Both parties 
knew that the supply of workers from Auschwitz would never dry up. Buna would 
never have to suffer a shortage of labour.
The plan was to produce synthetic rubber. The arrangement between I.G. Farben 
and the Nazis was perfect. The Nazis had a glut of slave labour, and I.G. Farben 
had to pay very little for these half-dead men. When the workers dropped dead, 
in the plant, it was no problem. Replacements were rushed in. In Buna, the 
machines were more alive than the men. The men came from everywhere. Over twenty 
languages were spoken across those noisy machines. Buna was not a spectacular 
success. Over four years it failed to produce one pound of synthetic rubber.
Ruth felt her face. She was flushed and hot, despite the cold. 'I don't think 
you should bother going through all of this with a lawyer,' said Ruth. 'We don't 
want to grovel, and try to prove what we owned, to anyone. We don't need their 
money.'
'It is not their money,' Edek said. 'It is our money.'
'I don't want it,' she said.
They were close to Kamedulska Street, now. Ruth recognised a small grocery store 
she had bought some water in, when she had first come here.
'The lawyer did tell me,' Edek said, 'that all these dealings with the Swiss did 
allow the war to be two years longer. If the Swiss did not do this business with 
the Nazis, the war would have finished by 1943. It is the Americans who did make 
this calculation.'
'Your mother and father would still have been alive wouldn't they?' Ruth said.
'And your Mum's mother and father, and her brothers and sisters,' said Edek. 
'And your Mum would not have gone to Auschwitz.'
'I know,' said Ruth. 'You were in the last transport out of the Lodz ghetto, in 
1944.' Edek was quiet. Ruth felt like crying. 'Nobody cared about the Jews,' she 
said. 'Turkey sold chromite ore to the Germans. The Germans needed the ore to 
continue the war. Turkey said it was not a neutral country, but it was "non-
belligerent".'
'I did not know this,' Edek said.
'Spain sold wolfram ore to the Germans,' Ruth said. 'Wolfram ore was used to 
make tungsten, a particularly hard metal that was crucial to the Germans' war 
effort.'
'Oy, oy, oy,' said Edek. 'I did not know this.'
'Nobody in that part of the world was innocent,' Ruth said. 'The Swedes let 
German troops cross Sweden to 


join in the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Swedes let two hundred and fifty 
thousand German troops use the Swedish railway system.'
'It is hard to believe," said Edek.
'The Swedish navy provided an escort service for German military supply ships,' 
Ruth said. 'These countries were all busy making a profit from the murder of 
Jews. After the war, the allies, England, America, and France, asked Spain, 
Sweden, Portugal and Turkey to return the
 


gold, looted from Jews, that Germany had paid them with. They didn't want to. 
They hung on to the gold. And the allies didn't even ask them to give back gold 
that had been transferred through Switzerland by the Germans. Nobody wanted to 
give up anything.' She paused. 'You can see why I don't want their money,' she 
said, 'can't you?' 'Maybe,' Edek said.
'No one was punished except the Jews,' Ruth said. 'Alfred Krupn the main 
manufacturer of German artillery, armour plate, submarines and warships for 
Hitler, was never punished. The directors of I.G. Farben, who ran the factories 
at Auschwitz, were all acquitted of war crimes, like using slave labour. 
Apparently they were all acquitted for lad of evidence.'
'I could have given them this evidence,' said Edek. 'Of course,' said Ruth. 'But 
nobody asked you.' They walked, in silence. Ruth hoped that she hadn't depressed 
Edek It was depressing to think about how many people were pleased to benefit 
from the murder of Jews. And here, in this Catholic country, with barely a Jew 
left, anti-Semitism was still evident. Maybe the Poles didn't know that, earlier 
this year, their Pope, the Polish Pope John Paul II, had made an historic move? 
The Pope had apologised for the Catholic Church's silence during the Holocaust, 
In Vienna, in June, he had given a speech in which he said, 'Unspeakable 
suffering was inflicted on the Jewish people, in Europe. Reconciliation with the 
Jews,' he added, 'is one of the most fundamental duties of Christians in 
Europe.' Maybe the Poles had missed out on that speech?
Edek and Ruth were on Kamedulska Street. They stopped outside number twenty-
three. Ruth felt, suddenly, frightened. She shouldn't have forced her father to 
come to Poland.
'Did I force you to come to Poland?' she said to Edek. He didn't seen to hear 
her. He was staring at the building. He looked dazed. 'This is it,' he said.
'I know,' she said. She wanted to say something else, but she couldn't think of 
anything to say. 'This is it,' Edek said, again.
Ruth looked at the concrete and brick apartment block. It looked shabbier than 
she remembered. She remembered walking into this building, fifteen years ago. 
She remembered how difficult it had been for her to breathe. As though the 
inhabitants who no longer inhabited the apartment block took up all the 
breathing space. She could feel their presence. She had thought that she could 
feel their movements. The movement of children, cousins, mothers, grandmothers. 
On the first floor, Ruth had thought she could hear laughter and bustle. When 
she had knocked at one of the apartment doors, an old lady had emerged and told 
her that no one else was at home during the day, on that floor.
'Tadek and Moniek did have apartments in this building, too,' Edek said. 'They 
did live here with their families.' So there were children, Ruth thought. There 
were mothers and cousins and grandmothers in this building.
'Your brothers Tadek and Moniek?' She said.
'Of course,' Edek said, 'which other Tadek and which other Moniek should I 
mean?' Edek looked cold. He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders 
hunched.
'Shall we go inside, Dad?' she said. 'It's cold out here.'
'Maybe we do not need to go inside?' Edek said. 'There is nothing more to see 
inside. You can see everything what there is to see from here. Come on Ruthie, 
let us go back to the hotel.'
'Can we just look around the courtyard, out the back, then?' she said.
'What is there to see?' he said. 'Nothing.' She tried not to look disappointed.
'I'll just have a look around the courtyard,' she said. 'I'll be back in a 
minute.'
 


'I will come with you,' said Edek. He followed her into the hallway.
'Look how many apartments they did make on every floor?' he said.
He had stopped at an old intercom system just inside the hallway and was 
counting the buzzers. 'It looks like they did make three apartments from my 
parents' apartment,' Edek said. 'Look, see here on the second floor. It used to 
be our apartment, and the apartment of the Zukers and the apartment of the 
Bermans. Now, it is one, two, three, four, five, six apartments. The Zukers' 
apartment and the Bermans' apartments was not big apartments. They must have 
made the extra ones from our apartment.'
It was very quiet, in the building. There was no sign of life. Either the 
occupants were very old, or out at work. Edek had walked towards the staircase. 
He was touching the banister. What was he thinking about, Ruth wondered? What 
was he remembering? Ruth kept very quiet. She didn't want to disturb him.
Ruth looked at the crumbling plaster in the hallway. She had remembered this 
hallway as tiled. Tiled with smooth, cream tiles. Cream tiles with a patterned 
border. How could she have replaced the patchy plaster with Italian tiles? She 
couldn't believe she could have had such a distorted vision.
'Was this hallway ever tiled?' she said to her father. 'No,' he said. She looked 
at the staircase she had held on to fifteen years ago. The staircase whose 
banister she had gripped to keep a grip on herself. She remembered it as marble. 
It was not marble. It was made of wood. A wooden staircase. It didn't curve and 
sweep in a broad semicircle. The staircase had a gentle curve, and it was quite 
wide. But it was not ornate and it was not marble. How could she have turned the 
creaky timber stairs into marble steps? Sheer force of will, she thought. She 
must have needed them to be marble. She must have not wanted to see any decay, 
any disintegration. The marble must have represented the life, and the shine 
that must have been there, once. The life that she was looking for.
Ruth was shocked. She had a clear recollection of touching the tiled wall with 
her cheek. How clear could recollections be? They couldn't be that clear. There 
were no tiles, no marble, no shine, no life. There was just a run-down building, 
at twenty-three Kamedulska Street. She wiped away her tears. She didn't want to 
make Edek feel bad. He must be feeling bad enough.
Edek started to walk up the stairs. Ruth followed him. He stopped at the landing 
on the first floor.
'Here lived Tadek,' he said to Ruth. Edek's voice was quite firm, but his eyes 
and face and mouth looked shaken. 'And here lived Moniek,' he said. 'I did like 
his two children very much.'
'Moniek and Tadek lived next door to each other?' Ruth said. She knew it was a 
stupid comment. The doors to the two apartments were side by side. But she 
didn't know what else to say. She didn't want to ask about Moniek's children. 
She didn't want to ask whether they were boys or girls, or one of each? Or what 
age they were. Or what happened to them. She knew that they were all dead. But 
how did they die? And when? In all probability Edek didn't know.
'Here lived Mr and Mrs Bader,' Edek said, pointing to another door. 'They was a 
very nice couple. She could not have any children and she did give me always a 
piece of lekekh, a piece of spunch cake, when she did bake on Fridays.'
'How nice,' Ruth said.
'She did bake a very good spunch cake,' Edek said. Ruth loved the way Edek 
pronounced sponge. She had always adored this pronunciation. As a teenager she 
had taken it up herself. She had looked for opportunities to bring spunch cakes 
into conversations.
I could smell Mrs Bader's spunch from my bedroom,' Edek said. The placing of 
'smell' and 'spunch' so close to the word 'bedroom', in the one, small sentence, 
added a dimension to the word 'spunch' "at Ruth had never noticed. Smell, and 
spunch, sounded distinctly Sexual when linked to a bedroom.
 


What was she doing playing around with words and their connotations, now, Ruth 
thought? This was not the moment to go off on some word association fantasy. She 
had to stay connected to the present, at the moment.  'You lived on the next 
floor up,' she said to Edek. 'I lived on the next floor,' he said. 'The second 
floor.' 'Let's go up,' Ruth said.  Edek looked at her. 'We had, downstairs, in 
the back, a place where a man did come with a cow,' he said. 'You had a cow out 
the back?' said Ruth. 'The cow did not belong to us,' said Edek. 'The cow did 
belong to the man what came to us with the cow. He came with the cow and a big 
bucket. He did milk the cow and did put the milk from his bucket into the 
buckets of the people what lived in this building. He did come a few times a 
week.' 'I didn't know that,' Ruth said. 'There is a lot that you do not know,' 
said Edek. 'I know,' she said. 'The milk did come straight, fresh, out of the 
cow,' said Edek. 'It  did taste very good.'
'You wouldn't be able to drink milk like that, now,' said Ruth.
'Why?' said Edek.
'Because cows are fed hormones and antibiotics,' she said. "The antibiotics go 
into the milk. Raw milk is a perfect place for a variety of bacteria to multiply 
in.'  'Really?' said Edek. 'I did not know this.' 'Yes,' Ruth said. 'People get 
very sick from raw milk. Salmonella is the most common form of food poisoning 
caused by milk. Raw milk killed people in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, before antibiotics and hormones. Now, pasteurisation kills the most 
dangerous microorganisms.'  'Nobody did get sick, here, from the milk,' said 
Edek.
'Today milk is pumped directly from the cows' udders, by milking machines, to 
steel tanks, and from there to refrigerated trucks,' Ruth said. 'You did see 
this?' said Edek.  'I went to a dairy farm, once,' she said. 'Two years ago. 
They told me two hundred and eighty million glasses of milk are consumed by 
Americans every day.'  'Two hundred and eighty million?' said Edek.
'Yes,' she said. 'It's a lot of milk.'
Ruth stopped talking. Why was she talking about milk? She thought that this was 
possibly the most complicated conversation about milk that had ever taken place 
on this spot of the landing, on the first floor of twenty-three Kamedulska 
Street.  'You want to see where the man did milk his cow?' Edek said. 'Come on, 
I'll show you.' He started to walk downstairs.
'Dad,' she said. 'Let's see if we can see into your old apartment, first? Then 
we can go and look about the back.'
'You do not want to see where I got my milk?' Edek said.
'I do,' she said. 'But later.' Edek walked back up to her. They went up the 
stairs to the second floor.
'You want to knock on the door?' Ruth said. They were standing outside Edek's 
old apartment, the apartment he grew up in.  'No,' he said.
'Shall I knock?' she said.
'No,' he said.
One of us has to knock,' she said. 'This is the door that used to be the front 
door of your apartment? Right?' she said.  'This is the door,' Edek said.
Suddenly, and abruptly, Edek lifted his fist and knocked on the door. A loud 
abrasive knock. Ruth's heart started racing. She felt
 


breathless. The door opened slightly. An old man looked out into the darkened 
hallway. He seemed about Edek's age, but more aged than Edek. His shoulders were 
bent, and he seemed to have trouble seeing. He fumbled in his pockets and put on 
the glasses he was searching for. He peered at Edek and Ruth.
Edek stepped forward. He extended his hand to the man. Edek explained, with the 
aid of a multitude of polite and well-mannered expressions, and bows of respect, 
that he was here to take nothing away from this man. He introduced himself. He 
explained that he once lived in this building. 'I grew up here,' he said. 'And I 
just want to see the home of my childhood again. The home of my mother
and father.'
Edek motioned towards Ruth and said that Ruth, too, wanted to see where he had 
grown up. The old man looked up at Ruth. 'She has been here before,' he said. 
Ruth understood what he was saying. 'He remembers me,' she said to Edek.
'She was here fourteen or fifteen years ago,' the old man said. 'She wore a long 
black coat. And her hair was much longer.' 'He remembers your coat," Edek said.
'It was only an ordinary coat,' Ruth said. Even an ordinary coat had looked 
luxurious, in Poland, then. People were queuing for bread and there was no 
toilet paper. The man looked at the coat that Ruth was wearing now. It was a new 
coat. But still black. He smiled at her.
'He's remembering that I gave him several hundred zlotys,' Ruth said to Edek.
'Several hundred?' said Edek.
'They were worth much less, then,' she said. 'I am not interested in taking 
anything away from you, kind sir,' Edek repeated. 'Neither is my daughter.'
'Your family owned this building,' the man said. 'Your daughter
told me.'
'We do not want this building,' Edek said. 'I have lived for nearly
years without this building. Why should I decide I want this building now? I am 
an old man. I just want to see my old home.' Edek paused for a minute. He looked 
at Ruth, then turned back to the man. 'As a matter of fact, dear sir, I did not 
want to come here. 'What do I want to think about the past for? I am comfortable 
with my life- But she wanted me to come. She wanted to be here with me. What can 
you do when your child wants something? And she is my only child.'
'I have two daughters, myself,' the old man said.
'Congratulations,' said Edek.
Edek turned to Ruth. 'I do not think he is going to let us in,' he said.
'I've been able to understand most of what he's saying,' said Ruth.
'You understand more Polish than you know,' said Edek. 'What are we going to do? 
I think we have to go."
'We have to let him know we'll make it worth his while,' said Ruth. Edek turned 
to the old man.
'I know that to let perfect strangers, with no warning, into your own home is an 
inconvenience,' he said. 'We will of course make up to you for this 
inconvenience.'
The old man nodded his head. He stepped back and opened the door. 'You were 
right,' Edek said to Ruth.
They both entered the apartment. Inside, it was dark. The man switched on a 
lamp. Edek looked around. He seemed disoriented. He took a few steps and 
stumbled. He turned in the other direction and walked into a wall. 'Be careful, 
Dad,' Ruth said.
'They did chop it all up,' Edek said. 'They did cut off one room which used to 
be here. It must be now in the apartment next door.'
'They haven't looked after the place, have they?' she said.
'You can say that again, brother,' Edek said. 'Brother' was an Australian 
expression Edek had latched on to, 


not long after his arrival in the country.
 


'You can say that again, brother,' he repeated. Everything about the apartment 
was worn and in a state of decay The walls were peeling, the windows were 
blackened, the carpet was threadbare and stained. Everything looked dirty,
'You have a very nice place,' Edek said to the old man. 'Sit down sir,' the old 
man said. 'I will make a cup of tea.' 'Shall we have a cup of tea?' Edek said to 
Ruth. 'I guess we have to,' she said.
'Thank you very much,' Edek said to the man. Ruth and Edek walked into the 
living room. 'This room used to be part of our lounge room,' Edek said. Ruth was 
too distressed to be reassured by his pronunciation of 'lounge'. From the day he 
had learnt the word he had pronounced it 'lunge'. 'I'm lunging with my spunch,' 
Ruth used to say, to amuse Norman. It always made him laugh. Not even the 
thought of lunging with a spunch could make her laugh now. She felt so 
miserable, standing in this cramped, slumped and grubby apartment. She had 
remembered more light in the apartment, more room, more life. She had 
embellished everything. She mustn't have seen the neglect, the breaks and chips 
and cracks. She must have overlooked the dust and dirt. She must have been 
overwhelmed. Overawed to be there at all. Overawed by the thoughts of the lives 
that had been so alive, here.
When she had walked up the stairs in Kamedulska Street for the first time she 
had known she was placing her feet on the same steps her father had stepped on. 
As a child. As a teenager. As a young man. The same stairs her grandmother and 
grandfather had stood on. They had all used those stairs. All the aunties and 
uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces. And, that year, fifteen years ago, 
when she, Ruth Rothwax, had been twenty-seven years old, she, too, had walked up 
and down those stairs.
She had walked up and down the stairs for two or three hours before she had 
knocked on the door of the apartment. She had walked
from the ground floor to the top floor, five flights of stairs, dozens of times. 
She had almost been in a daze. As she walked she had imagined the children who 
must have run from one floor to the other And the mothers and the fathers. And 
her father. And her father's father and her father's mother. She had been quite 
exhausted when she had arrived in this apartment. Maybe that accounted for her 
blemished vision.
Edek looked distressed. 'This was not like it was when we did live here,' he 
said. 'It was a beautiful apartment.' He looked over in the corner. 'The balcony 
is still there,' he said. 'My father used to watch me come home from school from 
this balcony. He did want to check that I did have my hat on.'
'You told me that story,' Ruth said. 'I went out on the balcony when I came here 
last time.'
'Probably even the balcony is not very nice now,' said Edek.
'It was a bit dirty and run-down,' she said.
'What for do we need to stay?' said Edek. 'Maybe I tell him to forget the tea?'
Ruth looked around her. The crumbling walls and broken windows were at odds with 
the building's past. In the past this building had housed excitement and 
laughter, excitement and tenderness, excitement and love. She had felt the 
excitement on that first visit. And she could feel it now. It wasn't eroded by 
the disintegration or the neglect. She felt much better. It was still there. 
Still in the air.
'If you stand still, Dad, you can feel the past,' she said. 'You can feel the 
life.'
'Don't speak like that,' Edek said. 'It will be no good for both of Us" He 
looked as though he was about to cry.
'The tea is nearly ready,' the old man called out. 'Please sit down.' A sofa 
piled high with clothes was against one wall. A rocking chair faced the sofa. 
The rocking chair was covered in cat's fur. Ruth had noticed a large cat asleep 
in the kitchen. She moved the clothes and
 


cleared a space for herself and Edek. Edek looked at the sofa. his, face 
crumpled. He started to cry.
'What's wrong, Dad?' Ruth said. He shook his head. He looked embarrassed to be 
crying. He tried to stop. But his tears were insistent. They kept coming. Ruth 
felt sick. She shouldn't have put her father through this.  'We can go now, 
Dad,' she said.
'He is already making the tea,' Edek said. He wiped his eyes. 'This couch was 
our couch,' he said.
'Oh no,' she said. And she started to weep. Edek sat down on the couch. 'Do not 
cry,' he said to her. She sat down next to him. She put her hand in her father's 
hand. They sat, on the couch, holding hands. 'Do not cry, please,' he said to 
her, after a few minutes.  The old man arrived with three stained cups, a pot of 
tea, two teaspoons and a sugar bowl, on a tray. He put the tray on top of a 
cardboard box.  'Thank you very much, sir,' Edek said. 'It looks very nice.' 
Ruth wiped her eyes. She was glad there wasn't much light in the room. She 
didn't want to see the cracked, old cups with any more clarity.  'Ask him when 
he moved in here?' Ruth said to her father. Edek asked the old man the question.
'Approximately 1940,' the old man said.
'It must have been minutes after all the Jews were moved out,' Ruth said.
'Do not speak like this,' Edek said.
'He can't understand me,' said Ruth, and she held her cup of tea up and smiled 
at the old man. Bardzo dobrze, she said to him. He nodded, pleased with her 
compliment about his tea. 'It's disgusting tea,' she said to her father.  
'Ruthie, please,' he said.
'Ask him what happened to all of the things that were in here an in all of the 
other apartments,' she said to Edek.  'It is not necessary to ask this,' Edek 
said.
'Please, Dad,' she said.
Edek asked. 'He said his wife will know all of this. She was in charge of the 
rents in the building. She will be back at four o'clock,' Edek said to Ruth.  
'Ask him if he wondered what happened to all the people who lived here?' Ruth 
said. Edek asked. Ruth could understand the old man's reply.  'I heard they 
moved somewhere else,' the man said.
'Ruthie, what good is this?' said Edek.
'I'm not sure,' she said. 'There must have been so many photographs, books, 
documents, left. Ask him if he saw any.'  'My wife knows all of that,' the old 
man said. 'If you are extra nice, she will talk to you.'
'What does he mean extra nice?' Ruth said.
'He said his wife is not such an easy woman. We should maybe bring some 
chocolates and some flowers.'
'That's no trouble,' said Ruth.
'You really don't want to think of owning this building,' the man said to Edek. 
'This building is nothing but trouble. The owner can't sell it. Everything is 
broken. People don't pay their rents because nothing gets fixed. There is no 
heating. It is terrible.'  'Tell him we're not going to take this flea-hole from 
him,' Ruth said.
'I can promise you, sir, I have no interest at all in owning this Property,' 
Edek said.
'You don't even want to think of it,' the man said.
Ask him who the owner is,' said Ruth. The man shook his head. He said that he 
didn't know. Ruth and Edek got up. 'Is sixty zloty enough?' Edek whispered. 
'It's enough,' Ruth said. 'I don't think we're going to get anything out of 
him.' 'We will be back at four o'clock,' said as he shook hands with the old 
man. Ruth was surprised.
 


She had been sure that her father was not going to want to return. Edek and Ruth 
walked along Kamedulska Street. They passed an
empty block of land.
'My father did have a yard for timber, here," Edek said. He sounded
very flat.
'Mum told me about the timber yard,' she said.
'You want to walk to Pomorska Street where Mum did live?' Edek
said.
'Yes, please,' she said. 'I'd love to.' They walked, quietly, without speaking. 
Ruth was exhausted. Her father must be totally wrung out, she thought.
'I love you, Dad,' she said. 'I love you, too,' he said.
On Pohidniowa Street Edek pointed to an empty store front. 'It used to be here 
the bakery,' he said. 'On Friday I would take our cholent to the baker to go 
into the oven after the bread was finished. The next day was Shabbes and we 
couldn't cook. You know Shabbes, the Sabbath?'
'Of course I know Shabbes,' Ruth said.
'The cholent did stay in the baker's oven all night,' Edek said. 'The next day 
when Shabbes was over we did pick up the cooked cholent. My mother told me 
always to be sure it was our cholent that I did pick up, because we had plenty 
of meat in our cholent.' Edek smiled at the memory of the cholent.
'Your cholent had more meat in it than most of the local people's
cholent Ruth said.
'Much more meat,' he said. 'Some people's cholent had no meat. As a matter of 
fact I did once pick up the wrong cholent. It was in a pot what was just like 
our pot. It had no meat in it at all. My father was not very happy with me.' 
Edek seemed to have cheered up, talking about the cholent. 'Two more streets and 
we will be in Pomorska Street,' he said.
Ruth recognised the building her mother had lived in as soon as she saw it. She 
hadn't been able to look inside when she had last been in Lodz No one had been 
home, in the ground-floor apartment that Rooshka had lived in. Ruth and Edek 
peered into the hallway. It was dark and quiet. The only sign of any occupants 
was the washing strung out on lines, in the courtyard. You could see the washing 
from the street. The windows in her mother's old apartment were covered with 
layers of improvised drapes. Squares of an old blanket, pieces of faded lace, 
part of a used tablecloth.
'They put this stuff on the windows to keep out the cold,' Edek said. 'It looks 
pretty bad," he said, after a few minutes. They walked through to the courtyard 
where Rooshka had spent many hours studying and doing her schoolwork. The 
courtyard was bleak and barren. Filled with lines of washed and worn, torn and 
faded clothes.
Edek put his hands over his eyes. 'There is nothing left,' he said.
'Mum used to study here,' Ruth said.
'I know,' he said. 'I did used to visit her. I used to beg her to come out for 
an ice-cream with me. But she always said no. She said how would she become a 
pediatrician if she went out all the time for ice-creams with me.'
'Where in the courtyard did she sit?' said Ruth.
'Just here,' said Edek, pointing to two steps. 'She was always here. Every 
night, after school. She was so happy to do her studies. Not like me. She was a 
lovely girl, your Mum.'
'I know,' said Ruth. Edek walked up to one of the windows of the Spindlers' 
former apartment. He tried to look through a crack in the window.
'It's pretty decrepit, isn't it?' Ruth said.
It is good Mum did not see this,' said Edek 



 


chapter eight
Ruth was sitting in the lobby of the Grand Victoria Hotel. She felt terrible. 
Her head ached. Her body was tired. Lethargic. Why did her body feel so tired, 
she wondered? She was exercising less than she did at home. She wasn't running 
as much, and she wasn't lifting weights. Yet, she was more tired. She was 
exhausted.
Her father was upstairs, in his room. He was reading one of his detective 
fiction books. The One-Armed Alibi. She hoped that The One-Armed Alibi was 
taking Edek's mind off his visit to Kamedulska Street, this morning. The cover 
of the book hadn't looked enticing. A man, with a bloodied stump of an arm, was 
being strangled by an even stranger-looking man. Still, she thought that nothing 
her father was reading about could be stranger than this trip. Ruth had wanted 
Edek to have a nap. But Edek had insisted that he was not tired.
'You'll feel better if you have a short nap,' she had said.
'I feel fine,' he had said.
'Well, at least read quietly in your room for an hour or so,' Ruth had said.
 'You speak to me like I am child,' Edek said. 'I don't sleep during the day in 
Melbourne. Why should I sleep during the day in Poland?
'Because it's more stressful, being here,' she had said.
'For me, the stress did happen a long time ago,' Edek said.
Ruth had felt worried about her father. He hadn't eaten any lunch-'I'm not 
hungry,' he had said when she suggested they stop for lunch-He looked well 
enough. Maybe no one would want to eat lunch after
the sort of breakfast Edek had had. Her father looked in pretty good condition, 
she thought. Especially considering the fact that he never exercised, and ate 
with abandon. He seemed to be in better shape than she was.
Her head hurt. She wondered if she had eaten anything that could have 
contributed to the headache. Maybe the figs in the compote had been canned figs? 
Canned figs, as well as chicken livers, bananas, peanut butter and chocolate 
contained Tyramine, a chemical that could cause blood vessels to dilate and 
result in a headache.
Ruth knew a lot of trivia about the body. She knew that the growls that stomachs 
made were the sounds of the digestive juices mixing with gas as they moved 
through the digestive tract. She had tried not to accumulate too many of these 
esoteric facts, but they kept attaching themselves to her. She knew that New 
Orleans had the highest proportion of obese Americans. Why would anyone want to 
know that?
She had also acquired an assortment of information about emergencies. She knew 
that you should treat burns with cold water, and ask for a fibrillator in the 
ambulance if you suspected you were having a heart attack, and a clot-bursting 
medication in case of a stroke. She knew how to administer CPR, cardiopulmonary 
resuscitation, to others and she had learnt a self-administered anti-choking 
manoeuvre. The abdomen was pressed just below the ribs, against the back of a 
chair forcefully. The movement was repeated until the air was forced through and 
the food expelled. Sometimes Ruth went through the motions of this manoeuvre, in 
practice sessions. She felt that, living on her own, it was important to know 
these things.
She also washed her hands several times a day. She knew that people who washed 
their hands regularly were sick less frequently. in Poland, she wanted to wash 
her whole body, several times a day. She felt in danger of contamination. But 
what was infectious? What Was contagious? Ruth wasn't sure.
 


She had showered, again, before coming down to the lobby to do some work. 
Working reassured her. She was composing a list of possible new subjects for 
letters. She thought she would try to expand her range of business letters. 
Business letters were so much less taxing than personal letters. People, Ruth 
found, needed help with the briefest of letters. A simple acknowledgment of the 
receipt of a letter could be rendered useless or incite a fury in the recipient 
with a lack of information or the wrong tone. It was important, in these letters 
of acknowledgment, to be brief and concise, but never brusque, abrupt or terse. 
The letter should identify the correspondence which was being responded to, and 
state the action that would be taken. This way, people would know that their 
query or complaint or request had been heard.
Letters of resignation were also an area in which it was easy to trip and fall. 
There were lawyers all over America who could be consulted about the legalities 
of a resignation. The lawyers looked after the client's legal position but 
seemed to lack an understanding of the emotional aspects of a letter of 
resignation. Ruth had written out a set of rules, for Max, for this category. 
Letters of resignation seemed to incite people to make inflammatory statements. 
A course that was clearly not in anyone's best interest. It was crucial, Ruth 
felt, that a letter of resignation should have no accusations or recriminations. 
Threats and blame were to be avoided. And, if at all possible, a complimentary 
line or two should be included. Ruth had had a lot of success with her letters 
of resignation. Twice, clients had told Ruth that their resignation letters were 
so effective that they had eliminated the difficulties that led to their 
intended departures.
Word of mouth was how most clients came to Rothwax Correspondence. Ruth had 
covered enough territory, on paper, to have traversed most of several of her 
clients' lives. She had written holiday greetings letters, the accepting and 
declining of invitations, birth announcements, sympathy letters and letters of 
apology for clients.
Ruth felt that she knew these clients better than most people each other.
Ruth wrote on her list letters to public officials. She must write a few more 
prototypes in this category. Rothwax Correspondence was receiving more requests 
for letters to public officials. A letter to a public official could be very 
effective or have no effect at all. The right letter made a big difference.
Ruth added to her list, praise-for-staff letters. She thought that this category 
could prove useful to many businesses. It seemed, to Ruth, so easy to spread 
goodwill. One brief letter of praise every other year seemed to bring results 
that far outweighed the effort involved or the money expended. Ruth added 
answering reference requests, welcoming new customers, multi-denominational 
holiday greetings, and rejecting-a-job-applicant letters to her list.
Ruth had had requests from parents to write letters on behalf of their children. 
She usually said no. She felt insincere adopting a six-year-old's tone. More 
fraudulent than she ever did voicing an intimacy or intensity for an adult, as 
part of a business transaction. Ruth had also turned away a large volume of 
business writing college application essays for the children of clients. So many 
highly reputable and successful clients doubted their children's ability to 
write a good essay. 'Wouldn't it be morally compromising if I wrote the essays?' 
she had asked one of her clients, the head of a large charitable foundation. 
No,' he had replied. 'Not any more morally compromising than if I helped him to 
write the essay.' 'But you would only be helping him,' Ruth had said. 'I would 
be writing the essays.' 'What if I bring in his half-written essays and you 
polish them up?' the client had asked. Ruth had refused. She didn't want to pass 
herself off as a teenager, even if it was only on paper. But writing college 
essays was clearly a market somebody could move into. Ruth wondered if it
as common for kids not to write their own essays in America.
probably only among the middle class and the wealthy, she decided.
 


A fax from Max had been waiting for her at the Grand Victor! Hotel when she got 
back from Kamedulska Street. Ruth had been surprised to hear from Max on a 
Sunday. Max was obviously taking her responsibilities as acting head of Roth wax 
Correspondence seriously In the fax, Max had told her that Bern's mother was 
coming in for a handwriting test, on Monday. This had been Bern's idea. 
According to Bern, Max said, his mother had very good handwriting. 'I'm going to 
give her a speed and accuracy test,' Max had said, in the fax. Speed and 
accuracy? What did Max think she was running? IBM? 'Every-thing is under 
control,' Max had added. What did Max mean? How out of control could a business 
become in this brief period of time?
The lobby of the Grand Victoria was mostly occupied by men. They were not the 
usual run-of-the-mill businessmen found in hotel lobbies. They looked more like 
criminals. They were middle-aged and skewered and circled with gold necklaces 
and bracelets and an occasional earring. Most of them wore large rings on their 
fingers. They were all smoking.
Several of the men had young women by their sides. Very young women. The young 
women looked adoringly at the men and sent them fetching glances whenever the 
men looked back. The women batted their eyelashes and patted the men on the arm 
or shoulder. Two of the young women were staring at Ruth. It was probably her 
computer, she thought. They probably didn't see too many businesswomen.
'You are having trouble with your father?' a voice said.
'Oh, no, not you,' Ruth said. 'No, I'm not having trouble with my father. I'm 
working. Why don't you disappear?'
'I can help with this trouble,' Hoss said.
'Trouble shooting would not, I think, be your strong point,' said.
you
I know what the problem is,' said Hoss. 'You do not know what need to know.' 
Most of us don't,' she said. 'I know what the problem is,' Hoss said, again. 
'And I know the
answer.' 'Your answers are not the answers I'm looking for,' Ruth said.
'Anyway I am not having trouble with my father. We have both
simply embarked on an extremely troubling trip.' 'That is true,' said Hoss. 
'More true than you know.' 'You of all people would know the truth of the 
situation,' Ruth
said.
'Thank you,' said Hoss.
'It was not intended as a compliment,' Ruth said. 'It was an acknowledgment of 
your expertise in this particular historical area.'
'You do not know what you need to know,' Hoss said.
'Neither do you,' she said. 'You're stuck in Zweites Himmel's Lager.'
'Let me help you?' said Hoss.
'You could just disappear,' Ruth said. 'That would be a big help.'
'Ha, ha, ha,' said Hoss. He thought it was a joke.
Ruth was irritated. 'It's not a joke,' she said. 'I want you to go away.' He 
laughed, again. What aspect of what she was saying could possibly appear 
humorous? She couldn't read Hoss's laughter. It sounded like ordinary laughter. 
Was he laughing at her? Was he remembering an old joke? Why didn't she twist her 
heel into the floor? Why was she allowing him to stay? 'Piss off,' she said to 
Hoss.
'Why are you being so difficult?' Hoss said.
Piss off,' she said. 'Can't you hear me? Are you going deaf in your old age? You 
should be able to hear me. At ninety-eight your ears must be enormous,' she 
shouted at him.
This didn't sound as insulting as she had intended. It sounded stupid. Ears did 
grow with age. She had recently read the results of
 


research into ear growth. Some English doctors had investigated the subject and 
concluded that ears grew, on average, one-fifth of a millimetre with each 
passing year. That didn't seem much, but over fifty years it added up to half an 
inch. Ruth had wondered whether the growth was due to gravity. Ears hung, after 
all. They were never supported. Lyndon Johnson, Charles de Gaulle and Salvador 
Dali all had big ears, the report noted. She herself had small ears. So did 
Edek. She decided there was probably little significance, apart from appearance, 
in people's ear size.
'I can hear very well,' Hoss said. 'And I am feeling remarkably well. My bones 
do not bother me so much. I feel youthful. Almost like my old self, again.'
'Your old self?' Ruth said. 'I wouldn't head in that direction if I were you. No 
one in their right mind would want to return to your particular old self.'
'Really?' said Boss.
'You'll be in hell forever if you can't understand that,' Ruth said.
'I am in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss said.
The other people in the lobby of The Grand Victoria seemed oblivious to the fact 
that she was talking to someone. Even the group of gold-chained and linked men, 
clustered in a circle of armchairs next to Ruth, didn't appear to have noticed. 
Their girlfriends certainly hadn't noticed. Maybe talking to dead people wasn't 
as obvious as talking to living human beings. Why did Hoss have to turn up now. 
She had just been beginning to relax. She had planned to make notes for Max on 
the structural aspects of a handwritten letter. How to select the paper and what 
size paper was required for particular text lengths. Until now, Ruth had 
selected and purchased all the stationery that Rothwax Correspondence used for 
handwritten letters and documents.
Ruth had planned to give Max a list of points to be taken into account when 
selecting envelope size and quality. And a corresponding list about paper 
selection. For example, Ruth always chose plain paper for formal letters, and 
made sure that casual letters were not written on paper that was too formal. She 
made sure there were no sentimental flourishes, colours, patterns or borders on 
love letters. She also made sure that the weight of the paper reflected the 
subject matter. Ruth chose fragile Japanese paper for people who saw themselves 
as more idiosyncratic. In certain careers idiosyncrasy was an asset. Ruth kept a 
whole range of handmade paper for a client who was an MTV executive and a range 
of paper embedded with petals and leaves and twigs for people whose personal 
lives or businesses were more connected to environmental and ecological issues.
Ruth had already taught Max how to situate handwritten letters on the page. How 
to date and address the letters. When to omit and when to include a phone or fax 
number. It all seemed so simple. But for most people it was very complicated. 
Max could still make mistakes. Recently Max had selected a rectangular envelope 
for a square sheet of letter paper. The wrong size envelope meant that a letter 
had to be awkwardly folded. A. detail that could appear unimportant, but wasn't. 
A badly folded letter suggested chaos and clumsiness and a lack of clarity. Some 
people might think this attention to detail was petty. But Ruth knew that it 
wasn't. She knew that people unconsciously absorbed the care and attention 
contained in the letters. In much the same instinctual ways as they perceived 
carelessness or indifference that was not immediately apparent.
Where was Hoss? Ruth realised that she had slipped into a reverie. A reassuring 
reverie in the self-contained, well-ordered world of letter Anting. In letters, 
if you were careful, there were no slips and spills. No one to take a thought or 
sentence into a direction that you hadn't intended. No one to question the 
sentiments and statements. The letter was all yours. And, if there was a 
response that was less than that you hoped for, it was made out of your 
presence.
Ruth could feel Hoss's presence. She knew that he was still around.
 


She wondered why she was so sure of this. She couldn't easily define why she was 
sure. It was something in the air. A thickening. A coarsening. 'I really am 
feeling so much better,' Hoss said. Ruth nodded to herself. A congratulatory 
small nod. She knew she was right. She had known Hoss was still there. 'I have 
been thinking about the various prisoners in Auschwitz,' Hoss said.
'Wow, you must really be trying to get out of Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Ruth 
said. 'Some more thoughts in this direction and you'll be the star of your 
sensitivity-training class.'
'Thank you,' said Hoss. 'Of all of the prisoners in Auschwitz, it was the 
gypsies who caused me a great deal of trouble, but, ironically, they were, and I 
must be careful to phrase this correctly, they were my most beloved prisoners.'
'You just lost all credibility,' Ruth said. 'No wonder you've been stuck in the 
sensitivity-training class for fifty-eight years. It's not smart to make 
statements like that. It doesn't have even a hint of reality about it. Your most 
beloved prisoners? What were you doing, walking around Auschwitz as the director 
of a love-fest, a love-in?'
'I was very fond of the gypsies,' said Hoss. He sounded hurt. 'I am telling you 
the truth,' he said.
'I bet,' she said.
How could he be so stupid? Ruth thought. Men, on the whole, seemed to be so much 
less aware of what they were saying. She looked at the men around her. They were 
still in their armchairs, smoking and drinking. They had no idea of how 
unattractive they were. They held themselves with the smug arrogance of men who 
believed they were attractive. There was probably a plentiful supply, in Poland, 
of young women who would flutter their eyelashes at these men. Poverty created 
climates for that sort of relationship.
The two girls who had accompanied this group of men had left. Ruth was now the 
only female in the lobby. She looked at the men, with what she hoped was an 
expression of contempt. She caught
herself. Why was she doing this? Why did she have to be so harsh and judgemental 
about these men? She would hate any man who dismissed women in the way that she 
was dismissing these men. Poland was definitely not bringing out the best in 
her. If she wasn't careful, she would leave the country as unpleasant a human 
being as the most unpleasant of the Poles she was railing at. If she wasn't 
careful, she would turn into one of them.
The lobby did feel cloaked in testosterone, to her, though. There were too many 
men. Too many men. Ruth was startled by the phrase. Was this what the gypsy 
woman, in Warsaw, could have meant by 'too many men'? Hoss and all of these 
Poles? But Hoss wasn't a man. He was a ghost. A phantom, a shadow, an 
apparition, an appearance. He was not a man. He was more like a bogyman, or a 
scarecrow, or the hobgoblin in a frightening fairytale.
'There are very few gypsies in Zweites Himmel's Lager," Hoss said. 'The ones 
that are there work mainly as fortunetellers.'
'They work in Zweites Himmel's Lager?' Ruth said.
'They are in a better category than I am,' said Hoss. 'I am in the top 
punishment category which is, to my mind, a little unfair. As a result of this I 
am unable to work. I am forced to remain idle.'
Ruth could hear the sound of teeth grinding. It must be Hoss, she thought. She 
herself had a tendency to grind her teeth, in annoyance. 'Why would gypsies be 
telling fortunes in hell?' Ruth said. 'Everyone there has already had their 
future. They know what it was. They are dead. Their future is behind them.'
'People still have a future in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' said Hoss. And the 
future is as unknown to them, there, as it is on earth. People are, of course, 
as always, concerned with their future.' Hoss sounded annoyed with her. How was 
she supposed to know how things worked in the afterlife? 'There is more to life, 
than life and death,' Hoss said. There is a life in death, as I have evidenced 
to you.'
 


I am not sure you can evidence to someone,' Ruth said.
 


'Why is that important?' said Hoss. 'My English is not so perfect that I have to 
worry about this?'
'You are right,' said Ruth. 'You have far greater imperfections to worry about.'
'Could we resume our conversation?' Hoss said. 'I think the resumption of the 
conversation is out of my control,' Ruth said. 'I'm starting to feel that I was 
destined to hear this.'
'Very good,' Hoss said. 'So as I was saying, there is a life in death. There is 
pain, illness, and, for some, happiness. There are libraries and censorship. And 
rewards and deprivations and punishments. There are nations and nationalities, 
and class structures. And positions and ambitions. All in all death is pretty 
much what one has already experienced in life. The difference is that some of us 
now have fewer experiences, fewer privileges and less freedom.'
'That sounds reasonable,' Ruth said.
'Are you suggesting that a certain justice has been administered?' Hoss said.
'Surely you know what I'm suggesting and what I am not?' she said.
'Maybe,' he said.
'But I am very interested in the fact that there is life in death, she said.
'There is also death in life,' Hoss said. 'But I think you know about this.'
What was Hoss referring to? The depression that she tried to stave off with 
exercise and analysts? Or the life that was forever missing from the lives of 
people who had survived too many losses, too many atrocities, too much 
obscenity? She decided not to ask him.
'So you have fortune-tellers in Zweites Himmel's Lager?' she said to Hoss. 'How 
fascinating.' Hoss made a small sound. It was a sound of pleasure. A brief 
exhalation of air. He was probably pleased at he interest, she thought.
'We have crystal readings and palmistry and astrology,' Hoss said. 'In Zweites 
Himmel's Lager aura readings are compulsory.'
'Aura readings?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'You know surely what an aura is?'
'A distinct quality that seems to surround a person,' she said.
'Exactly,' Hoss said.
'Why are aura readings compulsory?' Ruth said. She had never believed in auras.
'We have to have our auras read once a week, in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss 
said. 'They do not trust us to tell the truth. These aura readings, I can tell 
you from my own personal experience, are very reliable. They are more effective, 
I have heard people say, than the lie detectors they use in America.'
'Really?' said Ruth.
'You can be trained or tutored to avoid detection by lie detectors,' Hoss said. 
'But nothing, unfortunately, can change your aura.' It sounded like a good 
system, Ruth thought. Maybe she had been a bit hasty in her judgements of aura 
readings?
'So the gypsy fortune-tellers in Zweites Himmel's Lager get a lot of business do 
they?' Ruth said to Hoss. 'Yes, yes,' said Hoss. 'We all want to know what the 
future holds for us. And the gypsies have expertise in that field. I still have 
a soft spot for gypsies. In the spring of 1943 there were approximately sixteen 
thousand gypsies in Birkenau. I am not sure exactly how many. We included, of 
course, half-caste gypsies in this number. They lived in huts which were built 
to house three hundred. Each of these huts contained between eight hundred and a 
thousand gypsies.'
I think you may have the year wrong. I think it could have been 1944 Ruth said.
Please do not correct me,' said Hoss. 'It is my life. I was there. In July 1942, 
the Reichsfuhrer SS visited the camp,' said Hoss. 'I Personally led him on an 
extensive tour of the gypsy camp.'
 


'Himmler ordered me to destroy the gypsies,' he said. 'Himmler said those still 
capable of work could live, but the others had to be destroyed. It was not so 
easy a task to drive the gypsies into the gas chambers. They were the most 
trusting of people. I do not understand why their trusting natures bothered us. 
But it did. Many of us did not feel so good about killing the gypsies.'  'During 
the night of July 31st, three thousand five hundred to four thousand gypsies 
were murdered. Technically, I must add, it was also August 1st, as the gassings 
went on after midnight.'  'You concentrate on the technicalities, don't you?' 
Ruth said.
'I did not witness the killings of the gypsies myself,' said Hoss.
'Of course,' said Ruth. 'You were a witness to nothing other than the 
Reichsfuhrer SS's orders.'
The gypsies who were left after this had to go into the gas chambers eventually, 
too,' said Hoss. 'Four thousand of them went into the gas chambers in August 
1944. Schwarzhuber told me that it was much more difficult for him to witness 
this than any of the many previous mass exterminations of Jews. Schwarzhuber was 
the first Commander of the Protective Custody Camp of Birkenau, in 1944.'  'Do 
you think we could eliminate the euphemisms now that we're on better terms?' 
Ruth said.
'What do you mean by this?' said Hoss.
'Protective Custody Camp?' said Ruth. 'I think you could just refer to it as 
Birkenau or Auschwitz II. I'd know what you were talking about.'  'I see what 
you mean,' said Hoss. 'I will try. To get back to Schwarzhuber, this 
extermination of the gypsies was very hard for him. He knew almost all of them, 
individually. He had been very friendly with some of them.'  'Poor man,' said 
Ruth.
'I can see you do not quite comprehend the affection some of us had for these 
gypsies,' Hoss said.
'I do not quite comprehend the indifference you had to everyone else,' Ruth 
said. 'And you're still in deep shit because you don't even know what you are 
revealing.'  'Deep shit?' said Hoss.
'It's just an expression,' she said. 'You don't have excrement carts in Zweites 
Himmel's Lager, do you?' she asked.
'No,' said Hoss.
'I wonder why they spared you that?' she said. Hoss didn't answer.
Ruth remembered a question she had wanted to ask him. 'Is there a devil in 
hell?' she said.
'What?' said Hoss.
'Is there a devil in hell?' she said. 'Or is the place full of devils?' Hoss was 
quiet for a minute. Ruth thought that maybe it was hard to detect the devil in a 
place teeming with unseemly denizens.  'It is, as you suspected,' Hoss said 
eventually. 'There is not one devil in Zweites Himmel's Lager.'
'There are demons and fiends and dybbuks everywhere, are there?" she said.
'Dybbuks?' said Hoss. 'What is a dybbuk?'
'I'm surprised that you don't know what a dybbuk is,' said Ruth. 'After so much 
contact with Jews you would think you would know a few things about Jewish life. 
A dybbuk is the soul of a dead person that enters and takes control of a living 
person.'  'I did not know this,' said Hoss.
'There are probably dybbuks in the middle of the cutthroats and thugs and 
roughnecks in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Ruth said. A disturbing thought occurred 
to her. Did she have a dybbuk in her? Did she have Hoss's soul living inside 
her? She shook her head. She was being stupid. She didn't believe in dybbuks.  
'It is not only lowlife that lives in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' said Hoss.
 


'No, there are fine upstanding citizens like you,' Ruth said.  snorted.
'Could we leave this subject, please?' Hoss said.
'And go on to a more savoury one?' she said. 'Of course.'
'Despite the adverse and disadvantageous conditions,' Hoss said 'the gypsies did 
not appear to suffer very much psychologically as a result of their 
imprisonment.'  'You could work for me,' Ruth said. 'You have a real way with  a 
synonym and antonym.'
'How could I work for you?' Hoss said. 'I am not permitted to  work.'
'I was being sarcastic,' Ruth said. 'I was referring to your use of  the words 
"adverse" and "disadvantageous".'
Hoss snorted. 'I have asked you before not to interrupt me with  irrelevant 
observations.'
'So the gypsies were happy to be in Auschwitz, were they?' Ruth said. She shook 
her head. She noticed another woman in the lobby of the Grand Victoria. The 
woman looked Polish. She was about Ruth's age. She was well dressed. On the 
third finger of her left hand she sported a very large diamond. Ruth looked 
again. It was an enormous diamond. It stood out on her hand and looked quite 
incongruous in the less than elegant lobby.  'I have always had a great deal of 
respect for women,' Hoss said. Ruth almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of 
this notion, and the self-delusion involved, but she also felt a shred of alarm. 
Could Hoss read her mind? Did he know she had been thinking about women? 
Probably not. It was probably a coincidence.  'In Auschwitz, however, I saw very 
quickly that I would have to  rethink this position,' Hoss said. 'In Auschwitz 
it became apparent  to me, quite quickly, that even a woman must be observed 
carefully  and scrutinized before she is entitled to complete respect.'
'Oh yeah,' Ruth said. 'Your enormous respect for women  have dissipated fast. 
Those standards you applied for complete  respect? Not many women must have 
measured up.' Hoss snorted.
'You must have been full of concern for women,' Ruth said, 'when  you asked 
Professor Carl Clauberg of the University of Konigsberg to look into the 
question of female sterilisation.'  'What do you know about Professor Carl 
Clauberg?' said Hoss.
'I know he was thrilled to have official support for his research,' Ruth said. 
'He specialised in the treatment of sterile women. He was thrilled at the 
prospect of unlimited numbers of patients to work on.'  'That is enough about 
Clauberg,' said Hoss.
'Am I making you uncomfortable?' Ruth said.
'Not at all,' Hoss said, with a stern tone.
'When Clauberg arrived in Auschwitz in the spring of 1943 you installed over two 
hundred women in Block 10, for him,' Ruth said. 'He injected a series of 
chemicals into their fallopian tubes. It was a secret formula.'  'It certainly 
stopped the women from menstruating,' Hoss said. 'But we do not know if it was 
effective sterilisation.'  'That's because when the experiments were over most 
of the women were sent to the gas chambers,' Ruth said.  'I did not like 
Clauberg,' said Hoss. 'He boasted to Himmler that his methods could, with one 
skilled physician and ten unskilled assistants, sterilise several hundred women 
a day. But he had no basis from which to prove this.'  'Oh, he was a liar, was 
he?' Ruth said. 'A liar and a boaster. Did you like Doctor Horst Schumann any 
better? You called him from Berlin. Remember how he exposed a batch of several 
hundred Jews, mainly Dutch and Greek Jews, to fifteen minutes of radiation on 
genitals. He did about thirty men and women a day.' are you bringing this up?' 
Hoss said.   I  thought we were discussing your respect for women,' Ruth
 


said. 'After three months, Doctor Schumann, and I hope he was not related to the 
composer, castrated all of the men. Then he removed the women's sexual organs 
and shipped them to his laboratory in Berlin for analysis. He must have had a 
great deal of respect for women, too. What a pro-women team.' Ruth was agitated. 
She didn't need this agitation. She needed to recover from the morning. To try 
to absorb all that had happened. The information that had come her way from her 
father. The old man. The decrepit apartment block. What was she doing with Hoss?
The Girl from Ipanema was now playing, in the background, in the lobby of the 
Grand Victoria. There was something strange about the recording. Ruth realised 
after a minute that it must be a Polish recording. 'She goes walking' was coming 
out as 'She goes vucking'. It sounded just like 'She goes fucking'. 'She vucks 
slowly,' the woman sang. Ruth couldn't believe what she was hearing. Yesterday, 
she had been startled by another Polish recording. "I look into your arse,' a 
singer had crooned. It had taken Ruth several minutes to work out, that the line 
the singer was trying to sing was, 'I look into your eyes'.
Ruth looked around her, in the lobby. No one else seemed to perceive the lyrics 
as lewd. The woman with the diamond had been joined by another woman. An elderly 
woman. They looked like mother and daughter to Ruth. It made her happy to see a 
mother and daughter who looked as though they were enjoying each other's 
company. Ruth forgave the woman her large diamond. Being a good daughter, she 
thought, showed something infinitely more important about her than her choice of 
jewellery.
'The breaking up of families during the selection process,' Hoss said, 'caused 
much distress to the Jews. When we separated the men from the women and the 
children, it caused a terrible apprehension and panic in the entire transport. 
It was frequently essential to use force in order to restore order. Jews have 
highly
developed feelings of family. They stick together like leeches or limpets- The 
confusion that was brought about by this nervousness at being separated from 
each other was so great that frequently whole selections had to begin all over 
again.'
Why did she have to listen to this? Ruth thought. A better question would be why 
wasn't she trying to get rid of Hoss? She was too tired to get rid of him. He 
wore her out. He rendered her almost comatose, unable to move. As though she was 
in a trance. A hypnotic trance. She knew that she wasn't. Anyone who could be 
critical of the size of a diamond on the finger of a stranger was not in a coma 
or a trance.
'What psychological effect did imprisonment have on Jews?' Hoss said, as though 
Ruth had asked him that question. 'Even in the early days, in Dachau, the guards 
were particularly vicious with them. Jews were used to being tormented and 
hounded and victimised as the defilers and debasers of the German people,' Hoss 
said. Ruth could feel that Hoss was in the swing of his story. She could feel 
the relish in his re-telling of this part of the world's history.
'I observed,' Hoss said, 'an interesting phenomenon in Dachau. A copy of Der 
Sturmer was put up in the camp.' He paused. 'Do you know what Der Sturmer is?' 
he said.
'A pornographic anti-Semitic weekly publication produced by Julius Steiner,' she 
said.
'I thought you would know of it,' Hoss said. 'I myself did not approve of the 
pornography. After the copy of Der Sturmer was made available it was immediately 
apparent that fellow prisoners who had previously displayed no antagonism 
towards Jews became anti-Semitic. The Jews, of course, behaved in a typically 
Jewish manner by bribing their fellow prisoners. Of course the Jews had plenty 
of money.'
'This was before 1939, when most of the money that most of the Jews had was 
taken from them,' Ruth said.
 


'Of course,' said Hoss. 'It was before Kristallnacht. After Kristallnacht, for 
their own good, to save them from reprisals from the German people, Jews who 
were traders and businessmen were arrested. They were taken to concentration 
camp as protective custody Jews.'
Ruth laughed. 'How can you say that with a straight face?' she said. 'Protective 
custody Jews. Maybe you haven't got a straight face. I can't see you. Maybe 
behind that steady and serious voice you're making the facial gestures of a 
lunatic or a clown or an unsettled, mentally deficient buffoon?'
'You could probably see me if you tried hard enough,' Hoss said.
'Now you sound really retarded,' said Ruth. But she was unnerved. What did Hoss 
mean by that?
'I first became acquainted with Jews en masse, in Sachsenhausen, after 
Kristallnacht,' Hoss said. 'Before then, there were few Jews in Sachsenhausen. 
It was not yet an extermination camp. After the Jewish invasion, things changed 
at Sachsenhausen.'
'I think you've got your terminology wrong,' Ruth said. 'Prisoners are rounded 
up and imprisoned. They do not "invade" prisons.'
'Please do not interrupt me with such irrelevant things,' Hoss said.
'You're right,' she said to him. It was irrelevant. And maybe Hoss was right. 
Maybe invaders didn't actually have to do the invading themselves. She must look 
up the Oxford Dictionary definition of 'invasion'.
'Before the Jews, bribery at Sachsenhausen was virtually unheard of,' Hoss said. 
'Now, it became commonplace. Bribery and corruption were widespread.'
'Among the prisoners, you mean?' Ruth said. Hoss ignored her. 'I can see that 
the Jews were a real problem for you,' Ruth said. 'You are helping me to 
understand why you killed millions of Russians, Gypsies and Poles, but 
designated only Jews to be wiped off the face
of the earth.' She hoped that her sarcasm was loud and clear. She felt flushed, 
as though she had shouted the words. 'Not only were Jews corrupters of German 
bodies and souls, they were a massive logistical problem for you,' Ruth said to 
Hoss. 'How do you kill so many people and dispose of their bodies in an 
efficient and economical manner?'
'This was a question we relegated a lot of resources and manpower towards,' said 
Hoss.
'Very successfully,' Ruth said. 'We were a disposal problem for you. Refuse that 
was taking up too much room. Some of us were able to get away before you got to 
us. Half of the Jews in Germany emigrated between 1933 and 1939. You managed to 
dispose of the 125,000 Jews who were left. And 109,000 Austrian Jews managed to 
move to areas beyond your control, in 1937 and 1938. So the 70,000 Austrian Jews 
that you rounded up were not too much trouble to get rid of. But your real 
problem was in Poland. In 1939, there were 3,351,000 Jews in Poland. But you did 
a good job. Less than 369,000 were still alive after the war.'
In most of the large towns in Poland, Jews constituted more than a third of the 
total population. In 1939, there were over 250,000 Jews in Lodz. Three-tenths of 
one per cent survived. Her mother and father had been two of those three tenths 
of one per cent. What was she, herself, doing in Lodz? No Jew belonged here. You 
could still feel a hatred of Jews in Poland. And she and her father looked so 
Jewish. Especially her father. He looked just like all the Jewish men who used 
to gather in Poludnia Street, in Lodz, when Edek was a child. Ruth had seen 
photographs of street scenes in Lodz before the war.
For a time, when Edek was married to Henia, he didn't look quite so Jewish. Out 
of the blue, he had emerged with red hair. It had been Henia's idea. But Edek 
had liked the effect. He thought it made him look youthful, he said to Ruth.
 


'It makes you look like Lucille Ball,' she had said.
'Lucille Ball?' he had said.
'Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy,' Ruth had said.
'I look like Lucy?' Edek said. 'Oy, cholera, why didn't anybody tell me?' Edek, 
who had never been a redhead, had stopped using the formula that Henia had 
guaranteed would restore his hair to its natural colour, immediately.
'You spared those Jews who were personally useful to you,' Ruth said to Hoss.
'What do you mean by "personally useful"?' Hoss said.
'I'm being specific,' she said. 'Specifically referring to those Jews who were 
useful to you.'
'I do not understand you,' Hoss said. 'I treated all Jews in the same manner. 
According to my orders.'
'You had orders to employ two Jewish dressmakers in your home, in Auschwitz?' 
said Ruth.
'You have been listening to the wrong people,' Hoss said. 'I did not employ 
Jews.'
'Well, it wasn't technically employment,' Ruth said, 'because there was no pay. 
But they worked for you. Making dresses for Mrs Hoss. I guess their pay was that 
they were not immediately killed.'
'I have asked you once before, if you could please leave Mrs Hoss out of this,' 
Hoss said. 'Please.'
'Maybe,' Ruth said.
'I want to emphasise to you that I have never personally hated Jews,' said Hoss. 
'It is a fact that I looked on Jews as the enemy of the German people, but I 
myself never felt a personal hatred for Jews.' Ruth didn't say anything. 'I saw 
absolutely no difference between a Jewish prisoner and any other prisoner,' Hoss 
said, with indignation. 'I treated all prisoners in exactly the same way. In any 
case, I am not the sort of person who accommodates hatred with ease. It is 
simply not my nature. I know all too clearly what hatred
looks like. I have witnessed much hatred around me, and I have been the 
recipient of hatred. I have suffered from hatred. I know what hate is.'
'I know you know what hate is,' Ruth said. 'Few people would doubt that. Your 
sons knew hate, too. From the time they were small boys.'
'Why are we discussing my sons?' said Hoss.
'We're discussing hate,' Ruth said. 'And your blue-eyed, blond-haired sons knew 
all about hate and the hierarchy in the kingdom of hate that you ruled.'
'My sons played no part in this,' Hoss said. 'I will refuse to listen.'
'Can you?' she said. 'Can you refuse to listen to me? I don't seem able to 
refuse to listen to you.'
'My sons play no part in this story,' said Hoss.
'It is the story of their play, their games that I'm talking about,' Ruth said. 
'Remember, when they were eleven and seven, their favourite game was the 
prisoner and the commander? The elder boy was always the commander. He had a 
sword in his belt, and he would screw an imaginary monocle into his eye as he 
shouted at his younger brother, the prisoner, to march faster, faster. Schnell, 
schnell, schnell, he would scream at his little brother. The little one wasn't 
frightened. He knew the game well. He was not at all frightened by the rage his 
brother was expressing as he screamed and pretended to beat him. The small boy 
knew what to do. He was the prisoner, and he would spin around and fall flat on 
the grass. His brother the commandant would look at him with contempt, and then 
his anger would die down. He would give his little brother a last kick. It 
didn't hurt, both boys were barefoot, but the younger one knew what to do. When 
he was kicked, he rolled over like a limp bag. And he lay there his mouth open 
and his eyes glazed. His elder brother would look at him and, pretending to 
address a group of prisoners, would say Zum Krema-torium. He would then march 
off, stiffly, with a disgusted expression
 


on his face. The two boys loved this game. They played it regularly ' 'I did not 
hear any of what you have just said,' said Hoss. Ruth laughed. 'What did your 
wife think of that game?' Ruth said 'Or was she too busy tending to the rose 
hedges and begonias in her blue flower boxes?'  'I am not listening,' said Hoss.
'She didn't actually have to do the gardening in Villa Hoss herself, did she?' 
Ruth said. 'She had far too many prisoners at her disposal, in that tree-shaded 
stucco house. The house that was known by everyone in Auschwitz as Villa Hoss. 
Was Frau Hoss too busy overseeing the upkeep of the swimming pool, or the 
children's pets, the horses, the tortoises, the cats, the lizards? Maybe Hedwig 
had no time to notice what games her boys were playing?' 'You know her name?' 
Hoss said. 'I know her name,' Ruth said.  Ruth's stomach hurt. She put her hand 
on her stomach. It ached. 'You do not look so well,' Hoss said.
'It's a pity that there are none of your Nazi doctors around,' Ruth said. 'They 
would have fixed me up in a flash.' 'We had some very fine physicians,' said 
Hoss. The doorman approached Ruth and asked her if she would like a drink. He 
seemed unaware of the intense dislike she felt for him. Ruth wanted to say no. 
She wanted to say no to anything from this man. But she was thirsty. 'I'll have 
a Perrier,' she said. He came back to say they had no Perrier. 'I'll have 
anything that isn't bottled in Poland,' she said to him. He brought her a bottle 
of something that looked Italian. She poured a glass. It tasted fine. The 
doorman smiled at her. She tapped at a few keys on her computer, and made out as 
though she was engrossed in her work. The doorman went back to the front door.  
'The worst thing in the world is to be unoccupied,' Hoss said. I would accept 
any hard labour, any task at all rather than this enforced  idleness.' Ruth 
drank her mineral water. 'I am cut off from everything,' Hoss said.
'Maybe that's the point of Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Ruth said.
'No it is not,' said Hoss. 'Other inmates of Zweites Himmel's Lager have jobs 
and occupations. But I am not allowed to have a job.'  'Maybe you were too 
zealous in your last one,' Ruth said.
'They are punishing me,' Hoss said.
'You could be right,' she said. 'Is there a worse category of inmate than you in 
Zweites Himmel's Lager?' Ruth said.
'We are residents,' said Hoss. 'Not inmates.'
'You just called the residents of Zweites Himmel's Lager inmates, yourself,' she 
said.
'It was a mistake,' Hoss said.
'Are there worse conditions than the conditions set out for you?' said Ruth.
'I don't think so,' he said.
'No red hot flames?' Ruth said.
'They ceased with the flames a few years ago,' said Hoss. 'The psychologists, 
there, said the flames were not a deterrent. They instituted instead solitary 
confinement, censorship and peer review.'  'Peer review?' said Ruth.
'Yes, that is what I have to endure,' Hoss said. 'A monthly review by my so-
called peers. A bunch of blackguards and thugs and criminals and antisocial 
types. They deliver reports on my behaviour.'  'What do they say?' said Ruth.
'They are so stupid,' said Hoss.
'I'm sure,' Ruth said.
'They say I am antisocial,' said Hoss. 'Who would be social in this company?'
'You may have a point there,' Ruth said. She sipped her mineral water.
'Talking to you has very much helped my restlessness,' Hoss said.
 


'I have been forced to do nothing for so long. It is very hard. I cannot even 
pace.' A strangled sound escaped from him.
'Maybe if you pass your sensitivity-training class they'll let you exercise,' 
Ruth said. 'Maybe you should try to impress your peer review panel? Try to get 
on well with the boys.' 'They are not all boys,' Hoss said. 'There are some 
women on the panel?' Ruth said. 'Yes,' said Hoss.
'I'm glad that women are able to rise through the ranks in Zweites Himmel's 
Lager,' Ruth said. 'Speaking of peers, several of your peers in Auschwitz said 
you appeared to be a kindly, unselfish, introverted man. Although I'm not sure 
how seriously you can take some of those peers. They also said you were a 
perfectionist. I can believe
that.'
'I am a perfectionist, that is true,' Hoss said.
'Well you'll have to perfect the art of doing nothing,' Ruth said. 'It will be a 
whole lot better than what you were previously perfecting.'
'I do not think I will need to perfect the art of doing nothing,' Hoss said. 'I 
believe I will get out of here, one day. Things change, even in Zweites Himmel's 
Lager. And I am not a fatalist, unlike most
Jews.'
'Really?' said Ruth. 'Unlike most Jews?'
'I observed the Jews in Auschwitz over a lengthy period of time,' Hoss said. 
'Jews have a propensity for melancholy.'
'Auschwitz was not, for most people, an uplifting experience,' Ruth
said.
'That is true,' said Hoss. 'But I see the melancholy in all Jews. I
see this melancholy, on your face.'
Ruth touched her face. 'The melancholy is not there all the time,'
she said.
'The Jews in Auschwitz had more reason for melancholy. They, unlike most of the 
other prisoners, knew that they were, every single one of them, condemned to 
die,' Hoss said. 'They knew that they would remain alive for only as long as 
they were capable of work." 'Sure,' Ruth said. 'That is why, even in that first 
selection process, young girls tried to look older and stronger and old women 
tried not to show their age. They knew the appearance of whatever energy they 
could muster could save their lives.'
'The Jews, however, deteriorated very quickly,' Hoss said.
'Could that be because they arrived, most of them, after years of starvation and 
disease and imprisonment, years of unrestricted brutality?' Ruth said.
Hoss ignored her. He seemed able to ignore anything that he wanted to. Why 
should that thought surprise her? She wished she could ignore him. She didn't 
want to hear what Hoss had to say about the Jews. 'The Jews declined and 
disintegrated so rapidly not only because of the hard work, which I must say 
most Jews were unaccustomed to,' said Hoss. 'I believe firmly and absolutely 
that the Jews went downhill because of their psychological state.'
Ruth felt exhausted. What was the point of this conversation? Why didn't she 
just dig her heel in, and keep it there until Hoss collapsed? She wondered 
whether she could kill him. Could you kill ghosts or spirits? If you could cause 
them pain maybe you could slaughter them. She decided she had to calm down. She 
didn't want this tension with Hoss to give her a stroke or a heart attack or a 
cerebral haemorrhage. She could feel her heart racing.
'You know the expression "to go downhill", I see,' she said. What a stupid thing 
to say, she thought. Why did she say that?
 


'Yes, I know this expression,' said Hoss. 'My English is quite good, I think. 
"Downhill" is not such a common English word.
'The Jews were fatalists,' Hoss said. 'They gave in to all the wretchedness and 
discomfort and desolation. They gave in to the terror. They accepted their fate 
with a hopelessness. This lack of a desire to live, this indifference, this 
collapse of will made them susceptible,
 


physically, to the slightest thing. Death was inevitable for them. They accepted 
their fate.'
'You mean they didn't fight back?' said Ruth. Hoss didn't answer 'I've heard 
that before,' she said. 'I've heard it said that they were hopeless and 
pathetic. Not like you Germans.' Ruth could feel the hysteria rising in her. 
'You're right,' she said. 'We're not known for our physical prowess. Jews are 
not known for shooting and fighting. We're not known for our aggression towards 
others. But those feeble, apathetic Jewish prisoners really should have tried 
harder. They should not have lost so much of their strength. They should have 
been able to overwhelm the Germans. It's remarkable how fast they went downhill. 
First they were ordered out of their homes. They should have refused. The 
punishment was only death. Then they were imprisoned and deprived of all of 
their rights, not to mention their properties and material possessions. They 
were cut off from the rest of the world. A world that didn't care too much for 
Jews, anyway. The living conditions they were imprisoned in were so harsh that 
many of them died before they could be murdered. They died of disease and 
starvation and beatings. Being beaten to death was much easier than slowly 
starving. How did those Jews buckle so fast? Some of them didn't even last a 
year.
'They all worked for as long as they lasted. They worked for the Germans, making 
machinery and straw boots and other essentials for the German army. Children of 
all ages worked to help the Germans murder them later down the line. If the 
children stopped working for a minute, they were beaten. Those children, that 
is, who weren't murdered by the Germans because they were too young to work. 
It's amazing how quickly the Jews went downhill under those conditions. And that 
was years before most of them were shipped to you, Mr Hoss. Rudolf Franz 
Ferdinand Hoss SS Obersturmbannfuhrer.
'Most of them were no longer alive when they were shipped to
you. They had expended every last ounce of energy trying to look after their 
spouses and their children. Trying to hold their children. Trying to hold their 
children's hands at night and talk of better times. Giving a parent their only 
piece of bread. Those who were lucky enough to have a parent still alive. It's 
truly pathetic that these starved and diseased and tortured human beings didn't 
stand up to you. It displays a pitiful inadequacy to be cowed by thugs with guns 
and pistols and clubs and batons and dogs. You yourself wouldn't be frightened 
of guns and clubs and criminals, would you?'
Ruth thought she was going to throw up. She had to get outside. She had to get 
some fresh air. She ran out into Piotrkowska Street. She took several deep 
breaths. She couldn't allow herself to become so agitated. She had known this 
trip was going to be difficult. She hadn't known how difficult.
She felt grubby. She couldn't shower again. She would come out in a rash if she 
kept washing herself each time she felt soiled. Anyway, what she was trying to 
get rid of couldn't come off with soap and water.
She suddenly wanted to go home. Next to Hoss, New York looked wholesome. She 
thought of Washington Square Gardens and Fifth Avenue and the East Village. She 
made a promise to herself never to complain about the city again. She missed New 
York. Its edginess and worrying qualities seemed normal and reasonable, next to 
this.
'You do not know what you need to know,' Hoss said.
'I've had enough of you and your incomprehensible phrases and sentences,' Ruth 
said.
'I can help you,' Hoss said.
'You can help me by disappearing,' she said. 'Piss off.'
'This obscenity does not affect me,' Hoss said.
'This will affect you,' Ruth said. She dug her heel into the ground as hard as 
she could. She dug so hard that her foot hurt. She hoped that Hoss's blood 
vessels, if he still had any, were dilating. She hoped
 


he had an enormous headache. She heard a high-pitched sound, a faint shrill 
moan, and then a whoosh. It was the sound of a draft or a shifting air stream. 
Hoss was gone. She could feel it. The air was less dense, less viscous. It was 
easier to breathe. She took several deep breaths. She felt better. She went 
inside.  chapter nine
Edek and Ruth were standing outside number twenty-three Kamedulska Street. It 
was four o'clock. The remnants of a small altercation they had had before 
leaving the hotel still hung between them. The discord, like most discord, had 
arisen from something inconsequential. Ruth had ordered a ham sandwich for Edek. 
She had wanted him to eat something before they went back to Kamedulska Street. 
She had taken the sandwich to Edek's room. Edek had been reading, on the bed. He 
had hastily pushed some wrappers out of the way when he had answered the door. 
Ruth had noticed the corner of a cardboard McDonald's container and a large 
plastic cup on the floor. Several chocolate wrappers were in the rubbish bin.  
'When did you go to McDonald's?' she had said to Edek.
'An hour ago,' Edek said.
'I didn't see you,' Ruth said. 'I was in the foyer."
'I did go out from the side door,' Edek said.
'You shouldn't have gone out without telling me,' Ruth said. She said it more 
sharply than she had intended to.
'What is wrong with you?' Edek had said. 'I went just to the McDonald's and 
back.'
If I had found you not in your room I would have been worried,' Ruth said.
You like to worry,' Edek said. 'You are such a nervous type.'
'Thank you,' she had said. 'Don't go out again without telling me.'
'Okay, okay, do not get so nervous,' Edek said.
 


'And what are you eating junk for?' Ruth had said. 'McDonald's is junk.'
'If the McDonald's was such rubbish would they have so many McDonald's?' Edek 
said. He noticed the ham sandwich Ruth was holding. 'I will have this sandwich, 
too,' he had said. 'I did get only a small hamburger.'
'Jews are not meant to eat hamburgers,' Ruth said. 'Hamburgers are for goys.'
'And ham is for Jews?' Edek had said. Ruth didn't know why she had picked on her 
father for eating a hamburger. It just didn't seem like the sort of food an 
eighty-one-year-old should be eating.
The footpath outside twenty-three Kamedulska Street was strewn with old 
newspapers and other debris. The mess upset Ruth. She wanted to clean it up. She 
didn't want litter around this building. She suddenly understood why people 
tended and cleaned graves. Why they tidied up around tombstones and monuments. 
But this wasn't a grave. Twenty-three Kamedulska Street wasn't a shrine. It was 
just a site of a former life. It wasn't a mausoleum. There was no one buried or 
interned here. This building was nothing more than a patchy amalgam of building 
materials. Nothing of those that had lived here was left. The markings on the 
walls and floors from fingers and feet were long gone. Rubbed out. There were no 
sounds from past lives. No smells. There was nothing. This building was no 
longer attached to her or to Edek. This building was someone else's building. It 
was just another building, in Lodz.
Still, the mess disturbed her. She wanted to sweep the old leaves that had 
gathered against the wall. She wanted to get rid of the stubbles of straw and 
the cigarette butts, and the dust. She kicked a couple of old rags to one side, 
until they were in front of the building next door. Then she remembered, her 
grandfather had owned that
building, too. She kicked the rags into the gutter. She wanted to get a bucket 
and a scrubbing brush and scrub the pavement clean. She wanted to get down on 
her hands and knees and clean the street, herself. She told herself that she was 
being ridiculous.
She had seen other Jews, in Poland. Jews like herself. Looking for something 
that was no longer there. Looking for gravesites of mothers and fathers who were 
never buried. Looking for monuments and testaments to the existence of people. 
People who were extinguished without fanfare or comfort. Without prayers. 
Without tombstones and headstones. Without anyone at their side.
Ruth had met Jews who had travelled to Poland to erect plaques in the birthplace 
of lost mothers and fathers. Plaques listing the family members who once lived 
there. In return for permission to put up the plaques, the Jews contributed 
money. Money for the upkeep of the town square, or money to build a public park. 
Polish officials were, on the whole, pleased with these arrangements. And so 
were the Jews. This way they had a site, a marker, a memorial. A place to visit 
and sit with their dead. A place to pay their respects.
Housing the dead seemed to Ruth to be an essential part of life. She wasn't sure 
why it was so important. The dead were absent. They were absent regardless of 
whether their memories were enshrined in a vault or tombstone. Or their names 
engraved on plaques and monuments. The dead were as absent as they could be. A 
dwelling place for the dead, was really an address for the living. A place where 
the living could commune with those who were out of reach of regular 
communication. Where the living could feel their connection to those who were no 
longer alive. On the surface the fixtures and fittings of death, such as 
cemeteries and gravesites, seemed unnecessary. The obstacles to communion with 
the dead seemed less tangible than the Problem of a clearly marked location for 
the meeting.
Still, she wanted to clean up this particular location. She contemplated hiring 
someone to keep at least the exterior of twenty-three
 


Kamedulska Street clean. She decided that that was absurd. What would she be 
keeping clean? A memory? You couldn't sweep and scrub and wash memories. 
Memories came with their own degrees of cleanliness and comfort.
'Why can't they keep this place clean?' Ruth said to Edek. 'What for?' he said. 
'For us? It could be the cleanest street and the cleanest building in all of 
Poland and it would not make any difference to us.'
'They should clean it out of a respect for the memory of those people whose 
lives they moved into,' said Ruth. 'It is too late for respect,' Edek said.
Edek was carrying a dozen red roses and a box of Lindt chocolates. A four-pound 
box of Lindt chocolates. The roses were beautiful. Tall, voluptuous, full-bodied 
roses. They were a deep red. The colour of blood. Her mother had loved roses.
'Mum did like roses very much,' Edek said. 'That's exactly what I was thinking,' 
said Ruth. 'We think alike, me and my daughter,' Edek said. Ruth thought that 
Edek must have forgiven her her irritation at his solo outing. 'We do, don't 
we?' she said. She took the roses from Edek. 'You give Mrs Whatever-her-name-is 
the chocolates and I'll give her the roses,' she said.
They had bought the roses at an open-air market. The market had had a life force 
that was scarce in Lodz. Rows and rows of brown eggs had suggested a fecundity, 
a fertility which appeared at odds with the matte grey sky and flat air. Mounds 
of big round brown onions and bright red potatoes seemed to be bursting with 
life. The carrots looked strong and orange. Not pale like most city carrots. And 
the cabbages as big as beach balls seemed almost carnal. The street market had 
buoyed Ruth's spirits. The people shopping at the market had looked less grim 
than most of the other residents of Lodz-They had seemed more robust. Almost 
cheerful.
Ruth and Edek had planned to catch a tram to Kamedulska Street, but all the 
trams were crowded. And Ruth didn't want to stand in the middle of a crowd of 
Poles. All of the yellow and white trams, in Lodz, were always packed. Packed 
with dour passengers. All immobile. All frowning. Jammed in on their way to 
somewhere. Ruth wondered why the trams were always packed. The buses were always 
crowded, too. Where were all of these Poles going?
'Shall we go inside?' she said to her father.
'We got the flowers and the chocolates,' he said. 'Why not?'
In the hallway, Ruth was distracted by the ceiling. The ceiling was patched in 
several places. Large rough patches of brown concrete had been smeared over what 
must have been cracks and leaks. It was a particularly unpalatable shade of 
brown. The ceiling looked shit-stained. Patched and repaired with excrement.
'I'm sorry I made you come to Poland,' she said to Edek.
'You did not make me,' Edek said.
'It was my idea,' said Ruth.
'Maybe it was not such a bad idea to see how it looks now,' Edek said.
'You're just being nice to me,' Ruth said. 'I don't feel at all good, in 
Poland.'
'Who would feel good in such a place?' Edek said.
'Looks like not even the Poles,' Ruth said. 'They don't look like the happiest 
people on earth, do they?'
'Shoosh,' he said to her. 'Do not speak like this.'
Nobody in this building understands English, I'm sure,' she said. Anyway why do 
we care about offending them? I don't care if I offend them.' Edek shook his 
head and walked up the stairs. 'Sorry, ,' she said. 'I know this is not easy for 
you.'
Ruth and Edek stood outside the door of the apartment. Edek
 


must have stood in this very spot so many times in his life, Ruth thought. He 
was still living there with his mother and father when he was twenty-one and 
twenty-two. He was there for part of his twenty-third year. Ruth looked at the 
door of the apartment. She felt a sense of dread. She wished she was back in New 
York. Back in New York, where the unfamiliar was more familiar than anything 
here. Where the oddities seemed less odd.
'Come on,' said Edek. 'Let us go in.' He knocked loudly on the door. Ruth was 
surprised by the vehemence in his knock. She thought that she herself wouldn't 
have had so much boldness in her knock. Her knock would probably have been 
timid. A timidity designed to hide her rage.
A woman opened the door. At first glance, it appeared as though the woman had an 
exceptionally large head. Then Ruth realised it was the woman's hair that was 
huge. Some of this oversized hair was held in place by a scarf. The hair was 
bright red. The scarf that was attempting to restrain the hair was green. Ruth 
was disconcerted by both the colour coordination and the volume of hair. Elderly 
women didn't usually possess such unruly hair. And the red and green looked 
terrible together. Of course, Ruth realised, this red expanse of hair was not 
growing on the woman's head. It was a wig. It was somebody else's hair. Or maybe 
it was nylon.
The woman's face was lined and hard. She smiled at them. Her features rearranged 
themselves for the smile. Her face remained hard. 'Come in, come in,' she said. 
Her lips stayed almost fixed while she mouthed a series of obsequious welcome 
greetings. Ruth felt frightened. She walked behind Edek into the apartment. The 
old woman looked carefully at the gifts of roses and chocolates, and then handed 
them to her husband. 'Sit down, sit down,' she said. She took the rocking chair 
for herself. Ruth and Edek sat, facing her, on the sofa. It was warm in the 
apartment. Ruth was shivering. She moved closer to her father. Edek looked at 
her. 'I'm just a bit cold,' she said.
'There was nothing in this building,' the old woman said. 'When I moved here, 
the whole building was empty,' Ruth was startled. How could the woman lie like 
that? Ruth knew she had understood what the woman had said. 'She moved in in 
early 1940,' Ruth said to Edek. 'Everything was still here.' Edek asked the 
woman if the building had other tenants, when she had arrived. 'No one else was 
here,' she said. 'The building was empty.' The old woman had said this facing 
Ruth. Ruth tried to hide her expression of disbelief.
'We have a lot of trouble with this building,' the woman said. 'Nobody will fix 
anything, as you can see. It is a broken down building and not worth any money 
at all.'
'I am not at all interested in reclaiming the building, kind madam,' Edek said. 
'What do I want to trouble myself with a building in Lodz for? Please, kind 
madam, I live in Australia, on the other side of the world. What use would I 
have for this building?'
'Nobody pays their rents,' the old woman said. 'So you would not make any money 
from this building.'
'Of course not, madam,' Edek said.
'The tenants would pay rent, of course, if someone looked after the repairs 
needed,' she said.
'Of course,' Edek said.
'It would not be easy to get this building from the current owner,' the old 
woman said with a sigh. She rolled her eyes. 'The owner is a very difficult 
man.'
'Please, please, please,' Edek said. 'I did not come here to try to reclaim the 
building.' Edek looked at Ruth. 'Do you understand what she is saying?' he said.
'I can understand what she's saying,' Ruth said.
What were they terrified of? Ruth wondered. If the current landlord was so mean 
wouldn't anyone else be preferable? Even a Jew? Probably not, she thought. Not 
if the Jew was around, in person, that prospect was what was frightening them. 
The thought
 


of Jews returning was clearly not a palatable thought.
'Tell her this is the last place on earth you'd want to live in,' Ruth said to 
Edek. He ignored her. 'I meant, tell her you're committed to your life in 
Australia. You wouldn't possibly be in a position to move back to Lodz.' Edek 
looked puzzled. 'I just want her to know that there's no chance she's going to 
be surrounded by Jews, again.' Edek explained that he was not planning to 
return. The old woman looked relieved. 'Ask her if there wasn't anything small 
left behind," Ruth said. 'Like mezuzahs, or candles or photographs. Tell her 
you're only interested in those things of no value other than their sentimental 
value to you.' 'There was nothing here,' the old woman said. 'Nothing?' Ruth 
said to Edek. 'That is impossible. No one cleared the apartments out of all of 
the inconsequential stuff or anything else. A few Gestapo officers might have 
looked for valuables, but everything else was left just as it was.'
'There was not one thing in any of the apartments in this building,' the woman 
said. She was still wearing her scarf. She must keep it on all the time, to 
contain that wild wig, Ruth thought. 'There were no books, no photographs?' Edek 
said. 'I have said to you,' the woman said, 'there was nothing.' The old man 
came out of the kitchen.
'I can vouch for that,' he said. 'I came not too long after her and the place 
was completely empty.'
Edek winced. Ruth looked at him. His face was contorted. 'Are you alright?' she 
said.
'I am fine, fine,' he said. But he didn't look fine. 'I did see, in the corner, 
a bowl which did belong to my mother,' Edek said to her. Ruth looked shocked. 
'Please,' Edek said. 'Do not let her see that I saw this. Ruth looked in the 
corner. On top of a small chest of drawers was an ornate, engraved oval silver 
serving dish. She started trembling-'Do not look at it, she will see,' Edek 
said. Ruth tried not to stare at the oval silver bowl.
'There was nothing in this building,' the woman said. 'The Jews took everything 
with them.'
'So she knew that it was Jews who lived here?' Ruth said. 'At least she's 
admitting something.'
As though she had understood what Ruth had just said the old woman said, 
'Everybody knew this was the Jewish area,' to Edek. Ruth thought that her tone 
must have alerted the old woman to what she was saying.
'Of course, of course,' Edek said to the old woman.
'Ask her where all the Jews went?' Ruth said. Edek asked.
'The Jews moved to bigger apartments,' the woman said.
'Jews are always moving on to bigger and better things,' Ruth said to Edek.
'I wasn't here when the Jews moved out,' the old man said.
No one appeared to have been there when the Jews moved out, Ruth thought. No 
Poles at all. Where had they all been when that endless straggling procession of 
Jews, carting whatever possessions they could, had walked through Lodz? Were the 
Poles out celebrating? Did they know they would soon be relocating to the 
dwellings that the Jews were forced to leave? For the poorer Poles, it must have 
been quite a bonanza, quite a bonus. It must have seemed like Christmas.
'Could we offer to buy the silver serving dish?' Ruth said to Edek.
'Please,' Edek said. 'Do not look at it. She will see you.'
'I'd really like to buy it,' Ruth said.
'What for?' said Edek.
'I'd just like to keep it with me,' Ruth said. 'To hold it and look , at it.'
'It is not a person,' Edek said. 'It is just a dish.' '. 'It's probably solid 
silver,' Ruth said.
'My father liked to buy silver for the table for Shabbes,' Edek said. They were 
both quiet.
'I didn't know anything about what was happening to the Jews,'
 


the old woman said. 'I knew nothing myself,' the old man said. 'I was in 
Czptochowa.'
'It wasn't happening to the Jews of Czptochowa? Edek said to the old man. Edek 
looked uncomfortable as soon as he had said this as though the sentence had 
propelled itself out, of its own accord. Edek shifted uneasily on the sofa. Ruth 
could see he was distressed at what he had blurted out. She could see that it 
was far more accusative than he had intended. Ruth smiled at the old man, in an 
effort to dilute the discomfort. No one spoke.
Ruth diverted her desire to stare at the silver dish by gazing at the front 
door. A stand was filled with an assortment of hats and something furry. Ruth 
thought it could have been a large cat. She looked more closely. It was an 
assortment of wigs. Different coloured wigs. Worn-out wigs. One wig slumped on 
top of the other. Why did anyone need so many wigs? And why leave them on 
display near the front door? They were so unsightly. A motley moth-eaten 
collection of wigs. Was the old woman bald? Ruth wondered. Did she grab a wig on 
her way out of the door in the way that other people picked up a hat? The wigs 
made Ruth feel a bit sick. The old woman saw Ruth staring at the wigs. Ruth 
looked away. She didn't want to offend her, yet.
'Ask her if there is anyone else in the building who might know of any 
photographs or other articles left behind,' Ruth said to Edek.
'There is nobody else who was there at the time,' the old woman said when Edek 
asked.
'Nobody else,' her husband added.
'Jengelef Boleswaf died ten years ago,' the woman said.
'Jengelef Boleswaf?' said Edek. 'He was our caretaker.'
'He lived on the third floor,' said the woman.
'He did live in the basement before,' Edek said to Ruth.
'So there were no documents, nothing?' Ruth said. Edek talked to the woman for 
several minutes.
'She does say that every single apartment was empty when she came,' he said.
'Oh, well,' Ruth said to Edek. 'Let's go. There's nothing here for us.' She 
moved, and went to stand up.
The old man beckoned her to stay put.
'He is bringing us a cup of tea,' Edek said to Ruth.
'Can't we say we don't want it?' she said. She felt exhausted. Exhausted by the 
woman's intransigence. Exhausted by the decrepit, depressing, disintegration all 
around them.
'How do you live in Australia?' the old woman asked Edek.
Tell her every Jew has a swimming pool, a yacht and a Mercedes, in Australia,' 
Ruth said. Edek laughed despite himself. Edek's laugh reassured Ruth. She calmed 
down.
It was naive of her, she thought, to think that she would be given anything by 
these Poles, even a fragment of seemingly inconsequential information. Ruth 
could see that Edek was depressed by these surroundings too. 'Don't be depressed 
by this, Dad,' she said. 'This is not your home. Your home vanished along with 
all of its occupants. A home is made up of who is in it.'
'You are right,' Edek said.
The old man brought in the tea. 'We'll drink some of the tea and leave,' Ruth 
said to her father. The old man smiled at Ruth. He put the tea and some biscuits 
on a small table next to Ruth. Six, horseshoe-shaped biscuits were placed on a 
white plate with a gold, fluted edge. There was a matching teapot, sugar bowl 
and milk jug. They had clearly brought out their best china, Ruth thought. The 
man came back with four matching cups and saucers. He poured Ruth a cup of tea. 
It was very strong tea. Almost black. Ruth wasn't sure she could stomach such 
strong tea. She decided that she needed a drink, and turned to Edek to ask him 
if he could ask for some hot water.
She could see straight away that something was wrong. Edek looked very pale 
Rum's heart started to pound. 'Are you alright, Dad?' she
 


said. He didn't answer her. 'Dad,' she said, 'Are you alright?' A bolt of fear 
ran through her. How would she get her father to a hospital if he was not well? 
What was the Polish word for ambulance?  'I am alright,' Edek said, weakly.
'Are you in pain?' Ruth said. Edek shook his head. He didn't look well. 'You 
sure? You've got no chest pain, no shortness of breath?' Ruth said. Edek shook 
his head. 'No shooting pains in the arms?' Ruth said.  'I am alright,' Edek 
said.
'Let's take you to a doctor,' Ruth said.
'I do not need a doctor,' said Edek. 'I just did get a shock.'
'Of course this has been a shock for you,' Ruth said. 'It's a big shock to be in 
your own home and see so starkly how everything is gone.'  'I knew it was all 
gone,' Edek said. He sounded a bit more like his old self.
'We shouldn't have come,' Ruth said. 'We knew there was nothing here.'
'The teapot and the milk and sugar things did belong to my mother,' Edek said. 
'The spoons, too.'
'Oh, no,' Ruth said. No wonder Edek had looked ill. She started to cry.
'Do not cry,' Edek said. 'It is too late to cry.'
'My daughter is very emotional,' Edek said to the couple. 'She gets upset 
easily.'
'Can we leave, Dad?' Ruth said.
'We have not finished the tea,' said Edek. He drank his tea while Ruth sat next 
to him and wept.
'Thank you so much for your hospitality,' Edek said to the old man and woman, as 
they were leaving. The old man took Ruth's hand and went to kiss it. She 
squirmed as his stained brown teeth moved closer to her hand. She pulled her 
hand away. She tried to smile at the man, but she couldn't stop crying. She 
wiped her hand  on the side of her coat. She wanted to wipe away the man's 
touch.
Edek and Ruth walked down the stairs. Ruth tried to pull herself together. She 
shouldn't fall apart like this. She should be looking after her father.  'Do you 
think she thought you wouldn't recognise the china?' Ruth said to Edek.
'Who knows?' said Edek. 'To tell you the truth it did give me a big shock. I 
remember my mother pouring tea from this teapot many many times.'  'It was a 
beautiful teapot,' Ruth said. 'The old couple obviously keep it for important 
occasions.'
'We did use this every day,' Edek said. 'My mother had two sets with twelve cups 
and plates so that sometimes if the whole family was there, we could all have a 
cup of tea.'  'I can't believe that the old woman served us tea in that 
service,' Ruth said. 'Maybe she's had it for so long she really thinks it was 
always hers. Maybe she's forgotten where she got it from?'  'Maybe,' said Edek. 
'It is not worth it to try to think about what she thinks.'
They walked down the rest of the stairs. Ruth looked at the backyard. It was 
barren. Cracked concrete with weeds growing in the cracks. A row of four 
outhouses were at the back of the yard.  'They was the toilets for the whole 
building,' Edek said. Ruth could smell the toilets.
'Judging by the smell,' she said, 'they are still being used.'
'We did have an inside toilet,' Edek said. 'Not many people did nave an inside 
toilet.' Edek walked over to a corner of the yard. Ruth didn't follow him. She 
thought she should allow him some time on his own. She walked away from the 
toilets.  A large brown dog wandered into the yard. Ruth moved away from the 
dog. The dog followed her.
'There's a dog in the yard,' Ruth called out to Edek. 'Don't let
 


him get too close to you,' she said. Edek turned to look at the dog.
'He is alright,' he said to Ruth. 'There is nothing to worry about. He is just a 
dog.' Edek was right, Ruth thought. There was no reason to worry about the dog. 
The dog was much less worrying than the humans around it.
Still, she didn't want to get too close to this dog. Why did dogs not know that 
she didn't like them? They always followed her and wagged their tails when she 
was trying to ignore them. 'Go away,' she said to the dog. He wagged his tail. 
'Go away,' she said. The dog walked right up to her. He looked at her and wagged 
his tail, again. 'I don't like you,' she said to the dog. He wagged his tail, 
again. He didn't seem to understand. 'Shoo,' she said to the dog. The dog looked 
at her. He had large brown eyes. Ruth had no idea what sort of dog he was. He 
was a large brown dog, to her.
She had deeply offended a client, once, by asking what brand of dog the client's 
dog was. 'What breed,' the client had said. 'Dogs are breeds. They are living 
creatures. They breed. They are not manufactured brands.' Ruth had apologised. 
'Of course, people don't have no-name brands of dogs,' she had said. 'You can't 
buy a generic dog.' She had meant this to be amusing, but she could see that the 
client had no room for humour in a conversation about his dog. 'I think you need 
to be more sensitive about how people feel about their dogs,' Max had said to 
her.
The next day Ruth had read a report by the American Animal Hospital Association 
that had said that seventy per cent of the former and current pet owners 
surveyed thought of their pets as children. The Association also had asked 
people to list the one companion that they would want on a deserted island. 
Fifty-three per cent listed a dog or a cat. Ruth found that statistic 
bewildering. She looked at the brown dog. What would you do on a deserted island 
with this dog? She was sure this dog wouldn't have anything interesting to 
contribute.
Americans were contributing billions of dollars to the economy for the care of 
their pets. Last year Americans spent over eleven billion dollars on the health 
care of dogs and cats and birds. The average cost of a visit to a vet, last 
year, was $73.60 for a dog and $66.58 for a cat. Ruth wondered why there was a 
discrepancy of seven dollars and two cents between the cost of a veterinary 
consultation for a dog and that of a consultation for a cat.
There were specialists, now, who treated the emotional problems of dogs, cats 
and even parrots. These veterinary behaviourists used drugs such as Valium or 
Prozac to deal with the anxiety of their clients. The pets, not their owners. 
They treated kittens who were slow to be toilet-trained, and dogs that howled 
with separation anxiety. There were academics in this area, too. A professor of 
behaviour at the University of California's School of Veterinary Medicine 
treated pets in his office. He charged one hundred and twenty dollars for a 
consultation of an hour to an hour and a half, to determine the cause of the 
problem behaviour. Follow up visits cost eighty dollars.
Ruth felt that she must be lacking some fundamental and profound human 
characteristic that allowed her to feel relatively detached from pets. 'Shoo,' 
she said to the brown dog, again. The dog wandered off towards Edek. Edek liked 
dogs. Edek patted the dog. Edek had been looking at a small patch of earth at 
the end of the yard. Ruth had been watching him. What was he thinking about? She 
thought. His mother's silver dish? His mother's china? The meals that were eaten 
on the china? The people who were eating the meals?
Ruth heard footsteps behind her. The old man had come out into 016 yard. He 
walked up to Edek, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. 'I told you to 
be extra nice,' he said. 'She is not an easy woman!" Ruth understood what he was 
saying. She was surprised that she could understand.
The flowers and the chocolates were not enough?' Edek said to the man.
 


'No,' said the old man. Ruth watched her father bite his lips, in an effort to 
suppress a reply from slipping out.  'The chocolates weren't large enough?' Ruth 
said to her father.
'Not for his wife,' Edek said.
'They were the biggest box I could find in Lodz,' Ruth said.
'I understand what the man is saying,' Edek said.
'So do I,' said Ruth.
'We think alike, like usual,' Edek said.
'Let's offer him money,' said Ruth. 'Why shouldn't we?'
'Who knows what we would get for the money?' said Edek.
'Probably more lies,' said Ruth.
'Why should we pay for lies?' Edek said.
'I've wasted money on lesser things,' Ruth said.
'No,' said Edek. 'I do not want to give them money.'
'It's only money,' Ruth said. 'You're not really giving them anything.'
'It would give them pleasure to get money from me,' Edek said. 'And I do not 
want to give them this pleasure.'  'Okay,' she said.
The old man had been looking apprehensively at Edek and Ruth. He looked as 
though he was trying hard to fathom the tone of their conversation. Ruth thought 
he had worked out that he was out of luck. That neither Edek nor Ruth was about 
to hand over a stash of cash. The old man looked bothered.  'My wife is really a 
very nice woman,' he said. 'It just takes something extra to put her in a good 
enough mood to talk.'  'Tell him he can drop that shit,' Ruth said.
'Please,' Edek said. 'Do not speak like this.' Ruth smiled at the man. She could 
tell he understood the general tenor of her suggestion. He fidgeted and shifted.  
'Maybe a small contribution to our lives?' he said. Edek didn't answer. Instead, 
he looked at the ground, and pushed a piece of loose  dirt around with his feet. 
He looked distracted and distressed.
'A small contribution?' the man said.
'I think we've already contributed enough,' Ruth said to Edek, 'Don't you?' Edek 
was quiet. 'Don't let him get to you,' Ruth said to her father.  'He is not 
getting to me,' Edek said. He continued to poke at the piece of earth, with his 
foot.  'What are you doing?' the old man said to Edek. 'Looking for Jewish gold? 
We know they buried their gold.'  'You know nothing else,' Edek said. 'But you 
know this?'
'I know the Jews buried their gold,' the man said.
'So the news of Jewish gold got to Czfstochowa?.' Edek said. The man nodded. A 
look of fury crossed Edek's face. 'Maybe your wife found this gold?' Edek said.  
Edek turned to Ruth. 'There is nothing here for us,' he said. 'Let us go.'
'You had a cousin who came here after the war?' the old man said to Edek. Edek 
spun around.  'Suddenly you remember something?' he said.
'You reminded me,' said the old man. 'A neighbour saw the cousin digging in the 
yard. Next to this toilet, as a matter of fact.' The old man looked pleased with 
himself. He was grinning in excitement. His grin displayed all of his stained 
teeth. He looked at the piece of ground. 'There's nothing there,' he said to 
Edek. 'We already checked.'  'You found nothing?' Edek said.
'We found nothing,' the old man said.
Edek nodded at the man. His nod contained disbelief, but Ruth thought that the 
disbelief was largely unnoticed by the old man.  'You don't want to try again 
with my wife?' he said to Edek.
'No thank you,' Edek said.
Edek and Ruth left.
 


'How did the neighbour know that the cousin was a Jew?' Ruth said as they walked 
along Kamedulska Street.  'I told you. They can smell us,' said Edek.
'How did he know he was a cousin of yours?' Ruth said.
'A neighbour who went to school with my cousin did recognise him,' Edek said. 
'My cousin did tell me this.'  'So this old man with his dirty, stained teeth 
and his air of innocence put two and two together and came up with four,' said 
Ruth.  'What do you mean?' said Edek.
'He worked out that a cousin of the son of the owners, must be a cousin of 
yours,' she said.  'I suppose so,' said Edek.
'Who was the cousin?' said Ruth.
'It was my cousin Herschel,' said Edek. 'Herschel did come back to Lodz after 
the war.'  'Where was he during the war?' Ruth asked.
'In a labour camp, in Germany,' said Edek.
'Where in Germany?' she said. '
'Past Leipzig,' Edek said. 'Near Chemnitz.'
'How was Herschel related to you?' Ruth said.
'He was the son of the sister of my brother Tadek's wife,' Edek said.
'He was your sister-in-law's sister's child?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek.
'I don't think he was your cousin then,' said Ruth.
'He was my cousin,' said Edek.
'Your brother and sister-in-law's child would be your niece or nephew,' Ruth 
said. 'And this cousin who came back to Lodz would be their cousin, not your 
cousin.'  'What is wrong with you?" Edek said. 'You think about things that it 
is not necessary to think about. Herschel was my cousin. We grew up together.'  
'Sorry,' Ruth said.
'Herschel did stay in Lodz for one day,' Edek said. 'It did take him one day to 
see that nobody was left here and that his life was in danger. Every Pole he did 
see, in the neighborhood, looked upset to see him. "I thought that they killed 
you all," was what one of his old school teachers did say to him.'  'What 
happened to Herschel?' Ruth said.
'He did migrate to America,' Edek said. 'In 1948. Your Mum and me were still in 
the DP camp in Germany. He was very excited to go to America.'  Edek paused. He 
took a deep breath. 'In America Herschel did meet a young girl, a Jew from 
Poland, too. He wrote to me to say how happy he was. Her name, I think, was 
Helcha. He did send to us a photograph of him and Helcha. Helcha was, as a 
matter of fact, already pregnant in the photograph.' Edek paused again.  'I 
didn't know about your cousin Herschel,' Ruth said.
'He was already gone before you was born,' Edek said.
'Where did he go?' said Ruth.
'He did not go anywhere,' Edek said. 'He did die. In a car accident. He did not 
even live long enough to see his son born.'  'How terrible,' Ruth said. 'To 
survive the Nazis and die in a car crash.' It was illogical, but Ruth thought 
that surely all of Herschel's suffering should have protected him against 
further tragedy. Ruth felt depressed. Life was so haphazard and unpredictable,  
'I did like Herschel very much,' Edek said. 'He was the only one in my family 
what was alive after the war.'  'Dad,' Ruth said. 'Do you think we could buy 
your mother's china from those Poles?'  'Forget about it,' Edek said.
'I'd really like to have it,' said Ruth. 'Why should they keep using it?'
'Why not?' Edek said. 'Who does it hurt? Nobody.'
 


The,' she said. 'I don't want them to have it, firstly, and then secondly, I'd 
really like to have the set, myself. It would be very meaningful to me to have 
tea from the teapot and sugar from the sugar bowl that your mother used.'
'What sort of meaning does some pieces of china have?' Edek said.
'A lot of meaning, for me,' said Ruth.
'Forget about it,' he said. 'I do not want to go back there. For me, it is 
finished everything what was there.'
They walked back to the Grand Victoria, in silence. Edek looked tired. 'Would 
you like some dinner in your room tonight?' she said to him.
'That is not such a bad idea,' he said.
'It's been a big day,' Ruth said.
'You can say that again, brother,' Edek said.
When they got back to the Grand Victoria, Ruth ordered some barley soup, a 
schnitzel and a slice of chocolate cake to be sent up to Edek's room. She wasn't 
hungry herself. Her head was swimming with images of the old man's teeth, and 
the pile of wigs, and the gold-edged china. She thought about Herschel who got 
to America in order to die, and the general disarray and disorder of the 
universe. It was enough to take anyone's appetite away.
Ruth sat on the bed, in her room. The room felt airless and depressing. She was 
finding it hard to breathe. She used to have trouble taking deep breaths. Her 
breath felt shallow now. This was an anxiety symptom, she had discovered, that 
appeared when she was trying to contain her anger or her excitement. Her 
breathing felt laboured. It definitely wasn't excitement she was suppressing, at 
the moment.
She decided to have a cup of tea, in the lobby. Before she went down to the 
lobby she called Edek. He sounded more settled. He
had almost reached the end of The One-Armed Alibi, he said, and was about to 
begin The Hot-Blooded Heiress.
'I hope that The Hot-Blooded Heiress is good,' Ruth said to him.
'It does not matter if it is good or not,' Edek said. 'When I read it I am 
living every word.' Ruth thought that the words in The Hot-Blooded Heiress would 
probably be a lot more comfortable for Edek than the words he had had to hear in 
Kamedulska Street today.
'I'll see you in the morning,' she said to Edek. In the lobby she ordered 
herself a chamomile tea with lemon and some bread and jam. Plum jam. The Poles 
made very good plum jam.
Ruth thought about her grandmother's china again. The teapot and sugar bowl and 
milk jug. She had never thought of herself as having a grandmother. It was 
strange to think of her grandmother's china. The fact that there was also a 
matching plate suggested that it must have been part of a dinner service. It 
must have been a stunning dinner set. The china was very fine and the gold 
fluting around the edge of the plate was unusual enough to have made it an 
idiosyncratic choice of tableware. Ruth wondered who had chosen it. Her 
grandmother? It must have been an expensive purchase. Did women choose those 
things then? Or did the men buy them?
The silver bowl that Edek had pointed out looked very solid. That must have been 
expensive, too. It was strange to think of these sophisticated and luxurious 
accoutrements of everyday life as coming from her own family. She had grown up 
poor. She had grown up knowing that there were no family heirlooms. No legacies. 
No bequests or requests. No family recipes. No words of advice or pieces of 
wisdom. It was very strange to think of these pieces of china as part of her 
past.
Ruth wondered if there was more china than the pieces she had been shown. She 
thought that the old woman must have known that Edek would recognise the tea set 
and the silver bowl. But why would the old woman want that? Was the china a 
carrot? A bait? Was Edek
 


supposed to offer to buy it? Did the old couple fantasise about the amount of 
money an old Jew would pay to retrieve something from his former life? Or was 
the old woman simply flaunting her ownership of the stolen goods? Surely if the 
old woman had anticipated a sale, she would have given Edek and Ruth some 
indication of her expectation. Some grounds to begin a negotiation. But there 
had been no sign that the old woman or her husband knew that what they were 
serving up was an invitation.
Ruth didn't know what to do. She didn't want to upset Edek by suggesting that 
they return to Kamedulska Street. Yet she wanted the china and the silver bowl. 
She wanted them badly. She wanted to touch them. To hug them. To hold them to 
her. She knew they were only inert objects, but they had been held and touched 
by all the people that she would never be able to hold and touch. They had been 
touched by her grandmother and grandfather. They had been held and touched by 
cousins and uncles and aunties. She wanted to hold and touch them, too.
'Excuse me,' a woman's voice said. Ruth jumped. She had been completely immersed 
in her thoughts. 'I'm sorry to disturb you,' the woman said. Ruth looked up. It 
was the blonde woman who had been staring at her, yesterday at breakfast. The 
woman was smiling at her now. 'I saw you yesterday,' the woman said. 'You were 
having breakfast with your husband.'
'My father,' Ruth said. 'I was having breakfast with my father. I'm not married. 
I don't have a husband. I don't have a boyfriend. I support myself. I don't need 
a man to support me or travel with me.' Ruth was startled at her own response. 
Why was she being so snappy to a perfect stranger?
'I'm sorry,' the woman said.
'No, I'm sorry,' said Ruth. 'I've just had a rough few days and my nerves are a 
bit on edge. I guess not many daughters travel with their fathers. It's easy to 
mistake a father for a husband.' Ruth patted her
hair. She felt dishevelled. As though her snarled and tangled thoughts had 
disarranged her appearance.
'My father is forty years older than me, though,' she said.
'I assumed you had married an older man,' the woman said. 'Your father is very 
cute.'
'I think that, too, some of the time,' Ruth said.
'I hope you don't mind me introducing myself,' the woman said. 'My name is 
Martina Schmidt.'
'Ruth Rothwax,' Ruth said. She stood up and extended her hand to the woman. They 
shook hands.
'Do you mind if I join you for a moment?' Martina Schmidt asked.
'Not at all,' Ruth said. 'Please, sit down.' They both sat down. 'I noticed you, 
at breakfast,' Ruth said, 'not just because you were staring at me, but because 
everything about you said that you didn't come from Lodz.'
Martina Schmidt laughed. She was really very pretty, Ruth thought. 'I teach 
here,' Martina said. 'I teach at the film school. This is my last semester, and 
then I go back to Germany, to Berlin. I was staring at you because I couldn't 
believe that I was seeing you, again.'
'Seeing me again?' Ruth said.
'I was on the same flight as you from New York to Warsaw,' Martina Schmidt said. 
'I was two rows behind you, on your right.'
A vague recollection of someone staring at her came to Ruth. She had worked for 
most of the transatlantic flight. She had known that she was immersing herself 
in work in order to stave off an already increasing apprehension about arriving 
in Poland.
'I'm sorry I didn't notice you,' Ruth said.
'You were busy,' Martina said.
'Can I order something for you?' said Ruth. 'I'm in need of comfort, so I'm 
having the ultimate comfort food, bread and jam.' Martina laughed. 'I like bread 
and jam very much, myself,' she said. 'Most Germans do. We eat more bread than 
any other European country.
 


We make three hundred varieties of bread and we eat nearly two hundred pounds of 
bread a year per person. During the years after World War II when other food was 
not so available, we ate three hundred and ten pounds a year for every man, 
woman and child, in Germany.'  Ruth laughed. 'I didn't know that,' she said. She 
instinctively liked Martina Schmidt. Anyone who could come up with those 
statistics had to be an interesting person.  'There is a German saying,' Martina 
said, 'He who dishonours bread dishonours life.'
'Really?' said Ruth. She thought it would be inappropriate to comment on the 
irony of Germans honouring life. She called the porter.  'I will have a vodka,' 
Martina said to the porter. 'I am ordering a comfort of a different sort,' she 
said to Ruth. 'It is my birthday today.'  'Happy Birthday,' Ruth said.
'Thank you,' Martina said. 'I was not feeling at all happy. This is my fortieth 
birthday and I am again alone.'  'I didn't even notice my fortieth birthday,' 
Ruth said.
'It is not so much that I will be forty,' Martina said. 'But it is the fact that 
once more I am alone on my birthday.'  'Alone is not such a bad way to be,' Ruth 
said. 'It's much better than being with the wrong person.'
'I have spent many birthdays on my own,' Martina said.
'Why?' said Ruth. 'You're very beautiful and you work in a glamourous field-the 
film industry.'
Martina laughed. 'I'm not interested in my students, especially the Polish 
ones.'
'I can understand that,' Ruth said. 'Not the not finding students attractive, 
but the not finding Polish students attractive.' Ruth looked at Martina. She 
thought Martina might have viewed that remark as  too openly anti-Polish. But 
Martina laughed.
'It is true that Polish people are not the most attractive people in the world,' 
she said. 'But at the film school, I think we have some of the nicest and most 
interesting of them. Still I am very glad to be leaving Lodz.'  'It's a pretty 
depressing city isn't it?' Ruth said.
'Very depressing,' Martina said. 'Especially for women. Polish men think that 
all women find all of them very attractive. They look upon women as a 
combination of a decoration and a servant. I think the servant part is more 
important to them than the decoration.'  'You qualified in the decorative terms 
but failed in servitude, did you?' Ruth said.
'Yes, very much so,' said Martina.
The porter arrived with the vodka. Martina held up her glass.
'Cheers,' she said. Ruth raised her teacup. 'Cheers,' she said. She looked at 
Martina. Martina was beaming. Ruth suddenly felt happy. An inexplicable 
happiness spread through her. Suddenly Lodz didn't seem so leaden. So lifeless.  
'Why have you spent so many birthdays on your own?' Ruth said. If you don't mind 
me asking the question.'
'I don't mind,' Martina said. 'I was in love with someone for a long time. And 
it is not so easy to switch your love from one person to another.'  'Of course 
not,' said Ruth.
'I was staring at you, in the plane, because you reminded me of someone,' 
Martina said.
It's these standard-issue Jewish-Polish looks I have,' said Ruth. 'We all look 
alike.'
'You are Jewish?' Martina said.
Yes,' Ruth said. 'I thought it was obvious.'
Not to me,' Martina said. 'You looked so familiar and yet I could not place 
where I had seen you.'
 


'You had seen me before?' said Ruth.
'I thought I had,' said Martina. 'It wasn't just the way you looked, it was 
something else about you. When I got off the plane, it hit me, it was the way 
you were moving your leg.'  'Oh, no,' Ruth said. 'I didn't think my leg 
movements were so obvious.'
'It was not so obvious to other people, I am sure,' Martina said. 'But the 
movements were in groups of ten. Each time you tapped your foot, you did ten 
taps.'  'You were counting?' said Ruth.
'Almost unconsciously,' Martina said. 'You see, the person I was so in love 
with, also tapped his foot like this.'  'Really?' said Ruth.
'It was my husband,' Martina said. 'And when I realised that it was the leg 
movements that were familiar to me, I also realised who you reminded me of. My 
husband.'  'I look like your husband?' Ruth said. She felt vaguely offended 
about resembling somebody's husband.  Martina laughed. 'Of course he is not 
beautiful like you,' she said. 'But he is very good-looking. I shouldn't call 
him my husband really. He is no longer my husband. He is my ex-husband. When I 
realised who it was that you reminded me of, I tried to find you, but you had 
already left the airport.'  'Why did you want to find me?' Ruth said.
'I don't know,' Martina said. 'Somehow it was this movement with your legs. My 
ex-husband does exactly the same. It irritates everyone he knows.'  'Lots of 
people have nervous mannerisms that are similar, I guess, Ruth said.
'When I saw you in the hotel,' Martina said, 'I couldn't believe my eyes. I had 
been thinking about Gerhard, my husband, my ex husband, and then you appeared.'  
'Did you come here tonight looking for me?' Ruth said.
Martina looked surprised. 'How do you know this?' she said.
'Just a guess,' Ruth said. 'Why did you want to see me?'
'I don't know,' Martina said. 'Do you mind?'
'Not at all,' said Ruth. 'I was feeling quite miserable, and I feel much better 
now. I'm sorry I'm not Gerhard.'  'It is over between me and Gerhard,' Martina 
said. 'But you do look very much like him. I wish I had a photograph of him. You 
would be very surprised yourself, at this resemblance.'  'I've seen lots of 
people I thought I looked like,' Ruth said.
'Really?' said Martina.
'They're all dead,' said Ruth. 'I had no relatives other than my mother and 
father. All of their families were murdered by the Nazis.'  'I am so very 
sorry,' Martina said. She looked overwhelmed.
'I didn't tell you so you would feel sorry for me,' Ruth said. 'I was just 
explaining to you that I see images of myself in photographs of Jews, in Poland, 
before the war.'  'I was not saying sorry because I felt sorry for you,' Martina 
said. 'I was saying sorry for what we did to you. But perhaps it is better to 
say nothing. Sorry is not the right word for this sort of apology.' Martina 
stopped talking. 'Would you like me to leave?' she said to Ruth.  Because you're 
German?' Ruth said. 'Of course not.'
'I am very sorry,' Martina said.
'You didn't do anything,' Ruth said.
'Neither did the Jews,' said Martina.
They sat, in the lobby, in silence for a minute or two. 'Is this the reason you 
are in Poland?' Martina said.  Yes,' said Ruth. 'My father and I are looking for 
something. At  least I'm looking for something, and he agreed to come here with 
me.'
'What are you looking for?' Martina said.
 


'I don't know,' Ruth answered.
It was the truth. She didn't know what she was doing here. She didn't know why 
she had dragged her father here. Why she had wanted to be here with him. Was she 
looking for something? If she was, what was it? She seemed to have found some 
china. Was that what she came here for? She didn't think so.  'Maybe you have 
heard of my ex-husband?' Martina said. 'He is a playwright. Quite well-known in 
Germany. Gerhard Schmidt. He  writes about Jews?'
Ruth shook her head. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I haven't heard of  him.'
'He is really only well-known in Germany.' Martina said. 'Many  people think he 
is obsessed with the Jews.'
'Germans might think that any thought about Jews is excessive,'
Ruth said.
'Perhaps,' said Martina.
'Why did you split up if you were so in love with him?' Ruth said. 'I was too 
German for him,' Martina said. 'But he's German, isn't he?' Ruth said.  'Yes,' 
she said. 'But he doesn't like Germans. He doesn't like any Germans. I felt 
sorry for his parents. They gave him everything money could buy. And still he 
was not happy with them. He called his mother and father anti-Semites.' 'Were 
they?' Ruth said.  'I don't think so,' said Martina. 'They are very kind 
people.' 'The kindest Germans could be anti-Semitic,' Ruth said. 'I suppose so,' 
said Martina.  Ruth wasn't sure if a German who called his parents anti-Semitic 
was any better than any other kind of German.  'Gerhard is wonderful,' Martina 
said. 'But he is tormented His new play is about a wealthy German who finds he 
was adopted as a child. He turns on his parents until they admit he was adopted  
from Jews. Gerhard's mother is ninety-three. She couldn't stop crying when she 
saw that play. Gerhard's trouble is that he wishes he was a Jew.'  'I'd agree 
that that is troubling,' Ruth said.
'It is a very strange thing,' Martina said.
'Maybe all writers are strange,' said Ruth.
'He was always telling me how German I was,' Martina said. 'Of course I was 
German. I am German. He made me feel bad about being a German. I can't do 
anything about the fact that I am a German.'  'Of course not,' said Ruth. 'You 
can't suddenly become Nigerian.'
Martina laughed. 'Gerhard wished that he was a Jew from the time he was a boy,' 
she said. 'His parents thought it was a teenage rebellion. But he is fifty-two 
now, and he is still the same. He still wants to be a Jew.'  'Lots of Jews would 
hand their Jewishness over to him,' Ruth said. 'Lots of Jews aren't thrilled to 
be Jewish. If he wants to be a Jew why doesn't he convert?'  'He doesn't want to 
be a Jew in the religious sense,' Martina said. 'He wants to be a Jew in the 
cultural and traditional sense.'  'That does sound a bit crazy,' Ruth said.
'I think his parents were not strict enough with him when he was a child,' 
Martina said. 'They treated him like he was made from glass. He was very ill 
when he was a baby and I think that made them very nervous of him.'  'Why did 
you love him?' Ruth said.
'I loved him because I saw a sadness in him that I thought I could take away,' 
Martina said. 'And for a few years, I think I took that sadness away.' She 
looked miserable. 'Gerhard is a very fine, very talented, wonderful man,' she 
said. 'He just fell out of love with me because I am German. For two years I 
dyed my hair brown so I would not look so German. But it was not enough. It was 
like a
 


sickness with him. "We can't change what we are," I said to him "We can try," he 
said. I don't know why Gerhard was so unhappy with what he was,' Martina said. 
'He had everything. He had the love of two devoted parents. He had money. The 
Schmidts were very rich.' She paused. She looked sad.
'He doesn't sound very attractive,' Ruth said.
'That's the trouble,' Martina said. 'If he was a terrible person I wouldn't have 
loved him. But he is not, he is wonderful.'
Women were crazy, Ruth thought. They could justify any amount of intolerable 
behaviour, in the name of love.
'People thought I married Gerhard for his money,' Martina said. 'But I didn't, I 
married him for his sadness.'
'Why do women do that?' Ruth said. 'Why are they suckers for
sadness?'
'I don't know,' said Martina.
Then don't feel that way,' Ruth said. Then don't find themselves gravitating to 
sadness, do they?'
'I think not,' said Martina, and she laughed at the thought. It was a strange 
thought. Ruth imagined groups of men banding together to scour the world looking 
for sad women.
Then are looking for cheerfulness, I think,' Ruth said. She thought that, on the 
whole, she had done pretty well for a cheerless person. She had had three 
husbands. Maybe she wasn't all that cheerless. Whatever she was, she thought, 
she was sure that she fell quite a bit short of cheerful.
'What a strange story,' Ruth said to Martina.
'It is very strange," said Martina. 'Gerhard looks Jewish.'
'Do his parents?' Ruth said.
'No, not at all,' Martina said.
'I think you're better off without him," Ruth said.
'I miss him,' Martina said. 'He was clever, and witty and sensitive.
'There are not that many clever, witty and sensitive men around,
Ruth said. 'But why did you have to choose a German who wanted to be a Jew?'
Gerhard sounded bizarre, Ruth thought. Although maybe it wasn't
bizarre. She herself almost avoided Jews. She belonged to no Jewish groups or 
organisations. She never went to synagogue. She felt nervous on those rare 
occasions when she had been in a group of Jews Groups of Jews seemed dangerous, 
to her. They were so blunt. So direct. They asked questions and questioned 
answers. They drew attention to themselves. As though that was not dangerous. 
American Jews seemed less aware of the peril of being Jewish.
All of her life Ruth had chosen non-Jewish friends. Waspish men and women she 
had felt safe with. Safe from what? She didn't know. It was often a struggle to 
maintain the friendships. Ruth felt that she was too intense, too intrusive, too 
curious, too extreme for the moderate and restrained friends she chose. She was 
too much for these non-Jews. She saw it in their responses and their expressions 
and their gestures. In the last few years she had tried to make friends with 
some Jews.
She had married non-Jews, too. Edek and Rooshka had been bothered by this when 
Ruth had married her first husband. By the time Ruth had left husband number two 
her parents were more concerned with the turnover in husbands than the husband's 
particular religion. The fact that Norman wasn't Jewish didn't bother Edek at 
all. Ruth's two divorces seemed to have rendered obsolete Edek's desire for a 
Jewish partner for her. Edek just wished Ruth could stay married. Ruth couldn't 
imagine being married to a Jew. Jewish men seemed soft, to her. She thought 
that, possibly, she had a counter-phobic attraction to Gentiles. That seemed as 
lunatic to her as any of Gerhard Schmidt's actions.
'My mother was very upset when I left Gerhard,' Martina said. She thought he was 
wonderful. She said that most marriages are not Perfect so why should I expect 
perfection? She could not accept that
 


I knew that Gerhard no longer loved me. My mother adored him. She liked his 
concerns with Jewish people.'
'Well she must be unusual for a German,' Ruth said. She hoped she wasn't being 
offensive.
'When I was growing up,' Martina said, 'We had people from Israel staying with 
us. Five or six times a year guests from Israel would arrive. My mother never 
explained anything about these visitors to me, but I somehow got the impression 
that we personally had done something terrible to these people.'
'Where did your mother find the Israelis?' Ruth said. 'I don't know,' said 
Martina. 'They would just appear. We lived in Munich, at the time.' 'How weird,' 
said Ruth.
'I felt responsible, myself,' Martina said. 'I remember saying I was very sorry 
to one woman. She seemed an older woman to me but maybe she was only about 
forty. She patted me on the head and said, "You have nothing to be sorry for. 
You did not do anything to us." I thought she was only being nice to me.'
'I think it must have been tough for so many German children who were born after 
the war," Ruth said. 'It must be a terrible burden to wonder what evil your 
mother or father or your grandparents might have perpetrated. It must make 
adolescence and the subsequent separation of children from their parents very 
complicated." Martina nodded.
'Did anyone else you knew have Jewish people to stay?' Ruth said. 'No,' Martina 
said. 'At school the others didn't even know what a Jew was. I worried for many 
years that my mother and father must have done something very wrong to many 
people,' Martina said.
'I doubt it,' Ruth said. 'If they had, they wouldn't have been trying to make up 
for it.'
'That is not quite logical,' Martina said. 'It's logical enough,' said Ruth.
She didn't want to dwell on this subject. 'My parents didn't want me to leave 
either of my husbands,' she said. 'They preferred me to be married in a less 
than perfect marriage, than unmarried. They saw an unmarried female as being in 
a very imperfect state.'
'I'm afraid so do I,' Martina said. 'I know it is not very modern or progressive 
of me to think this way.'
'You'll find someone else,' Ruth said. 'You're so gorgeous. You won't be on your 
own for long.'
'Thank you,' said Martina. 'I think my attitude towards marriage comes from my 
mother,' she said. 'She believed in love forever. She is still mourning my 
father who has been dead for eleven years.'
'Your mother is a widow?' Ruth said.
She liked the sound of Martina's mother. Maybe Martina's mother would like to 
meet Edek? Ruth suddenly realised the drawback to this potential matchmaking. 
Mrs Schmidt was German. She wasn't sure Edek would be interested in a German 
woman, even a German who felt sympathetic to Jews. It was hard enough for Ruth 
to get her father to agree to meet any woman, let alone a German. Maybe Mrs 
Schmidt wouldn't really be keen to meet a Jew as a potential partner, either.
 'Do you have children from your marriages?' Martina said.
'No,' Ruth said.
'Neither do I,' said Martina. 'I saw from the beginning that it is very 
difficult to have a working life and to have children. I watched my mother 
struggle. She was a schoolteacher but she felt all the time that she was not 
paying enough attention to me. And I always went to the same school where she 
was teaching.'
'What do you get back when you have a child?' Ruth said. 'As far as I can see, 
you get very little. It's not like the old days when children eventually 
supported you.' Martina laughed.
You are right,' she said. 'Not many children today think about supporting their 
parents.'
All over New York,' Ruth said, 'parents are paying large sums o 



 


money for their children to be able to complain about them. They pay therapists 
every month for this privilege. Why pay money for someone to unravel what you've 
done to them? Why not avoid doing  it in the first place?'
'In Germany, it is not quite like this,' Martina said. 'But it is beginning. 
Middle-class parents are beginning to look to therapy as a solution for their 
children.'  'It is no sacrifice to choose a career over children,' Ruth said. 
'Those women who think it is have clearly never had children.'  'Gerhard said 
something very similar to this when we first met,' said Martina. 'I thought it 
was a very refreshing view for a man. You would like Gerhard very much. You 
would recognise something about yourself in him. I cannot explain exactly what.'  
'I hope I'm not as confused and demented as Gerhard sounds,'
Ruth said.
'He is confused, but not demented,' Martina said.
'Which foot does he tap?' Ruth said.
'His right foot,' Martina said. Ruth was very quiet. What a peculiar mixture of 
events and circumstances she was encountering, she thought. Here she was, in 
Lodz, hearing about a middle-aged German man who resembled her and tapped his 
right foot ten times. And wished he was a Jew. Life was strange. She decided 
against asking Martina if she knew what occasioned the right-footed taps of her  
ex-husband.
'Maybe I will meet someone else,' Martina said. 'A fortune-teller told me that I 
would live to a very old age and die in good humour.'  'What a great 
prediction,' Ruth said. 'I wouldn't mind a prediction  like that.'
'She also said I would marry someone who was not what he thought  he was,' 
Martina said.
'So you acted out her prophecy,' Ruth said. 'You married a German  who thought 
he was a Jew.'
'Or a Jew who thinks he is a German?' Martina said.
'His mother would have to be Jewish for Gerhard to be a Jew," Ruth said. 'So I 
don't think he could be Jewish.'  'His mother is a devout Roman Catholic,' 
Martina said.
'Poor Gerhard is going to have to adjust to the fact that he's not Jewish,' Ruth 
said, 'with a Roman Catholic mother he couldn't be Jewish.'  Martina sighed. 
'Who knows what happened in those times.' She looked distressed.
'Would you like another vodka?' Ruth said.
'Yes, I very much would,' said Martina.
Ruth ordered the vodka. She looked at her watch. It was getting late. She should 
go to bed, soon.  'Gerhard was looking for somebody,' Martina said. 'And it was 
not me.'
'We're all looking for somebody or something, I guess,' Ruth said.
'But Gerhard was convinced there was a particular person for him,' Martina said. 
'Somebody who was trying to find him. A numerologist told him he was looking for 
a number eight. The day he came home and told me that, I knew our marriage was 
over. I was too German and I was a number nine.'  'You don't believe in that 
stuff, do you?' Ruth said.
'I'm not sure,' said Martina. 'What number are you?'
'I don't know,' said Ruth. 'How does anyone know what number they are?'
'You add up the numbers of your birth date,' Martina said. Her vodka arrived. 
She drank it down in one large swallow.  'I am an eight,' Ruth said.
'Maybe Gerhard is looking for you?' Martina said. Ruth started to laugh. 'I'm a 
Jew who doesn't want to associate with Jews,' she said. 'We'd be a perfect 
match. He could be my Aryan and I could be his Jew.' They both laughed.
 


'It is not that I enjoy it,' Edek said. 'It is that I have to eat something. I 
been up since four o'clock.'  'You couldn't sleep,' she said.
'I could not sleep,' he said.
'It's a pretty disturbing trip isn't it?' Ruth said.
'I am alright,' Edek said.
Ruth looked at what Edek was eating. His plate was crammed. He had four 
sausages, a small mountain of bacon and what appeared to be a three- or four-
pound slab of scrambled eggs on his plate.  'That looks good,' she said.
'I did take too much,' Edek said.
'You don't have to eat it all,' Ruth said. 'Just enjoy whatever you want of it.'  
'I am not enjoying,' Edek said. 'I am eating a breakfast.' He looked 
disgruntled.  Ruth went to the buffet and chose some breakfast for herself.
'You eating that stuff again?' Edek said.
'The muesli you mean?' Ruth said.
'The stuff what is for birds,' Edek said.
'I like it,' said Ruth.
'No wonder you don't look so good,' Edek said. 'This is for birds,! or maybe for 
a mouse or even a fish. But not for a person. A person has to have a breakfast.'  
Edek leaned across the table and peered into Ruth's bowl. His head almost 
touched the muesli. He stared at it with concentration. As though if he looked 
long enough the individual grains of oats' and seeds and fruit might speak up 
and explain themselves.  'The muesli would be too big for fish,' Ruth said.
'It would be good for big fish,' said Edek. He shook his head and returned to 
his scrambled eggs. Ruth looked at her father. He looked tired to her. Or maybe 
she was so tired that everyone looked tire to her.  Edek was wearing his parka 
at breakfast. He had had the beige-coloured parka on every day. Whether he was 
inside or outside. She looked more closely at Edek. He was wearing the same navy 
knit top he had arrived in Warsaw in. Ruth wondered if he had worn it every day. 
She hadn't noticed what he had been wearing under his parka.  'Have you been 
changing your clothes, Dad?' she said.
'Of course,' he said, and continued to eat.
'Weren't you wearing that top and those trousers when you arrived in Warsaw?' 
Ruth said.  'Yes,' Edek said.
'Have you worn them every day?' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'So what are you changing?' Ruth said.
'What difference does it make to you what I wear?' Edek said.
'I just want to know,' said Ruth.
'I did change my gatkes,' Edek said. Gatkes was the Yiddish word for underpants.  
'I should hope so,' Ruth said, and then felt queasy. Why were they discussing 
her father's underpants over breakfast?  She took two Mylanta tablets out of her 
bag and put them in her mouth.
'What are you doing?' Edek said.
'I'm having some Mylanta,' she said. 'I don't feel well.'
'This Mylanta does make you better?' he said.
'Sometimes,' she said.
'You need to eat something,' Edek said. 'Tablets and stuff what a fish would not 
eat is not a breakfast. It is not normal. Have some eggs.'  I'll have some eggs 
tomorrow,' she said, and grimaced as she chewed the last of the peppermint-
flavoured indigestion pills. She Knew it was odd to chew antacid tablets for 
stress, but sometimes "ey made her feel better. Relieved her queasiness.
 


Edek had finished the food on his plate. 'Maybe I will have a small piece of 
bread with jam,' he said.
'Have you changed your socks?' Ruth said.
'I did change them on Saturday,' he said. 'What is wrong with you? To talk about 
my socks when we eat our breakfast? Clean or dirty socks is not something to 
talk about during a breakfast.'
'I wanted you to feel better,' Ruth said. 'I thought you'd feel better if you 
had clean clothes.'
Edek looked at Ruth. He looked annoyed. 'You have every day everything clean,' 
he said. 'Every day something else. A black skirt with a pleat one day, a black 
skirt without a pleat one day. A black dress with a piece of something in the 
front, in the morning, a black dress without a piece of something in the front, 
in the afternoon. A black coat with something on the collar yesterday, the day 
before a black coat with nothing on the collar. And all this black stuff is very 
expensive. My daughter does not like to put on something which costs less than 
fifty dollars.'
'You can't get anything for less than fifty dollars today,' Ruth said. Why was 
her father picking on her? He must be stressed, she thought.
'I got shoes for twenty dollars,' Edek said. He stuck his foot out from under 
the table. 'And these shoes was not the cheapest shoes. They did have a pair for 
ten dollars.'
'Made out of cardboard?' Ruth said.
'Made from leather,' said Edek. 'Real leather.'
'I paid three hundred dollars for these shoes,' Ruth said, and lifted her leg to 
show Edek the plain black lace-up shoes she was wearing.
'Crazy,' snorted Edek. 'They look like those shoes what you did wear to school.'
'That's why they're three hundred dollars,' Ruth said. 'They're an imitation of 
the shoes that schoolgirls wear. I love them. When I look at them I remember how 
I felt in my University High School uniform.'
'Those shoes what you did wear to school was brown,' Edek said.
'I can't believe you remember that,' said Ruth.
'I remember many things,' said Edek.
Ruth looked at her shoes. They were Prada. She had bought them on sale. Reduced 
from over four hundred dollars.
'I can get you such shoes from Melbourne for twenty dollars,' Edek said.
'You couldn't,' said Ruth. 'Nothing costs twenty dollars anymore, not even 
chewing gum.'
'You are crazy,' said Edek.
'Maybe I am,' she said.
'It is not normal,' Edek said. 'To buy shoes for three hundred dollars.'
'You buy gadgets,' Ruth said. Edek looked hurt. 'You tell me to spend money,' he 
said. 'And I buy only stuff what is useful for you.'
Ruth felt sorry for him. He looked wounded. She hadn't meant to wound him.
'That's true, Dad,' she said. 'Sorry, I'm just tired.'
'You want me to put on such clean clothes every day to feel better,' Edek said. 
'I feel fine. You do not look so fine.'
Ruth knew she looked bad. She had showered and put on clean clothes, but she 
still felt crumpled. She'd slept in her clothes last night. She had been shocked 
when she had woken up and discovered this. She had fallen asleep in her clothes, 
on top of the faded bedspread that covered the bed. She hadn't removed the 
eyeliner she wore under her eyes or cleansed her skin with cleansing milk. She 
hadn't washed her face or brushed her teeth. She had just fallen asleep. Falling 
asleep like that, unprepared and unaware, was something she hadn't done since 
she was fifteen or sixteen. This morning she had shaved her legs, scrubbed her 
face and rubbed toning lotion over her body, but she couldn't feel uncrumpled. 
She straightened the collar of her shirt.
 


'You do not look so good,' Edek said. 'I think it is too much for you to be in 
Poland.'  'I'm really glad to be in Poland with you, Dad,' she said. 'Really  
glad.'
'Maybe five days in Lodz is too much,' said Edek.
'Is it too much for you?' Ruth said.
'Not for me,' Edek said. 'I can take anything. But it is, I think, too much for 
you.'  'Okay,' she said. 'We can go to the Orbis office and change the date of 
our train tickets to Krakow. Let's leave on Wednesday instead  of Thursday.'
'Wednesday?' Edek said. 'Today it is Monday, that is another two  days.'
'Do you want to leave even earlier?' Ruth said.
'Not me,' said Edek. 'I came here to be with you. We will stay till when you 
want to stay.'  'I'd like to go to the Jewish Centre today, then the ghetto and 
the Jewish cemetery tomorrow,' Ruth said.  'The ghetto and the cemetery?' Edek 
said.
'I think it will be very interesting,' Ruth said.
'If you say so,' said Edek.
'Maybe we'll do the cemetery today,' Ruth said.
'Is the train tickets expensive?' Edek said.
'No, they're very cheap,' she said. 'Train travel in Poland is extremely cheap. 
We can go and change the tickets after breakfast.  'We have to go by train?' 
Edek said.
'I thought it would be better than flying,' Ruth said. 'We'll be able to see the 
countryside.'  'We did see the country, already,' Edek said. 'When we was in the  
Mercedes.'
'Would you rather fly?' Ruth said.
'I will go whichever way you do choose,' Edek said.
'What would you prefer?' she said.
'It is all the same to me,' he said.
Ruth knew that there was something behind Edek's query about the price of the 
train tickets but she couldn't figure out what. She decided to ask him about it 
later.  'Do you still want some bread and jam?' she said.
'I will have just a little piece,' Edek said.
'I'll get it,' Ruth said. She got up and walked to the buffet.  'Apricot and 
plum,' Edek called out to her. She got some jam for Edek and some fruit compote 
for herself.  She watched her father eat his bread and jam. He clearly loved it. 
He spooned large spoonfuls of jam onto each bite of bread. It cheered her up to 
see his hearty appetite.  'It's good jam, isn't it?' she said.
'Very good,' he said. Her father really was in very good shape for an eighty-
one-year-old, she thought. She should be really grateful for that.  'You look 
great, Dad,' Ruth said. 'You look years younger than you are.'  'I know,' said 
Edek. 'Everybody does say this.'
'You shouldn't be on your own,' Ruth said. 'You should be with somebody.'  'I am 
with somebody,' Edek said. 'I am with you.'
'You know what I mean,' Ruth said. 'A partner, company, somebody to go out 
with.'  'Do not start with this, please,' Edek said.
Ruth suddenly thought of Martina Schmidt's widowed mother. Mrs Schmidt, if she 
was half as gorgeous as her daughter, would probably appeal to Edek. Edek loved 
a blonde. So did most Jews. Most elderly Jewish women ended up blonde regardless 
of what colour they had started out as.   I  heard about a woman who seemed very 
nice,' Ruth said to Edek.
 


I told you, please, do not start again with this,' Edek said.
Ruth remembered, with a start, the drawback to Mrs Schmidt, even if Edek were 
interested in meeting a woman. Mrs Schmidt was German. And possibly Mrs Schmidt, 
despite her efforts at seeking out Jews, might not want to go out with one. What 
was she doing thinking about Mrs Schmidt? She had only met her daughter once, 
and would probably never see her again. Martina Schmidt was a stranger to her. 
It was strange that the connection they had had been
so intense.
Ruth could still feel Martina's presence, this morning. Meetings with most 
people rarely lingered for more than a minute after they were over. She could 
still feel Martina's gaze on her. She had wanted to touch Martina, last night. 
To hug her. As though they were more than strangers. As though they were 
something much more than strangers to each other. She had looked around the 
lobby this morning half hoping that Martina would be there. Of course, she 
wasn't.
Ruth missed her. It was absurd to miss someone you didn't know, she thought. She 
was sure that she and Martina could have become really good friends. But who 
knows, Ruth thought. People often seemed promising before you really got to know 
them. Then, all of their ordinariness appeared. Why was she so averse to 
ordinariness? she thought. There was so much about Ruth, herself, that was so 
ordinary. She wondered whether Martina would ever get back together with her 
husband Gerhard. Gerhard still seemed to have a pretty strong hold on Martina. 
Even though he had told her she was too German and the wrong number. The wrong 
number! How ridiculous. Ruth suddenly felt cold. She noticed that her legs were 
trembling-She steadied her legs.
'Are you cold?' she said to Edek.
'No,' he said. 'I am hot.'
'That's probably because you've just eaten,' she said.
'I am hot because they got the heating up pretty high in this place,
Edek said. Ruth put both of her feet firmly on the carpet. The trembling began 
to settle.
'Would you go out with a German woman?' she asked her father.
'Are you crazy?' Edek said.
'I thought you wouldn't," Ruth said.
'It is not the German I am not going to do anything with,' said Edek. 'It is the 
woman.'
'I'm not asking you to do something with anyone,' Ruth said. 'I'm just asking if 
you'd go out with someone German.'
'How many times do I have to tell you that I am finished with all that stuff,' 
Edek said. 'I am happy on my own. I can eat whatever I want to. I can have a 
piece of chocolate. I can read a book. I can watch television. No one tells me 
what to do. I am happy.'
'You'll be happier with someone to share your life,' Ruth said.
'That is what you said when you said I should get married to Henia,' said Edek.
'Henia and her boys had their own agenda,' Ruth said. 'And we couldn't have 
guessed how that would turn out.'
'You did say the marriage was a good idea,' said Edek.
'I was wrong,' said Ruth.
'You were wrong with the other women what you introduced me to, too,' said Edek. 
'Didn't you learn from that that I am not interested?'
'What I learnt from that,' said Ruth, 'was that one of them was too fat, one was 
too ugly, one had a terrible face. What I learnt was that they were not good-
looking enough for you.'
'You have to have something to look at, that is for sure,' Edek said.
'What about the women?' Ruth said. 'Do they have to have something to look at 
too? Maybe you weren't exactly their cup of tea.'
 


'This is a stupid saying,' Edek said. 'To say someone is a cup of tea.'
 


'It's probably not any more stupid than a lot of Polish sayings,' Ruth said.
'It is more stupid,' Edek said.
Ruth looked at her watch. They should leave if they wanted to go to Orbis. Orbis 
was the Polish Government Travel Agency. It was not renowned for its speed or 
efficiency.  'It is not so important for a woman what the man looks like,' Edek 
said. 'For a woman it is more important what wages a man does earn.'  'That's a 
sad reflection on women,' Ruth said.
'Why should they not enjoy the money, just like I enjoy to look at a nice-
looking woman,' Edek said. Ruth knew that there was an answer but it eluded her.  
'Remember that shocking woman you did want me to meet?' Edek said. He started to 
laugh.
'What shocking woman?' Ruth said.
'The one which did look like she did get her dress from a rubbish bin,' Edek 
said. 'You remember it was at that party with all the permanent people?'  'The 
permanent people?' Ruth said. 'None of us are permanent.'
'Nearly everybody there was permanent,' Edek said.
'Everybody?' Ruth said.
'Everybody,' Edek said. 'Everybody was posh, posh. Very rich.'
Ruth started laughing.
'You remember her dress?' Edek said.
'They were not permanent people,' Ruth said. 'They were prominent.'
'Prominent, permanent, what is the difference,' Edek said. 'Do you remember the 
dress? It looked like a bunch of shmattes'    'The bunch of shmattes was a dress 
that probably cost over a thousand dollars,' Ruth said.
'It did look shocking,' Edek said, and he roared with laughter at  the memory. 
'One side of the hem went down to here, one side up here. "The top was crooked. 
A tailor in Lodz would be out of a job if he did make a dress like that.'  A man 
at another table nodded to Edek. Edek waved to him. 'He is on the same floor 
what we are on,' he said to Ruth. The man got up and came over to them.  'Your 
father told me how honoured he is that you want to be in Poland with him,' the 
man said to Ruth. 'Really?' Ruth said.  'I said most children are not so 
interested to see where a parent does come from,' Edek said to Ruth. 'My 
daughter is the cream of the crap,' Edek said to the man. The man looked 
bewildered. 'You mean the cream of the crop,' Ruth said to Edek. 'That is what I 
said,' said Edek. 'The cream of the crap.' 'Crop not crap,' Ruth said. 'That is 
what I am saying,' Edek said. Ruth decided to forgo the elocution lesson. 'We're 
having a wonderful trip,' she said to the man. Edek nodded his agreement.  'It 
sounds fascinating from what your father told me,' the man said. What had her 
father said? Ruth wondered. He hadn't said all that much to her.  'What did you 
say about our trip?' Ruth said to Edek. 'I did tell this gentleman that we did 
go to Kamedulska Street, that sort of stuff,' Edek said.  'You didn't talk to me 
about it,' Ruth said. 'You was there,' Edek said.
'I would have loved to have heard what you were thinking and feeling,' Ruth 
said.
The man shuffled his feet. Ruth looked at him. He looked ill at ease. He 
obviously did not want to be included in this family squabble. 'It is a 
fascinating trip,' Ruth said to the man. id to Ruth. The man got
 


'You are behaving like a baby,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Let us go.' He got up. 'Nice 
to meet you,' he said to the man.  Ruth and Edek had been waiting in the Orbis 
office for twenty minutes before anyone took any notice of them. Ten or twelve 
Orbis employees were sitting, in a row, behind a glass partition. Like bank 
tellers in a bank. None of them appeared particularly busy. Two of them were 
eating, one was on the phone and one was leafing through a magazine. Not one of 
them looked up at Edek or Ruth. There were no other customers. Finally, Ruth had 
knocked on the glass. 'One minute,' the woman said. She finished her cup of 
coffee and beckoned Ruth over.  Ruth explained that they wanted to change the 
date of their train tickets from Lodz to Krakow. They would like to leave on 
Wednesday instead of Thursday. The woman pulled out an enormous book and started 
looking through it. The book had very thin pages. There must be five thousand 
pages of train timetables in that book, Ruth thought. She took a closer look. 
The timetables were in very fine print. There were thousands of them.  'I think 
we're going to be here for a long time,' she said to Edek.
Thirty minutes later, Ruth and Edek were still standing there at the Orbis 
counter. Ruth was furious.
'It can't be that complicated,' she said to the woman. Ruth had been glaring at 
the woman from time to time, but the woman hadn't appeared to notice.  'It is 
not easy,' the woman said, and kept turning the pages.
'Maybe we'll change these at the station?' Ruth said to Edek. 'Or maybe I should 
just buy new tickets, and throw these away.'  'Calm down,' Edek said.
'I am calm,' she said, gritting her teeth.
'Maybe I will call Stefan and ask him to drive us to Krakow?' Edek said.
'Who is Stefan?' said Ruth.
I
'Stefan is the driver what took us from Warsaw to Lodz," Edek said- 'He was a 
very good driver.'
'You want a driver to come from Warsaw to Lodz to pick us up and then drive us 
to Krakow?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'I think it is a good idea.'
'It's a crazy idea,' Ruth said. 'Warsaw is 88 miles from Lodz, and Lodz is 180 
miles from Krakow.'
'How do you know such exact miles?' Edek said.
'I just know,' said Ruth.
'That is not so far,' said Edek. in Australia people drive for sometimes one 
thousand miles.'
'On highways,' Ruth said. 'And not in icy winter conditions.'
'It is not so icy,' Edek said.
 'You want him to come to Lodz to pick us up, drive us to Krakow and then drive 
himself back to Warsaw?' she said. 'That's nearly 400 miles. Anyway, I don't 
want to drive 180 miles with someone who's got up at four a.m. to drive to us.'  
'We could book him into a cheap hotel in Lodz,' said Edek. 'Then he could come 
the night before and he will be like new for us in the morning.' Ruth felt 
exhausted. She glared at the Orbis woman, again.  'It would be very expensive,' 
she said to Edek.
'We can afford it,' he said. 'We can afford what we like,' he said, in a very 
loud voice.
'You really want to drive to Krakow with Stefan?' Ruth said.
'It was a very comfortable Mercedes, wasn't it?' Edek said. 'You said yourself 
how comfortable this Mercedes was.'  'Okay,' said Ruth. 'But we haven't got 
Stefan's number.'
'I got his number,' Edek said.
Edek ran towards his parka which he had left on a chair. He came back holding a 
business card. 'See,' he said. 'I got his number.' He looked so happy. Why 
shouldn't they get Stefan to drive them to
 


Krakow? Ruth thought. She would ask Stefan to drive them to the moon, if it made 
Edek this happy. Edek looked overjoyed. She would ask Stefan to move in with 
them, if it would keep her father feeling
so joyful.
'Ring Stefan up and see if he'll do it?' Ruth said.
'He will do it,' Edek said. 'He will be very happy to do it.'
'How do you know?' said Ruth.
'I did already suggest it to him when we was driving to Lodz," Edek said. '"It 
would be a pleasure," Stefan did say.' Ruth started laughing. Edek looked 
pleased with himself.
'We'll go by car,' Ruth said. She turned to the Orbis operator. 'Fuck your 
timetables,' she said.
'That is not such a nice thing to say,' Edek said to Ruth.
'It's nice enough,' Ruth said.
chapter ten
On the corner of Pilsudskiego Street and Kopciriskiego Street, Edek asked an 
elderly woman for directions to the Jewish Centre. 'It is on Zachodnia Street,' 
Edek said to her, in Polish. Ruth stood and waited. The woman was the fourth 
person they had asked. Ruth knew, from the map, that they must be close to 
Zachodnia Street. She had made a note of the exact address because she hadn't 
expected many locals to know where the Jewish Centre was. She didn't think Poles 
would be making pilgrimages to the Jewish Centre. But this woman knew. Ruth 
heard the woman refer to 'People of Moses' faith'. Why didn't she say Jewish? 
Ruth thought. Why did she keep repeating 'People of Moses" faith'?
Ruth had called the Jewish Centre that morning. A youngish-sounding man had 
agreed to give her ten minutes. He was the director I of the Centre, he said. 
'Be here at 11:10 a.m.,' he said. 11:10 a.m., she thought. This man must have a 
hectic schedule. 'I'll be there at 11:10 a.m.,' she had said to him. She had 
told him that she wanted a guide to take her through the Jewish cemetery. 'I 
need more notice to organise a guide,' he had said. 'I need several days.'
'Not many people's plans include a month in Lodz,' she had said to him. 'I need 
a guide in the next day or two.' 'I don't think I can do anything,' he said. 
'I'll come to the Centre anyway,' Ruth had said. She was puzzled at his lack of 
helpfulness. Maybe he was overrun by Jews wanting to visit the Jewish cemetery. 
The cemetery was locked. Even people who didn't want a guide had to go to the 
Centre to pick up the key.
 


Maybe being keeper of the keys was proving to be too much.
'Okay, okay, I know where the Zachodnia Street is,' Edek said. 'Follow me,' he 
said, and ran off. Ruth was too tired to run after him. Why did he have to run? 
No one else in the streets of Lodz was running. Ruth sped up. She had lost sight 
of Edek. She was agitated. Where was he? Why couldn't he do anything at a normal 
pace? She looked in each direction at every intersection she passed. There was 
no sign of Edek. How could he have got so far ahead of her in such a short time? 
She continued walking. It was ten-forty a.m. They had half an hour. She didn't 
want to be late.  She was just reaching a main street, which she hoped was Al. 
Kosciuszki, when Edek came around the corner and almost knocked her over.  'What 
are you doing?' she said to him, when she regained her footing. 'You're lucky it 
was me you bumped into, and not some Pole.'  'What are you talking about?' Edek 
said. 'I knew it was you.'
'You couldn't have known,' Ruth said. 'You can't see around corners.'
'Did we come to Lodz to argue about such stupid things?" Edek  said.
'No,' she said. 'You're right.'
'I did smell your perfume,' he said. 'You wear always the same perfume. I could 
smell the perfume from Kosciuszki Street.'  'I'm sure you couldn't,' Ruth said.
'Forget about it,' said Edek. 'We are very near to the Lodz-Fabryczna, the 
railway station.'
'Oh, good,' said Ruth. 'That station is not far from Zachodnia
Street.'
'I know this,' Edek said. 'That is why I am telling you. Zachodnia Street is off 
a street what the station is on.'  'Dad,' she called out to him, as he ran off. 
She gave up. She had  wanted to ask him if they could walk together. But he was 
gone. She relaxed a bit. At least they wouldn't be late. She checked the note in 
her pocket. The Jewish Centre was at number seventy-eight Zachodnia Street.  
Before she could put the piece of paper back in her pocket Edek had returned.
'The Lodz-Fabryczna is not there,' he said.
'It's still in the guidebooks,' Ruth said. 'It's the main station in Lodz. They 
can't have got rid of it.'  'Of course they still got the station,' Edek said. 
'But it is not there.'
'Maybe you're not looking in the right place,' Ruth said.
'I been there many times as a boy,' Edek said. 'I know where it is.'
'That was a while ago, Dad,' she said.
'You do not forget where a station is,' Edek said.
'Maybe they moved the station?' Ruth said.
'Maybe,' he said. 'I try one more place.' He was gone before she could object.
Ruth felt old. What was wrong with her? It was pathetic to not be able to catch 
up with an eighty-one-year-old. But then Edek was not your average eighty-one-
year-old, she thought. Maybe pitched against a more normal eighty-one-year-old, 
she might be able to hold her own. In the distance, she saw Edek waving to her. 
She ran up to him.  'I did find the Lodz-Fabryczna,' he was shouting. 'I told 
you I did know where it was. I will show you, now, where Zachodnia is. The woman 
in the street did explain it to me pretty good.'  'Dad, can you wait for me?' 
she said.
'Hurry up,' he said, as he streaked ahead of her.
One minute later, she could no longer see him. Edek's darting and dashing and 
rushing was demented, she decided. It was unnatural. Human beings were not meant 
to speed and careen from one place to the next. There was no need. There was no 
urgency, no emergency,
 


no crisis, no race. Finding the right street was not a matter of life and death. 
She looked around her. She couldn't see Edek anywhere. She thought it would be a 
miracle if she and Edek managed to arrive at Zachodnia Street together.
Suddenly, Edek reappeared. He was out of breath. 'Something is wrong,' he said. 
Ruth felt alarmed. She knew that a man his age shouldn't be running around like 
that.
'What's wrong, Dad?' she asked, trying to sound unworried. 'The streets are not 
where they should be,' Edek said. Ruth was relieved that geography and location 
were still what was wrong.
'Maybe it's us who are not where we should be,' she said. But Edek didn't want 
to listen. He was gone. She didn't care. She slowed down. It was she and Edek 
who were in the wrong place. What were they doing here? She should be in New 
York. In her office, where compared to this nothing seemed crazy.
Even the most unruly occurrences in the offices of Rothwax Correspondence seemed 
tame and subdued next to this. The indexing and cross-indexing of letters and 
files and folders seemed easy. The puzzling requests from clients seemed 
moderate and manageable next to this. This was madness. New York, with its 
erratic inhabitants, its crowded streets, its deviant traffic and aberrant 
pedestrians, seemed like the Sea of Tranquillity to Ruth. An oasis of order and 
clarity. What was the Sea of Tranquillity, she wondered? Was it a geographical 
location or a poetic phrase? She thought it might be a heavenly body, or 
something celestial. Anything to do with tranquillity was clearly not her area 
of specialty. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven. She was so tired.
Edek re-emerged. 'I cannot find the Zachodnia Street,' he said. 'I do not know 
what is wrong with me.'
Ruth didn't answer. She thought he was only questioning his sense of direction. 
'The Zachodnia Street was a street what I was on many times,' Edek said.
'Maybe we should go back to the hotel?' she said to Edek. 'We're not going to 
make our appointment anyway. The man from the Centre was specific about the time 
we had to be there.'
'Beggar him,' Edek said.
Ruth was surprised. Edek rarely swore. This was his version of swearing. 'Beggar 
him' was something Edek had condensed from the word 'beggar' and the Australian 
expression 'bugger him'. A phrase that originated, Ruth thought, from the verb 
'to bugger'. 'Beggar him' was one of Edek's worst obscenities. Edek didn't know 
that he had distorted and blended two different words. He didn't notice the lack 
of potency the phrase possessed.
Ruth had once tried to explain it to him, but he had dismissed her. He thought 
she was being pedantic. Ruth thought that maybe he just didn't want to know what 
'to bugger' meant. She decided it didn't matter. People got the general gist of 
what Edek was expressing. 'Beggar him,' Edek said, again.
They walked along whatever street it was that they were walking on. Suddenly 
Edek turned and shouted. Ruth got a terrible fright. She had been thinking about 
herself and Edek, and the mess they seemed to be in, in the middle of Lodz.
'Taxi, taxi, taxi,' Edek was shouting. He was in the middle of the street now, 
and waving his arms. The taxi he had spotted stopped.
'You gave me a terrible shock,' Ruth said when she got to him.
'I did get a taxi for you,' Edek said. 'A Mercedes.'
They got into the cab. Edek gave the cab driver the address. 'We need to be 
there in a big hurry, sir,' he said to the driver. Edek had assumed his 
excessively obsequious manner again. 'We're paying him,' Ruth said to Edek. 'We 
don't need to lick his arse.'
'What sort of person speaks like this?' Edek said. '"Lick his arse." It is lucky 
for us that he doesn't understand.'
'I wouldn't care,' Ruth said 



'Sir,' Edek said. 'If you can make it quick, there will be a big tip
 


for you.' Ruth grimaced and sank back into the seat. Edek have paid out the 
equivalent of a year's income in tips and bonuses before he left Poland.
Edek was counting his zlotys. 'Give me a few more zlotys,' he said to Ruth.
'So you can distribute them among the Poles?' Ruth said.
'For what are you in such a bad mood?' Edek said.
This is no picnic,' Ruth said. 'Do you think I should be cracking jokes and 
slapping my thighs?' She wasn't sure that Edek understood what slapping a thigh 
meant. Edek understood enough to take offence.
'It is not such a picnic for me, too,' he said.
They drove in silence. Ruth could smell the driver. She could smell the smell of 
sweat and other body odour, and unwashed hair and unclean clothes. Why didn't 
Polish men wash more often? You'd think the driver of a Mercedes would want to 
smell more like a Mercedes driver and less like the local vagrant, Ruth thought.
They drove past two pieces of anti-Semitic graffiti, one after the other. Stars 
of David, with the losing soccer team's emblem emblazoned across the star-shaped 
symbol of Judaism. Ruth pointed them out to Edek. 'They got rid of their Jews,' 
she said to Edek. 'But they couldn't get rid of their anti-Semitism.' She shook 
her head. 'They got rid of almost two hundred and fifty thousand Jews from this 
area. Wasn't that enough? What are they carrying on about?'
'Don't talk about this stuff,' Edek said. 'The driver, he sees what we are 
looking at.'
'So what?' Ruth said. 'He knows he's anti-Semitic. He doesn't care.'
'It is only children,' the driver said. 'Just children.'
'Jesus,' Ruth said. 'What sort of kids are they bringing up?'
'My daughter is not really a troublemaker,' Edek said to the driver, in English.
'If you want him to understand,' Ruth said to Edek, 'you'd better repeat it, in 
Polish.'
'Oy cholera,' Edek said, and began a long explanation of Ruth's bad mood to the 
driver. The driver nodded his head, sympathetically. Ruth and Edek had been in 
the taxi for over five minutes. They were two or three miles from where the cab 
had picked them up. Ruth knew that she and Edek had started out quite close to 
Zachodnia Street. How had they become so lost? No wonder she was tired. They had 
walked for miles. 'The Poles did used to throw stones at me, in this area,' Edek 
said in a low voice to Ruth.
They arrived, finally, at seventy-eight Zachodnia Street. Edek tipped the driver 
an inordinately large number of zlotys. The driver got out of the cab and bowed 
half a dozen times to them. Number seventy-eight was a large vacant allotment of 
land. An old building was at the very back of the block. They approached the 
building. A smell of boiled cabbage permeated the air. 'Can you smell boiled 
cabbage?' Ruth said to Edek. 'Yes,' he said. 'It is not very nice.' They reached 
the building. Ruth looked inside a dark doorway.
'I think we have to go inside and up the stairs,' she said to Edek. 'This is the 
Jewish Centre?' Edek said. 'Are you sure?' 'I think I'm sure,' Ruth said.
She and Edek walked up the dank, dark staircase. The smell of cabbage was 
overwhelming. The air was so damp that Ruth thought that the cabbage must still 
be being boiled. It was so dark it was hard to see where they were going. This 
was the headquarters of the Jewish community of Lodz? The heart of Jewish life 
in Lodz? What a heart, Ruth thought. She suddenly felt very depressed. This was 
not what she associated with being Jewish. Where was the warmth? Nothing about 
this place was Jewish.
Ruth was shivering. It was very cold in the building. 'Are you cold, Dad?' she 
said.
'No,' Edek said. 'Where are we?' he said after a minute. He seemed as dazed as 
Ruth to find that this dark run-down damp place was
 


the centre of Jewish Lodz. Ruth knocked at a partially opened door at the top of 
the stairs. She looked at her watch. It was 11:13 a.m They were only three 
minutes late. Inside, a man in his thirties, dressed in the black clothes of a 
religious Jew, sat at a desk. He was shuffling papers. He had an air of business 
about him. 'Come in,' he said, in a perfunctory manner. He didn't look up.
The room was not very large, and sparsely furnished. A woman was typing at a 
table against one wall. There was another room off to the left. Ruth wondered if 
that was where the cabbage was being boiled. She and Edek stood inside the door. 
The woman smiled at them. 'We're here to arrange a guide for the cemetery,' Ruth 
said to the woman. The woman, she had decided, looked more approachable than the 
man. The woman shook her head. It was clear she didn't speak English.
'Let's go,' Edek whispered to Ruth.
Ruth looked around the room. Two rolls of fax paper were on a shelf, together 
with a photograph of an orthodox Jew. Ruth didn't know who the orthodox Jew in 
the photograph was. This was the most sparse and spare Jewish centre she had 
ever seen. What furniture there was was old. It looked so depressing. So bereft 
of life. Maybe her father was right. Maybe they should go.
She knew the centre had two hundred members, a prayer house somewhere in the 
building, a canteen and a kosher kitchen. The cabbage that they could smell must 
be kosher. They served thirty free meals a day, Ruth had read, and provided the 
community with matzoh at Passover. The centre's aim was to maintain and support 
the religious and cultural traditions of the Jews of Lodz. How did you do that 
when there were no Jews left? It was an impossible task, Ruth thought. Not one 
that could be carried out with the help of boiled cabbage.
'We are to arrange for a guide,' Ruth said, again, in the direction of the man. 
'I rang you earlier.'
'Yes, yes,' he said. 'I will try to contact him.'
'Please,' Edek whispered to Ruth. 'He is busy. Can we go?'
'We'll wait for another few minutes," she whispered to Edek.
'I do not want so much to go to the cemetery,' he said.
'Just another few minutes, and we'll call it quits,' she said.
The woman looked up from her typewriter and smiled at them. Ruth and Edek smiled 
back. The man continued to shuffle papers. Ruth looked at her watch. It was 
11:24 a.m. 'How many Jews do you look after here?' she said, to the man.
'We feed about thirty a day,' he said, not looking up.
'Are most of them old?' Ruth said.
'All of them,' he said.
Then and women?' Ruth said.
'Most of them are men,' he said.
So this was what the Jewish community of Lodz had been reduced to, Ruth thought. 
Thirty poor, old men, who had boiled cabbage for lunch. It was heartbreaking. 'I 
think we'll go, Dad,' she said to Edek. She noticed a photograph of the American 
philanthropist, businessman and cosmetics heir, Ronald Lauder, on the wall. She 
knew that the Jewish Centre of Lodz was supported by the Ronald Lauder 
Foundation.
'This is the worst Jewish place I saw in my life,' Edek whispered. Edek looked 
depressed. The lack of any welcome had probably added to her father's distress, 
Ruth thought.
'You're supported by the Ronald Lauder Foundation are you?' Ruth said to the 
man.
'Yes,' he said.
'I was at his home, in New York, recently,' Ruth said. The man dropped his 
papers, took off his glasses and faced Ruth. He looked about thirty or thirty-
five, Ruth thought. 'You were just at Mr Lauder's house?' the man said. 'Yes,' 
said Ruth. It wasn't a lie. She had been to the Lauders'
 


spectacular art-filled New York apartment. She had been served the sort of food 
that should be canonised and memorialised, not eaten Each dish had been more 
dazzling, more aesthetically pleasing, than the dish that had preceded it. Ruth 
thought that she saw several of the guests genuflecting over the wines that were 
served.
Ruth had touched the Van Gogh painting hanging in the Lauders' library. She had 
followed the brushstrokes with her fingers. Traced Vincent Van Gogh's movements. 
Nobody had noticed. Ruth had known that she would never get that close to a Van 
Gogh again. Ruth was at Ronald Lauder's apartment for a book launch that the 
Lauders had hosted for a friend of a friend of Ruth's.
'Mr Lauder has a beautiful apartment,' Ruth said to the man. The man came up and 
shook hands with Edek and Ruth. 'Sit down, please,' he said. 'We are so grateful 
to Mr Lauder. Mr Lauder makes it possible for us to feed old Jewish men and look 
after them. Mr Lauder is trying to rehabilitate the Jewish community of Poland.'
Ruth wondered if 'rehabilitate' was the right word. The Jewish community was not 
damaged or diseased. It was destroyed. It was non-existent. She decided this 
condition was still open to the possibility of rehabilitation. Ronald Lauder 
could also have used restore, reconstitute or rehabilitate. They would all do, 
she decided. She wished she didn't get sidetracked by words and their meanings. 
'You were in Mr Lauder's apartment?' the man said, again. 'Yes,' she said. 
'Quite recently.'
'My daughter mixes with everybody,' Edek said. He looked very pleased to be 
making this announcement. 'My daughter is very rich, herself,' he said. Ruth 
nearly started laughing. She restrained herself. 'Not as rich as Mr Lauder,' she 
said.
'Please have a cup of coffee,' the man said. He told the woman to put on the 
kettle.
'No thanks,' Ruth said, at exactly the same time as Edek was saying. 'Thank you 
very much.'
She shook her head at Edek. She didn't want to stay in this place one minute 
longer than she had to. 'No thank you,' Edek said. 'We did just have a coffee.'
'We'd like a guide for the cemetery,' Ruth said.
'Of course, of course,' the man said. 'For which day would you like a guide?'
'Today,' Ruth said. 'This afternoon.'
'I can organise it for you,' the man said. 'I will arrange for our best guide. 
He is very familiar with the archives of the cemetery. We look after the 
archives in this office, thanks to Mr Lauder.'
'Could we have the guide at two-thirty p.m., for a couple of hours?' Ruth said.
'You want to be in the cemetery for two hours?' Edek said to Ruth.
'I just want to make sure we have enough time,' Ruth said.
'What is there to do in a cemetery?' Edek said. 'You walk in, you have a look 
and you seen the cemetery.'
Edek turned to the director of the centre. 'Tell the guide we will need him for 
half an hour maybe, one hour maximum.'
'We'll have two hours,' Ruth said.
'What for?' Edek said. 'Everyone in the cemetery is dead. You cannot stay and 
talk.'
'Maybe you want to pray in the cemetery?' the director said.
'We don't pray,' Ruth said. The man looked startled.
'You have to explain to him,' Edek said. 'You cannot say just we do not pray.'
'You can explain how you and Mum and your parents were brought up as orthodox 
Jews,' Ruth said to Edek. 'You can tell him that you decided there was no God 
after watching Nazis play football with babies, and bang babies' heads against 
walls. I don't want to go into it.'
'I will ring the guide straight away,' the man said. He walked briskly to the 
phone.
 


'Why do you make trouble?' Edek said. 'I don't like him,' said Ruth.
'You make trouble with everybody,' Edek said. 'In the taxi you did want to make 
the driver feel bad. Here you do want to make this poor man feel bad.'  'Why 
shouldn't I make taxi drivers feel bad?' Ruth said. 'If they feel bad it's only 
for one minute. They don't really think about what it means to have no Jews left 
in Poland, but plenty of anti-Semitic graffiti.'  'What did this man here do to 
you?' Edek said.
'He didn't make us feel welcome,' said Ruth.
'That is true,' said Edek.
'You was really in this Mr Lauder's home?' Edek said.
'I was,' Ruth said. 'There was me and a hundred other people.'
Edek laughed. 'You are a clever girl,' he said.
'Thank you,' she said.
'Excuse me,' the director called out. 'Can the guide meet you at  your hotel?'
'Of course,' Ruth said. 'We're staying at the Grand Victoria.' 'That is 
perfect,' the director said. 'The Grand Victoria at two-thirty p.m. sharp.' He 
made the arrangements with the guide, and  hung up.
'Marek is our best guide,' the director said to Edek and Ruth. 'Marek will show 
you the funeral home which was built in 1898. He will show you how the bodies 
were brought into the hall from the doors on the west side of the building.'  
'You want to see this?' Edek said to Ruth. Ruth nodded.
'Marek will show you everything.'
'Thank you very much,' Ruth said.
'Thank you very much,' said Edek.
'I am glad that you were able to visit our centre,' the director said.
'Could I ask you a question?' Ruth said.
'Of course, of course,' he said.
'Why would you want to rehabilitate Jewish life in Poland?' she said. 'I'm not 
trying to undermine what you are doing here, in helping these elderly Jews, but 
why would you want to re-establish Jewish life here?'  'It is very important 
that Jewish people have a home in Poland,' he said. 'We have to build up Jewish 
life in Poland, once more.'  'But why?' Ruth said. 'Poland is not a conducive 
place for Jews. Why would you want Jews to live here? Poles don't like Jews. 
There's anti-Semitic graffiti in the streets. You must have seen it.'  'Of 
course I see it,' he said.
'And you must see more than that if you're walking the streets of Lodz looking 
like a Jew,' she said.  'I cover my yarmulke with a cap,' he said.
'So you want all Jews to have to cover their yarmulkes with their caps?' Ruth 
said. 'What sort of a Jewish life would that be?'  'Ruthie, Ruthie,' Edek said. 
'Do not get so excited.'
'I'm not excited,' Ruth said. 'I'm disturbed. I can understand why it is 
important to look after those Jews that are left, but I don't understand why you 
want to create a Jewish community here.  'And where are you going to get the 
Jews from? Your current members are obviously too old to procreate. And you're 
not going to get any Jews that I know to migrate to Poland. Apart from the 
intrinsically unattractive prospect of living in Poland, a lot of Jews view 
Poland as one large gravesite.'  'Ruthie, this is not a nice thing to say,' Edek 
said.
'Well it is one large gravesite,' Ruth said.
'I didn't mean this, I did mean it is not nice to say it is no good, the life in 
Poland,' Edek said.  'Would you live here?' Ruth said. Edek didn't answer.
'We are looking for Jews who are already here,' the director said.
'Where are they?' said Ruth.
 


'They do not know they are Jews,' he said.
'Well what's the point of telling them?' Ruth said. 'It's not all that wonderful 
to be a Jew.'
'They want to be Jews,' the director said.
'The ones who don't know they're Jewish?' said Ruth.
'The ones who have already come forward," he said.
'Why?' Ruth said, 'so they can experience the antagonism and the anti-Semitism 
that they're missing out on?'  'She has got a point,' said Edek.
'They want to be Jews,' the director said. 'Some of them have gone to a lot of 
trouble to establish that there was Jewish blood in the family.'  'Don't they 
know that Jewish blood is still suspect in Poland?" Ruth said.
'They know that,' he said. 'Some of their families will not admit to any 
Jewishness.'
'So they are estranged from their families and living in Poland as Jews?" Ruth 
said. 'That doesn't sound great.'  'At least they are not living a lie," the 
director said.
'Lies are not necessarily all that bad,' Ruth said.
'Now you are being stupid,' said Edek.
'Why don't you ship those Poles who are desperate to be Jews off to Israel?' 
Ruth said to the director.  'They are not Poles, they are Jews,' he said.
'Well, still, why don't you help them to get to Israel?" Ruth said. 'Or ask Mr 
Lauder to help them get visas to America. No Jew in his right mind would want to 
stay here.'  Ruth shook her head. What was she trying to achieve here? Was she 
just being argumentative? Taking out her frustrations on this poor lone young 
Jew. Edek shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.  'I didn't know I was a Jew 
myself, until I was a young adult,' the director said.
Ruth felt bad. 'Do you want to stay in Poland?' she said.
'I hope to go to Israel,' he said. There was an uncomfortable silence.
'I do not feel so comfortable in Israel myself," Edek said.
'That's a whole other story,' Ruth said to the director.
'Israel is very important for the Jews,' Edek said. 'But for me the Jews what 
are there are not the same Jews what I grew up with.'  'The Jews you grew up 
with are gone,' Ruth said. 'Anyway, you don't like being in crowds of Jews.'  
'That is true,' said Edek. 'But I do give money to Israel,' he said to the 
director, 'and so does my daughter.'  'Having Jews in Poland is a sign that 
Hitler did not win,' the director said. Ruth was speechless. Hitler didn't win? 
What would Hitler have had to do to be considered to have won in this man's 
eyes? Ruth opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. There was too much 
to say, and the words were all jammed and backed up in her, in astonishment at 
this man's proposition.  'I think Hitler did win,' she said, quietly. Edek 
looked at her. She couldn't tell if he was about to admonish her not to continue 
this discussion, or whether he was sending her an expression of solidarity. Edek 
rolled his eyes, slightly, at her. Ruth was grateful to know that her father 
agreed with her.  'Ronald Lauder is restoring synagogues in Poland,' the man 
said. 'He is giving undiscovered Jews back their Judaism. People who did not 
know they were Jewish now know.'  'Does it help them?' Ruth said. 'Of course,' 
he said.
'They're not experiencing any more anti-Semitism as Jews than they did when they 
thought they were Poles?' she said.  The man thought for a second. 'I don't know 
the answer to that,' he said.
It was absurd to renovate synagogues in Poland, Ruth thought, and think that 
that was restoring Jewish life. The existence of the
 


synagogues, she thought, underlined the fact that the Poles and the Germans had 
very successfully got rid of the Jews. The synagogues stood there. Alone and 
unattended except for a handful of mostly elderly people, in some of the larger 
cities. And a stray tourist or  two.
Some of the synagogues were in poor villages and towns. In the middle of run-
down buildings. In the middle of rural and urban poverty, the newly renovated 
synagogues stood out. It was a misrepresentation of a Jewish community. A 
misrepresentation that was dangerous. A misrepresentation that played to the 
rich Jew stereotype. The decorated and restored synagogues suggested a Jewish 
community in the cities and towns. A prosperous Jewish community. A community of 
twelve Jews shouldn't be associated with the most expensively renovated building 
in the village or town, Ruth thought. It was a provocative gesture. Ruth felt it 
was almost like painting a target on each Jew. And why did Ronald Lauder have to 
put a plaque with his name on it, on every site? Surely that added to the 
stereotype of showy, flashy, Jews?  Ruth wanted to leave. The smell of cabbage 
felt as though it had permeated her skin and her hair and all of the rest of 
her. She felt that her lungs were expelling the scent of boiled cabbage.  'Thank 
you very much for organising the guide for us,' Ruth said to the director. She 
put on her coat.
'Thank you very very much,' Edek said to the director. 'I hope that you do 
manage to get to Israel.'
'Should I mail you a brochure of our activities here?' the director  said to 
Ruth.
'Of course,' Ruth said.
 'Send me one, too,' Edek said. He nudged Ruth. 'Ruthie, we should leave a 
donation now. Give the gentleman something.'  The director looked uncomfortable. 
'You can send a cheque when you receive our brochures,' he said.
'My daughter can give you something now,' Edek said. Ruth opened her wallet and 
took out a thousand zlotys. Edek looked at the money. 'My daughter is a good 
girl,' he said.  'Thank you very much," the director said. They all shook hands.
'I'm never going to be able to get rid of this cabbage smell,' Ruth said to 
Edek, on their way down the stairs.  'It is a terrible bad stink,' Edek said.
Ruth laughed. 'It sure is,' she said.
'You want something to eat?" Edek said.
'No, I'm not really hungry,' Ruth said. 'That cabbage made me feel sick. It 
didn't even smell as though they'd added fried onions or some meat. It smelt 
like plain boiled cabbage.'  'I am also not hungry,' Edek said. 'When I have a 
good breakfast I do not need nothing else.'
'Would you like to stop and have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake?' Ruth 
said.
'I did tell you I am not hungry,' Edek said.
'What about a bowl of soup?' she said.
'If you have some soup, I will have some soup, too,' Edek said.
They walked along Zachodnia Street.
'I think you got a point,' Edek said.
'About what?' Ruth said.
'About the spending money to find the Jews what is in Poland,' Edek said. 'If 
they do not know that they are Jewish, how Jewish can they be?'  'You think 
people are only what they're brought up to be?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Edek. 'If I was brought up Italian, I would be Italian.' 
'Maybe,' Ruth said.
 


'What for do they want to make Jews out of the Poles?' Edek said 'It is not so 
easy for a Jew to be a good Jew. I do not think it will be so easy for a Pole 
who thinks he is a Jew, to be a good Jew,'  'Especially in Poland,' Ruth said.
'Still, I got conscience bites,' Edek said.
Ruth loved the phrase 'conscience bites'. It was Edek's own phrase. He had been 
having conscience bites since Ruth was a small girl.  'What have you got a bad 
conscience about?' she said.
'We was not so nice to the man from the Jewish Centre,' Edek  said.
'I wasn't rude to him,' Ruth said. 'I just genuinely wanted to know  what they 
thought they were doing.'
'Why do you not ask this Mr Lauder?' Edek said. 'Ask Ronald Lauder?' Ruth said. 
'For a start I don't know him.' 'Did you speak to him when you was in his 
house?' said Edek. 'For one and a half minutes,' Ruth said. 'He greeted all of 
the guests. Anyway, you don't ask people with his degree of wealth real 
questions. You try to behave yourself in their houses. Eat the right food with 
the right piece of cutlery. Be charming, and be glad you were invited so you can 
tell other people that you were in his house.'  'You cannot ask a question?' 
Edek said.
'You can't question what they do,' Ruth said. 'Your job is not to question them, 
your job is to admire their acquisitions and achievements. Do you know what 
acquisitions are?'  'Of course I know,' said Edek. 'Acquisitions is stuff you 
did buy.'
'That's right,' said Ruth.
'I would speak to this Mr Lauder if I was in New York,' Edek said.
 'I'm sure you would,' Ruth said. She shuddered at the thought of what Edek 
might say to Ronald Lauder.  'A rich man is the same as a poor man,' Edek said.
'Not really,' Ruth said.
'For me they are the same,' said Edek.  grin;
'Well for the rest of us they're not,' Ruth said. 'I've watched people
I and stammer and agree with something they're violently opposed  when they're 
in the company of the very rich. There is something about a lot of money that is 
very intimidating.'  'Not for me,' Edek said.
Edek was probably right, Ruth thought. Ronald Lauder probably wouldn't 
intimidate him. Edek would have asked Ronald Lauder what he was trying to 
achieve by rehabilitating the Jews of Poland. She had wanted to ask that 
question, herself, but she had been unable to. All she had been able to voice 
was something that Ronald Lauder already knew. 'You have a beautiful home,' Ruth 
had said to him.  'Look, flaki,' Edek said. He was pointing to a chalked sign 
outside a small restaurant. 'You want some flaki  'I really don't feel like 
anything heavy,' Ruth said.
'Flaki is not heavy,' said Edek. 'It is not like meat. Flaki is just the stuff 
what lines the stomach. It is not fattening, too.'  'It's tripe and tripe is not 
really light,' Ruth said.
'You are not fat,' Edek said. 'You can afford to eat it.'
'I'm not worried about the calories,' Ruth said. 'I just don't feel like tripe.'
'You think always about what is fattening,' Edek said. 'That is why you have 
such bird seeds for breakfast.'  'Dad,' she said. 'Let's not fight. I'm not 
really hungry. I'd like to walk for awhile.'
'Why do you not have some flaki?' I did not want it for me,' Edek said. 'Only 
for you.' He looked glum.  They kept walking. Ruth felt mean about the flaki. 
She should nave said she wanted some. Then her father could have had the flaki 
he obviously wanted. They passed a cake shop. There were cake shops everywhere. 
Small side streets with no other signs of commerce had Cake shops. A pyramid of 
pontshkes was in the window of this cake shop. Each pontshke looked plump. 
Perfectly rounded and powdered.
 


'Don't they look beautiful,' Ruth said to Edek. 'Why don't you have a pontshke, 
Dad?' she said.
'No, I am not hungry,' he said.
'I'd have one if I didn't still feel saturated with the smell of cabbage,' Ruth 
said. 'They look so beautiful.'
'Okay,' Edek said, 'I will have one. Only one, and that is it.' When her father 
added 'and that is it' to the end of any declaration about food, Ruth always 
knew that he wanted more. 'One pontshke, and that is it,' Edek said.  They 
bought one pontshke. The shop was full of cakes. Chocolate cakes, butter cakes, 
apple cakes. Ruth wasn't tempted. She felt as though she had melted cabbage in 
her nostrils. They walked out of the shop. Edek bit into his pontshke. Puffs of 
icing sugar flew into the air and settled on Edek's nose and cheeks. They 
stopped. Ruth took out a tissue and wiped Edek's face.  'I'd like to walk for a 
while and see if I can clear some of that boiled cabbage out of my head,' Ruth 
said.
'In that case I will go back to the hotel,' Edek said. 'I got a couple of phone 
calls to make.'
'Who are you going to call?' Ruth said. 'Stefan,' said Edek. 'Who is Stefan?' 
Ruth said.
'You did ask me just before this same question,' Edek said. 'Stefan is the 
driver what is from Warsaw.'
'Sorry,' she said, 'I forgot. Okay, you call Stefan and see whether he wants to 
do the job.'
'I did tell you before that he will do it,' Edek said. 'You can't just assume he 
is available,' Ruth said. 'You think that Stefan is Mr Lauder?' Edek said. 'Of 
course Stefan will be available. How many jobs is he going to get like this?'  
'Depends on how many Jews like us keep trekking through Poland, Ruth said.
Trekking?' Edek said. 'What is trekking?'
Trekking is to travel with difficulty,' Ruth said.
'I did think that you did say that we are dreking through Poland.'
Drek was Yiddish for shit. Ruth laughed. That's very funny,' she said. In a way 
Edek was right. They were dreking though Poland. Having to deal with a lot of 
shit.  'I'll walk you back to the hotel,' she said to Edek.
'What for?' he said. 'I'll go back and you walk where you want to walk.'
'I want to walk past the places where the synagogues used to be,' Ruth said.
There is nothing there,' said Edek.
'I know,' said Ruth.
The map published by the Our Roots company that she had, of Jewish Lodz before 
the war, was marked with synagogues. Underneath each synagogue were, in 
brackets, the words 'non existing'. So the places she wanted to walk by were 
sites. Former sites of synagogues. There was the site of the Great Synagogue on 
Zielona Street. The Great Synagogue was considered by some to have been the most 
impressive synagogue in Poland. She wanted to visit the 'non existing' 
synagogues on Wolczanska Street and Wolborska Street. The Nazis had destroyed 
all the synagogues except one. There was one synagogue left in Lodz. A small 
synagogue at twenty-eight Rewolucji 1905 Street.  The synagogue at twenty-eight 
Rewolucji 1905 Street had survived partly because it was used as a storehouse 
for salt by the Nazis. And also possibly because it was tucked away in a corner 
at the back of the second of two courtyards. And it was very small.  'You want 
to walk to something that is not there?' Edek said.
'Yes, if you insist on putting it that way, that's what I want to do,' said 
Ruth.
'Are you crazy?' said Edek.
'I hope not,' she said.
 


'Is there something left where there was synagogues?' Edek said. 'Nothing,' Ruth 
said. 'There's not a trace of the existence of any of the synagogues that are 
gone.'
'What are you going to see?' asked Edek. 'I don't know,' Ruth said, 'Do you want 
to come with me?' 'I have to ring Stefan,' Edek said.
'That's true, you have to give him some notice,' she said. Edek looked at Ruth 
as though he was examining her for signs of mental deterioration. He was 
frowning.
'You do not go to a synagogue what is there,' he said. 'You do not go to the 
synagogues what are in New York, you do not go to the synagogues what are in 
Melbourne. Why do you go to a synagogue what is not there?'
Edek had a point, Ruth thought. She was never interested in synagogues. She 
avoided them. Why was she so drawn to these synagogues? To these absent 
synagogues.
'I don't know why I want to go, Dad,' she said. 'I just want to feel the air, 
there. To stand and listen.' 'To what?' Edek said. To nothing, to my thoughts,' 
Ruth said. 'You can listen to your thoughts in a synagogue in New York, or in 
Melbourne,' Edek said. 'Or you can listen to your thoughts in the hotel room, in 
Lodz.'
She was not interested in the Jews in New York, she thought. Or in the Jews of 
Melbourne. It was just the Jews of Poland. The dead Jews.
'You do not like so much the Jews what are alive,' Edek said.
'I've got nothing against them,' Ruth said. 'I don't dislike them. Some of my 
best friends are Jewish,' she said, and laughed out loud at the cliche. Edek 
didn't laugh.
'This trip is too much for you,' he said. 'You was worried about me being in 
Poland. I am fine. You are not so fine.'
Was there really something wrong with aligning herself with dead Jews? Ruth 
wondered. She felt most at home with the dead Jews. The dead Jews were her Jews. 
Her family. She understood their suffering. She mourned for them and their way 
of life. She tried to recreate some aspects of the life she imagined they had 
led in her own life. When she ate sauerkraut she pretended that it was straight 
out of a barrel, preserved and marinated for the winter in a basement in Lodz. 
She bought cans of sauerkraut and repackaged it in bottling jars with rubber 
bands and vacuum-sealed lids. She bought rye bread in Dean and Deluca on 
Broadway, and let it go stale in her kitchen. When it was hard and brittle 
enough she ate it. Edek had told her that in the ghetto stale bread was prized 
far more than fresher bread. The stale bread took longer to chew.
Rooshka could never throw bread out. She kept uneaten bread for weeks. 
Eventually Edek or Ruth would throw out the mouldy crusts and ends and slices 
that Rooshka had accumulated. Rooshka had lived for too long without bread to be 
able to discard any. Bread had meant the difference between life and death.
'Let me walk you back to the hotel,' Ruth said to Edek again. 'I don't need 
someone to look after me,' he said. 'You are the one who should be careful.'
'Are you sure you know the way?' she said. 'I am in Lodz,' he said. 'I know the 
way.' Ruth kissed Edek goodbye. 'I'll be back well before we have to 'cave for 
the cemetery,' she said.
'We have to go to the cemetery?' he said. I think you'll love it,' she said. 
'It's the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe. It's where the Jews are.' The Jews 
Ruth was referring to Were the Jews of Lodz who were lucky enough to be buried 
in the cemetery on Bracka Street. The Jews who were lucky enough to die before 
they were murdered.
It is where the dead Jews are,' Edek said.
 


'The dead Jews are the only Jews in Lodz,' Ruth said. 'So we have to visit 
them.'
She was looking forward to going to the cemetery. She planned to get back to the 
hotel in enough time to change her clothes and freshen up. She felt as though 
she was planning a visit to the home of relatives. This cemetery was probably 
the closest she would get to feeling surrounded by relatives, she realised. She 
wished that the dead were not quite so dead. She also wished that the dead were 
not quite so alive to her. She thought that dead people should feel more dead.
Ruth kissed Edek goodbye, again. She watched him walk away. His hands were in 
his pockets. And he was looking at the ground. He was walking quite slowly. He 
looked so alone, in the street. As alone as a small child. Ruth started to cry. 
She had to pull herself together, she thought. She couldn't walk through the 
streets of Lodz, in tears. She wanted to look tough, in Lodz. A tough Jew.
A greasy-looking man wearing a leather jacket and torn jeans leered at her. Ruth 
glared at him. He made a series of kissing noises at her. She glared at him, 
again. She wasn't sure why she didn't feel scared. It was in the middle of the 
day. But there were not many people around and a lot of dark doorways. It was 
strange that she felt less frightened in Lodz than she did in most places. She 
was always careful, in New York, despite the dramatic drop in the city's crime 
rate. She always triple-bolted her apartment and armed her security system. But, 
here in Lodz, she felt free of that fear. The man started making hissing noises 
at her. She decided she had better get a move on. She sped up. 'Arsehole,' she 
shouted back at the man. What was she doing, shouting at dodgy-looking men in 
the street? She was losing her grip. This trip had unhinged her, she thought.
Ruth walked briskly. She felt good walking. She had skipped her run too many of 
the mornings she had been in Poland. Skipped he run. That was a pun. She smiled 
to herself, and narrowly avoided
stepping onto a large pile of dog shit. The dog shit looked fresh. newly 
deposited. It was still steaming. Ruth felt sick. She looked around for the dog. 
It must have been a very large dog, she thought. She couldn't see any dogs. Just 
a group of small boys who had witnessed her near miss. They were all giggling. 
She smiled at them. They stopped giggling and stared at her. Why were they 
staring? Did she look odd? Did she look rich? Probably both, she decided. She 
didn't care. She was enjoying this walk.
Some of the most beautiful buildings in Lodz, possibly the only
beautiful buildings in Lodz, were built by Jews. Ruth was outside
the Poznanski Palace at seventeen Ogrodowa Street. Israel Poznanski
was one of the greatest industrialists in Poland. He had built this
palace in the early 1880s. Ruth liked the palace. It was impressive
without being overly ornamental. It was one of four palaces built
by Israel Poznanski. It was very large. Or was it? It seemed large to
Ruth but then she didn't know much about the sizes of palaces. She
had no idea how big the average palace was.
Israel Poznanski was not an elitist, Ruth decided. Across the road from the 
Poznanski Palace, where Israel himself lived, he had built several cotton 
factories, and housing for the employees who worked at the cotton factories, and 
their families. He built three large four-storey buildings and eighteen smaller 
buildings for his employees. AH together one thousand and eighty-six apartments. 
All across the road from the palace. Israel Poznanski obviously wasn't worried 
about needing privacy, or about lowering the tone of his neighbourhood, "looked 
like a cozy arrangement, to Ruth. The palace, with its stucco and stone 
carvings, looked like a protector, a guardian, a benevolent Presence, watching 
out for the workers and their cottages.
The Museum of the City of Lodz was now housed in Israel Poznanski's
Palace. On Gdanska Street Ruth passed the palace that Israel
Oznahski built for his son Ignacy. The Germans had occupied the
Building in 1940 and the Russians had taken it over in 1945. Ruth
 


had been unable to find out what had happened to the Poznanskis. Their fate was 
probably much the same as the other Jews of Lodz, she thought. This former 
Poznahski Palace was now the Lodz Museum of Art. Soon she came to the palace 
that Poznahski had built for his daughter Anna. Poznahski's daughter had been 
endowed with less than her brothers. This palace wasn't as large as the other 
palaces. Still, it was a palace. Anna Poznahski's palace was now used as offices 
for the Dean of the Lodz Medical Academy. Ruth wondered what had happened to 
Anna.
There were so many other buildings built by Jews. Ruth walked past the Central 
Museum of the Textile Industry. She knew that this building had been the largest 
factory in Lodz when it was built in 1837 by Ludwik Geyer. A few minutes later 
Ruth was in front of the offices of the renowned Theatre and Film School of 
Lodz. The building was formerly the Kohn villa. She thought of Martina Schmidt. 
Martina had probably already left, for Berlin.
Ruth had wanted to call Martina Schmidt that morning. It was strange how you 
could become attached to a stranger. It was probably easier to form an instant 
attachment to someone you didn't know, Ruth thought. You weren't hindered by who 
the person really was. Strangers were probably comprised of more of your own 
making and less of themselves. Maybe she and Martina Schmidt really had very 
little in common. That thought seemed to soothe her. She had inadvertently 
slowed down. She picked up her pace. This exploration of Lodz might as well 
double as exercise, she thought.
Ruth had been bothered by Martina's attraction to Martina's ex-husband's 
sadness. It was a shame people couldn't alter those aspects of themselves that 
were psychologically not in their own interests. Today, so many alterations were 
possible. They could genetically alter food to eliminate any difficult qualities 
and add or enhance the better qualities. In America, they added genes, removed 
from fish, to strawberries. This produced strawberries that would endure cold. 
Ruth
wondered if the fish-enhanced strawberries wilted in heat. Probably not, if they 
hadn't removed the strawberries' heat tolerance genes, she decided.
If it was possible to meddle and alter human qualities and characteristics, Ruth 
thought that she herself would probably need a complete revamping. Why had she 
chosen the word 'revamp', she wondered. Why not 'makeover' or 'overhaul'. 'Vamp' 
seemed an incongruous word, in Lodz. Ruth tried to get the word Vamp' out of her 
head. Sometimes words and their alternatives lodged themselves in her brain and 
stayed there all day. The worst example of this had been the word 'nymph', which 
had lasted a week. The word 'nymph' had appeared minutes after she had picked up 
a postcard from Norman that was in her letterbox, one day last year.
Why 'nymph'? No one, not even Norman, could possibly think of her as a nymph. 
She was much too big to be thought of as a nymph. Nymphs were slim, svelte, and 
ethereal. Still, the word 'nymph' had crept into Ruth's head and occupied her 
for almost a week. As soon as the word had arrived, Ruth had had to produce 
other words that resembled nymph. She had thought of spirit, sprite, sylph, 
elfish. Elfish had reminded her of shellfish, and then sea nymph and ocean nymph 
and fresh water nymph had followed. Soon Ruth was flooded with words. Seamaids 
and mermaids and other water spirits. The word spirits had allowed her to dip 
into the galaxy with the words shooting stars, guardian angels and fairy 
godmothers before she had switched to a rural setting with mountain nymph, glen 
nymph and tree nymph. She had been so relieved when the word nymph had left her.
She certainly didn't feel like a nymph now. Her stomach felt distended. This was 
something else that happened to her when she felt tense. She took two Mylanta 
tablets out of her bag. She was standing on Gabriela Narutowicza Street outside 
an interesting architect-designed building built as a business school, by Jews, 
in 1907. The
 


building was now occupied by the University of Lodz. A tall, grey building, 
around the corner from the former business school, was designed in the same 
style. This mansion was one of several owned by Jakub Kestenberg. Ruth thought 
that the only architects in business in Lodz, before the war, seemed to have 
been Jewish or been employed by Jews.
At number sixty-six Rewolucji 1905 Street was the Przytulisko, the old orphanage 
for Jewish girls. This building was now owned by the University of Lodz. What 
would Lodz have done without their Jews? Who would have built all of these grand 
buildings and palaces? What would the city of Lodz have done if they hadn't got 
rid of their Jews was a better question, she thought. Where would they have 
housed their institutes and museums?
Ruth was now on Pomorska Street, where her mother had lived. She looked around 
at her mother's old neighborhood. It was pretty decrepit. Maksymilian Goldfeder, 
a banker, had built the building at number ninety-two Pomorska Street two blocks 
from her mother's apartment, as affordable housing for poorer Jews. Ruth 
wondered if her mother had known Goldfeder. What a stupid thing to think, she 
thought. Her mother was a poor young girl and Goldfeder was a wealthy banker. 
She didn't think Mr Goldfeder would have spent his days roaming around Pomorska 
Street. It was more likely that her mother would have known the occupants of Mr 
Goldfeder's development for poorer Jews than Mr Goldfeder. Goldfeder also 
founded the Jewish Charity Association, which administered the low-cost housing 
foundation, among its other projects.
Around the corner at number thirty-nine Pohiocna Street, Ruth looked at the 
building that was once the Jakob and Anna Hertz shelter for Jewish Girls. What 
had happened to the Jewish girls who had been sheltered here? she wondered. Had 
any of them been able to reach old age? Close by was the former Poznariski 
Orthodox Hospital-This was now the Seweryn Sterling Hospital. Ruth walked back 
to
I
pornorska Street. The building at number eighteen used to be the Talmud Torah 
School. It was now occupied by the Chemistry Institute of the University of 
Lodz.
Her mother had probably walked past the Talmud Torah School every day. Where was 
her mother now? Ruth was walking in her mother's footsteps in Lodz. But she 
couldn't feel Rooshka. Rooshka was gone. Gone, like all the Jews of Lodz. What a 
community this must have been, Ruth thought. A community that built schools and 
synagogues and libraries and hospitals, and looked after its poor. So what if 
some of the Jews built themselves palaces. Why shouldn't they have a palace or 
two if they wanted to?
Ruth had thought that she would be able to feel the ghosts of the workers and 
orphans and students. The ghosts of the poor Jews and the ghosts of the rich. 
But she couldn't. She couldn't feel anything. She thought she would go back to 
the hotel, soon. She passed the apartment her mother had lived in. There was 
still no sign of life in the apartments.
Ruth found the only remaining synagogue in Poland, at the end of the second 
courtyard of number twenty-eight Rewolucji 1905 Street. The synagogue was tiny. 
At first Ruth was startled by its almost pitiful modesty. Then she decided it 
wasn't the synagogue that was pitiful, it was the fact that this synagogue was 
the only representative 'left of so many synagogues. Grand synagogues and plain 
synagogues. Modest and ornate synagogues. Synagogues in apartment buildings and 
synagogues in the centre of town. They had all been destroyed except this 
synagogue. It was a sweet synagogue with its central arched doorway and arched 
upper windows. The synagogue was painted in a matte muted pink and flat yellow. 
It was very very cute, Ruth decided. She was glad she had seen it.
As hidden as this synagogue was, it had still attracted arsonists. Someone had 
set fire to the synagogue in 1987. The Ronald Lauder foundation had helped to 
rebuild the synagogue. Evidently,
 


synagogues were still not safe in Poland. The newly restored Nozyk Synagogue, in 
Warsaw, was set fire to in 1987. The synagogue had been used as stables and a 
storehouse for fodder during the war. The restoration after the war had taken 
six years. The synagogue had reopened for services in 1983.
Ruth had seen the damage caused by a firebomb last year. It had frightened her. 
Who was so threatened by Jews that they had to try to burn down the only 
functioning synagogue in Warsaw? The same people who felt they had to get rid of 
this little synagogue, in Lodz. Ruth was pleased that the synagogue in Rewolucji 
1905 Street had been rebuilt. It was a small piece of the warmth, the glow, the 
devotion that must have been here when there were still Jews in Lodz. Ruth 
regretted questioning the point of Ronald Lauder's Foundation to revive Jewish 
life in Poland. This synagogue wouldn't be here without the Foundation. She 
contemplated ringing the Jewish Centre and apologising. She decided against it. 
They would think she was a lunatic. Ruth blew a kiss to her mother's apartment 
when she passed
it again.
She walked back to the Grand Victoria. She felt depleted. She needed a cup of 
tea. At the hotel, she sat in the armchair that she felt most comfortable in. 
The armchair was the most isolated one in the lobby. Set well away from the bulk 
of the chairs and sofas. Ruth had asked for a whole lemon to be squeezed into 
her chamomile tea. She sipped the hot lemon-filled drink, and started to feel 
better. She disliked this lobby. But she disliked her room even more. She hated 
her room. It depressed her. Edek was joining her in a few minutes. She was glad 
of the time alone. The time to recover from
all of that absence.
Ruth looked down. Someone had left a book at the foot of the chair. She picked 
up the book. The book was in English. It was a numerology book. How odd. How 
peculiar. Who could have left this book here? She looked around the lobby. It 
was quite empty. No
One in the lobby was looking at her. This was not a message. She felt a bit 
creepy. There was something eerie about this. Could Martina have left it? Ruth 
flicked through the book. There was no note. She was being silly, she decided. 
There was no hidden meaning to this. There was no meaning at all. Someone had 
just left the book behind.
Ruth looked at the chapter headed Numerology and You. Numbers in people's lives 
were not arbitrary, the book explained, they were of great significance and very 
important for personal development. The most important number was the birth date 
number. Ruth added her birth date number up. They still came to eight. How could 
she have developed this far, over forty-two years, if she had only just learned 
her birth date number? Maybe her ignorance of her birth number explained some of 
her bewilderment.
Ruth laughed to herself. If only it were that simple. She could have saved tens 
of thousands of dollars in analysts' and therapists' fees. There was a hierarchy 
in birth date numbers, she read. Master numbers had extra significance. Master 
numbers were eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three. These numbers could not be 
reduced to a single digit because, the book said, the owners of master numbers 
had a special lesson to learn.
Ruth was glad that she was not a master number. She had had enough lessons to 
learn. The next paragraph explained that the demands of the master number could 
be too difficult to live up to. In that case it was possible to reduce the 
burden by adding the digits of the master number together to form a single 
number. This bothered Ruth. If the number was not arbitrary, how could you 
arbitrarily change it? Why were the rules to all of these things so flexible, so 
slippery, so sloppy? She tapped her right foot ten times, in case that thought 
about numerology had offended any spirits or spooks or witches. Spirits or 
spooks or witches who believed in numerology, that was. That was a crazy 
thought, she decided. She stopped herself from tapping out another round of ten 
taps.
 


Edek would be down any minute. Ruth had something she wanted to organise before 
he arrived. She walked to the front desk.  'I'd like an interpreter for an hour 
or two tomorrow morning,' Ruth said to the man at the front desk.  'Of course, 
madam, I can organise this for you,' he said.
'Thank you,' said Ruth. 'Could I have the interpreter at eight o'clock?'
'Eight o'clock is very early,' the man said. Ruth raised her eyebrows.
'Do I have to pay extra for an early start?' she said.
'I think so,' he said.
'Okay,' she said.
'In that case I will organise it for you,' the man at the front desk said. 'What 
do you want the interpreter to do?'  'I want him to negotiate the purchase of 
some items for me,' Ruth said.
'Is it expensive items that you are buying?' he said. 'We have experts on amber 
jewellery and silver work.'  'No,' Ruth said. 'I just want to buy some household 
items. Some pieces of china.'
'You would like some amber too?' he asked.
'No,' Ruth said. 'If I get these pieces of china I'll be very happy.'
'This particular interpreter is very good,' the man said.
'Great,' Ruth said. 'Could you also book a car, one of the hotel taxis, to pick 
me and the guide up, take us to Kamedulska Street, wait for us and bring us back 
to the hotel?'  'Of course, of course,' the man said. 'Your guide and your 
driver will be here at eight a.m. sharp.'  'Do they know each other?' Ruth said.
'Who?' the man said.
'The guide and the driver,' she said.
'No,' he said. 'If you would prefer a guide and a driver who have worked 
together I can provide this.'    'No,' she said. 'It is not necessary.'
Ruth was relieved. A fear of being alone with two Polish men had suddenly swept 
through her. Men who didn't know each other were less likely to collude in 
extrapolating more money or any other deception.  'The interpreter will have to 
charge you extra because of the early time,' the man said.  'You mentioned 
that,' said Ruth. She and Edek seemed to be paying extra for everything in 
Poland. She had changed some more money on her way back to the hotel this 
afternoon. Money changers were called Kantors, in Poland. Kantors had sprouted 
rapidly all over Poland since the demise of communism. It was unsettling seeing 
all the Kantor signs. For Jews a cantor was a singer of liturgical solos. The 
person who sang during services at synagogues.  Edek rushed up to Ruth just as 
she was about to sit down again.
'I got Stefan,' he said. He looked joyful. 'Stefan is very very happy to drive 
us to Krakow. I told you he would be very happy.'  'That's great,' said Ruth.
'Ach, he is so happy,' Edek said.
'I'm glad we're spreading such happiness,' Ruth said.
'He is very very happy,' said Edek.
Ruth was irritated. Stefan's happiness was beginning to annoy her. She was 
aggravated by how happy Stefan was. She didn't want him to be that happy.  'I 
did speak to Stefan's wife, too,' Edek said. 'His wife is a very nice woman.'
'Great,' said Ruth. Edek didn't notice her agitation.
'Stefan's wife is very happy with the job, too,' Edek said. 'She did say to me 
she was very happy that he does get such a big job.'  Ruth was really irked. The 
thought of Stefan's wife bursting with "happiness felt more than she could 
tolerate. She looked at her father. he was beaming. 'She did say I spoke a 
perfect Polish,' Edek said.
 


'Who?' said Ruth.
'Stefan's wife,' Edek said. 'Who else are we talking about?' Anybody else, Ruth 
wished, to herself. She was developing a hatred for Stefan's wife. She tried to 
calm down. Maybe Stefan's wife was a nice woman. Maybe Stefan and his wife had 
sensitive and intelligent children. Children who would grow up to be great 
humanitarians or Nobel Prize-winning poets. These thoughts didn't help her. She 
still felt annoyed.
'I'm glad Stefan's wife complimented you on your Polish,' Ruth said to Edek.
'She said I did speak just like a Polack,' Edek said. Edek looked at the tray 
that had held Ruth's chamomile tea. 'What is that?' he said, pointing to a piece 
of chocolate-coated orange peel.
'It's exactly what it looks like,' Ruth said. 'Chocolate. Chocolate-coated 
orange peel. It came with my tea.' 'You do not want it?' Edek said. 'No, I don't 
want it,' she said.
Edek leaned over and grabbed the piece of chocolate-coated orange peel. He 
popped it into his mouth, quickly. As though the speed eliminated the action. As 
though he hadn't really eaten it. He was always this swift with food. As though 
a slower pace would increase the contents or the calories or the greed involved. 
Was it greed or need? It was unfair of her to think of it as greed, she thought. 
Her father was entitled to all the chocolate he wanted. He needed chocolate. In 
the same way that she needed to run. Her father needed his chocolate. She 
shouldn't needle him about this need. Needle him about his need, she repeated to 
herself, pleased with the pun.
'It is a very good chocolate,' Edek said. 'Good,' Ruth said. 'Our guide will be 
here soon,' she added. 'She did say she did think I was a Polack when she did 
speak to me,' Edek said.
'Is this Stefan's wife, again?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' Edek said. 'She said I did speak just like a Polack.'
'I'm not sure that doing anything just like a Polack is a good thing,' Ruth 
said.
'Do not be stupid,' Edek said. He wiped some chocolate from the sides of his 
mouth with his fingers. Ruth was about to offer him a handkerchief, when he 
licked his fingers clean.
'I did arrange a hotel for Stefan,' Edek said.
'I hope it's a cheap one,' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Edek. 'You think I am crazy?' Ruth didn't answer. 'The doorman 
did help me,' Edek said. Ruth grimaced at the thought of the doorman.
'At least he's good for something,' Ruth said.
'I do not know what is wrong with you,' Edek said.
Ruth noticed a slightly built, sensitive-looking man, hovering near the entrance 
to the lobby. 'I think that might be our guide,' she said to Edek. She went up 
to the elderly man. 'I'm Ruth Rothwax,' she said. He looked relieved. 'I am 
Marek Kowalski,' he said. Ruth introduced Marek to Edek. They chatted. Ruth 
liked Marek straight away. He had a face that looked sad in repose, and stayed 
that way when he was animated. He had large, watery blue eyes.
'I am looking forward to seeing the cemetery,' Ruth said to Marek. This cemetery 
is my love,' Marek said. Edek looked at Marek, oddly. Ruth could see that Marek 
was already too much for Edek. She didn't know why.
Edek ran off to organise a taxi. Ruth looked at Marek. His clothes Were frayed 
and worn. He was carrying a yellow shopping bag. Ruth asked him if he would like 
to leave the bag in the room. He smiled at her. No, he said, he took the bag 
everywhere. It was quite a large paper bag. Ruth hoped it didn't contain all of 
Marek's possessions.
She hoped Marek wasn't homeless. Edek had arranged the taxi. It
 


was a Mercedes. A grey one, this time. They got into the taxi. Ruth sat in the 
back with Marek. Edek sat in the front. Marek told the driver where to go.
'This Mercedes is not so big what the other ones was,' Edek said
to Ruth.
'It's smaller, is it?' she said. 'You cannot see this?' Edek said. 'Not really,' 
she said. Edek snorted.
Edek started chatting to the driver. Ruth could hear them talking. They were 
talking about Krakow. She switched off. She needed a break from Edek and Polish 
taxi drivers. She looked out of the car window, at the streets of Lodz. They 
really were bleak. Suddenly, Edek turned to face her. He had hoisted himself 
around in the seat, so abruptly, it had given Ruth a shock.
This gentleman,' Edek said, 'says he has got for us a better hotel in Krakow 
than the one what we have booked.' 'Which gentleman?' Ruth said. 'The driver, 
here,' Edek said, annoyed.
Ruth hadn't intended to annoy Edek. She just hadn't instantly associated the 
word 'gentleman' with the man who was driving them. She hadn't even looked at 
the driver. They were all blending into each other, all the Polish drivers of 
all the Mercedes. She noticed that this driver had greasy hair. So had most of 
the others. 'We're booked into a really nice hotel in Krakow,' Ruth said. 'He 
says he has got a better one,' Edek said. 'Why should we listen to him?' Ruth 
said. Edek ignored her. 'What is the name of the one what we are booked in?' he 
said. 'The Hotel Mimoza,' Ruth said. 'The Hotel Mimoza?' said Edek.
'It's very good. It's one of the best hotels in Krakow,' Ruth said.
Edek spoke to the driver briefly. He turned back to Ruth. 'He says
that this Hotel Mimoza is not in such a good position,' Edek said.
'It's in the heart of the old city,' Ruth said. Edek conferred with the driver 
again.
'He says you cannot drive in the old city.' 'We don't want to drive,' Ruth said. 
'We don't have a car.' 'He says he has got a better hotel,' Edek said. 'It is 
only two miles from the old town.'
'I want to be in the old town,' Ruth said. 'I don't want to be stuck in the 
depressing outskirts of the city.'
'He says this hotel, what he recommends, the Demel, is famous for their 
excellent cooking,' Edek said.
'We're not going to Krakow for the food,' Ruth said. She felt furious. Who did 
Edek think he was talking to? He was talking to a Lodz taxi driver, not the 
editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine or the travel editor of the New York Times.
'I used a top travel agent to make this booking,' Ruth said to Edek. 'The same 
travel agent what did book us into the Grand Victoria in Lodz?' Edek said.
'The Grand Victoria, unfortunately, is the best there is, in Lodz,' said Ruth. 
What was wrong with her father? Why did he instantly trust every Polish cab 
driver he came across? Why didn't he see the shirty expressions and the greasy 
glances? Marek was looking down at his lap. He looked uncomfortable. 'I'm sorry 
to have this argument in front of you,' Ruth said to him. 'It is just the 
tensions of travel.'
Marek shook his head, as if to ward off Ruth's explanation. 'You do not have to 
explain to me,' he said. 'We are nearly there,' he added. And smiled. He had the 
sweetest smile, Ruth thought. She wondered how old he was. It was hard to tell. 
He looked about eighty. They arrived at the cemetery. Edek paid the driver. Ruth 
was struck by the quiet, outside the cemetery. There was a strangely peaceful 
silence surrounding the cemetery. Could silence be peaceful? she thought. 
Silence could certainly be frightening or ominous or
 


suspenseful. She saw no reason why it couldn't be peaceful. Silence could be 
imbued with whatever you wanted to imbue it with, she decided. This silence felt 
peaceful to Ruth.
A sign outside the cemetery said 'Cmentarz Zydowski.' Jewish cemetery. Ruth knew 
that Israel Poznariski had bought the land for this cemetery and donated it to 
the Jewish community. She knew the cemetery had been opened in 1892.
Marek had the key to the cemetery in his hand. All three of them were standing 
in front of the gate which was the entrance to the cemetery.
'I want to introduce myself,' Marek said slowly. 'My name is Marek Kowalski.'
'You told us this, already,' Edek said. Ruth glared at him.
'I have some more to tell you,' Marek said. 'I come from Lodz. My mother was 
Helena Kowalski. My father was Tomasz Kowalski. My father died when I was eight 
years old. My father was not Jewish.'
'He does speak a good English,' Edek said, under his breath, to Ruth. Ruth 
glared at him, again.
'My mother was Jewish,' Marek said. 'I was in hiding with my mother Helena 
Kowalski during the war. My mother died last year. She was ninety-five. I am 
seventy years old.'
Ruth was shocked that Marek was only seventy. She was very moved by Marek's 
touchingly formal introduction of himself. No one introduced themselves like 
that anymore. No one thought it was necessary to tell anyone anymore about them 
than their latest accoutrement, a car, a piece of jewellery, or an item of 
clothing, revealed.
'Thank you,' she said to Marek. She looked at him. It was hard to believe that 
he was only seventy. He looked so much older.
'Let us go inside,' Edek said.
Marek unlocked the door. 'Would you like to walk for a time, first?' he said to 
Ruth. 'Or would you like me to tell you about the cemetery before we start?"
'We will walk,' Edek said. Ruth didn't mind. She wanted to take in the 
atmosphere. To feel the cemetery before she heard what Marek had to say.
Just inside the entrance to the cemetery was a mound of earth.
'This man had to be buried above the ground,' Marek said, pointing to the mound 
of earth. The mound looked forlorn and alone. The buried man was not far enough 
into the cemetery, Ruth thought. He was too close to the front gate. Too far 
from the rest of the dead.
'They did not have time to bury him?' Edek said.
The ground was too frozen,' Marek said. Edek looked closely at the small marker 
on top of the mound. 'He did die two years ago,' Edek said to Marek. 'The ground 
was not so frozen in summer.'
'That is true,' said Marek.
'I suppose they did forget,' Edek said.
A few flowers and branches were scattered on the mound. Ruth was glad that not 
everyone had forgotten this man. Ruth noticed an old red plastic cup lying near 
the side of the mound. She kicked it away.
'We will start our walk, then, on one of the two principal axes of the 
cemetery,' Marek said. They looked around for Edek. He had already run off and 
was halfway down a small path. 'We will follow your father,' Marek said to Ruth.
It had snowed lightly overnight. Small patches of white snow dotted the earth. A 
grey mist thickened the air. The leafless trunks and branches of trees had a 
light white frosting. This part of the cemetery was quite unkempt. Large tufts 
of weeds sprouted up against the sides of broken tombstones. Even the weeds had 
a 


ghostly beauty.
Ruth walked behind Marek. She could feel something falling away from her. 
Something lifting. Her limbs felt relaxed. What was she losing? she thought. She 
was losing her headache, she realised. She
as losing the stomach-ache that led, so frequently, to nausea. How did she know 
that these things were leaving? She could just tell. She dropped beside a 
particularly high pile of weeds and tilted headstones.
 


The weeds were entangled with fragments of stones that must have come from 
nearby graves. She could see bits and pieces of abbreviated inscriptions on some 
of the stones.
She wanted to clear the weeds away. Put the broken stones back together again. 
Mend the tablets and markers and memorials. She knew it couldn't be done. It was 
a bit like Humpty Dumpty, she thought. She was immediately shocked by that 
thought. How could she be so irreverent? How could she think about a nursery 
rhyme, here? The words to Humpty Dumpty went through her head. 'All the king's 
horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.' Maybe it was 
not so irreverent, she thought. Maybe it was appropriate.
Two exquisite headstones, side by side, caught her eye. Sculpted, in relief, 
across the top of each headstone, was a broken tree. The tree was broken in 
half. The top half, with all its branches and leaves, was draped elegantly 
almost to the bottom of the headstone. The smaller of the two headstones had 
'Jakob Horwicz' in a diagonal bar across the left-hand corner. The inscription 
on the other headstone was in Hebrew or Yiddish. The broken tree must symbolize 
a truncated life, Ruth thought. Marek came up to her. 'The broken tree 
symbolizes the end of life,' he said.
Edek found Ruth and Marek. Edek was slightly out of breath. He had come running 
back from whatever part of the cemetery he had been in.
'You seen enough?' Edek said to Ruth. Ruth was shocked.
'We've only been here for five minutes,' she said.
'How many minutes do we need to be here?' Edek said. 'A cemetery is a cemetery.'
'A few more,' Ruth said. Edek shrugged his shoulders and walked off. 'Don't lose 
us, Dad,' she called out, after him. He laughed.
'You think I am going to let you leave me in the cemetery,' he said. 'No way, 
brother.'
Ruth smiled at Edek's combination of the two colloquialisms, 'no way', and 
'brother'. 'Well, just make sure you can see us,' she said.
'Okey dokey,' he said. Ruth almost laughed. The Lodz cemetery was making her 
father more Australian by the minute. She smiled at Marek. 'This is difficult 
for him,' she said, nodding in the direction of her father.
'Of course,' Marek said.
Ruth walked ahead of Marek. She was glad to be on her own. She was quite pleased 
that her father had wandered off. Well, he hadn't exactly wandered off, he had 
run. As though he was running from a ghost. Maybe, in this place, he was.
Ruth realised that a large calm had descended on her. She felt steady and 
unstrained. The trouble that so often brewed and bubbled in her brain had been 
quelled. As though someone had poured a balm over her, and hushed her anxiety. 
She felt almost groggy with peacefulness. Almost sluggish with a quietness she 
had rarely experienced, as though she had been injected intravenously with a 
tranquillizer or sedative.
What had pacified her? she wondered. Was it her proximity to people she had 
always felt close to? The proximity to the dead? They weren't her dead. She knew 
that. Her dead weren't buried like this. Her dead were burnt in outdoor ditches 
or baked, like roast meats, in ovens. But these dead, the dead in the Jewish 
cemetery, in Lodz, were the closest to her dead, her family, that she would ever 
get. She knew that.
She kept walking. She felt so calm she wanted to cry. Was this calm what normal 
people felt like? Were there people who lived without the edginess and tension 
and nervousness that were normal tor her? She didn't know. She passed a group of 
stubby stumps, the remains of tablets and markers, sticking up from the ground. 
They
 


looked like big, thick, broken, grey teeth. She felt sad. What had been there? 
Who was buried beneath that piece of earth? Buried beneath those sunken and 
broken stone molars and bicuspids, with only cracked and shortened marble 
dentures as markings.
She arrived at a whole field of headstones still upright, still in one piece. 
The headstones were dwarfed and enveloped by tall, wild weeds. Ruth couldn't 
reach them. She was pleased that they were at least intact, if out of reach. 
Some mushrooms were growing around the foot of the tree Ruth was standing 
beside. The mushrooms looked alive. Healthy and vigorous. Cemeteries were 
probably composed of agriculturally enriched earth, Ruth thought.
She looked for her father. She couldn't see him. She didn't want to call out to 
him. She didn't want to disturb the silence. She felt it would be blasphemous to 
shout, in this place. You never knew who you might startle. She really had to 
stop thinking of dead people as being alive, she thought. It was no good for her 
to think this way. How could dead people be startled? That was absurd. She 
called out to Edek. There was no response. She looked around her. Nothing else 
had moved or changed. Nobody was bothered by her shout. She couldn't see Marek. 
Maybe he had followed Edek. She wasn't worried. She was sure she would catch up 
with both of them soon.
There were symbols on many of the headstones and tombstones in the cemetery. 
This was quite different from the plain, unadorned monuments and memorials in 
the Jewish cemetery in Springvale, Melbourne. Plant motifs were common here, and 
a pair of hands in a gesture of blessing was engraved and embossed on small and 
large stones, and columns and arches. The symbols often referred to aspects of 
the dead person's life. There were books for scholars of the Talmud and a basin 
and ewer, a pitcher with a flaring spout, for descendants of the Levites, 
attendants in the temple, and for teachers of the law.
Images of extinguished candles represented the end of the lives
of some women. This was an allusion to the lighting of the candles on the 
Sabbath, a job always done by women. An alms box was a symbol of generosity or 
charity, and a crown signified fidelity in a marriage. Ruth was fascinated by 
the graves and their symbols. She had read about the burial symbols of Jews, in 
Manhattan, months before she had left for Poland. She had known that she would 
be visiting the Bracka Street Cemetery. She had read that there were over one 
hundred and eighty thousand graves in the cemetery.
There was a balance and harmony in the cemetery that was palpable. As though its 
inhabitants were as cohesive in their death as they were in their lives. As 
though the community of scholars and teachers and lawyers and workers and 
watchmakers and artisans and industrialists and rabbis and doctors were still 
alive. Although they had shifted into another dimension, unchanged. Ruth could 
feel the symmetry, the unity. She could feel the love in the community, the 
husbands and wives, the families.
'Where were you?' Edek said, in a loud voice. Ruth got a fright. She jumped.
'Marek and I was looking for you everywhere,' Edek said.
'You gave me an awful fright,' Ruth said.
'We was worried about you,' Edek said.
'I've looked for you a couple of times,' she said.
'Well we are together, now,' Marek said.
'Okay, forget about it,' Edek said to Ruth. 'I did find you.'
Marek put down his yellow shopping bag.
This cemetery has been designated a national monument of the example of 
nineteenth-century architectural thoughts,' he said.
Edek groaned. Ruth hoped that Marek hadn't heard the groan. The architectural 
thought that is being recognised is the turning of existing fields and small 
farms close to the town, into a place for the burial of the dead,' Marek said. 
Edek kicked at some dirt with his foot 



 


'Okay,' Edek said, briskly.
'One of the architects who drew up the plans was Adolf Zeligson, who also 
designed the pre-burial hall,' Marek said.  'Thank you very much,' Edek said. He 
went to move on.
'I have not finished yet,' said Marek. He looked hurt.
'Forgive my father,' Ruth said.
'Why should he forgive me?' Edek said. 'I did not do anything wrong. How did I 
know that he was not finished?' Edek looked wounded, now.    'I didn't say you 
did anything terrible,' Ruth said to her father. 'Are you ashamed of your 
father?' Edek said. 'No, of course I'm not,' she said.  'Maybe I was right. 
Maybe I should have stayed in Melbourne,' Edek said.
'Let us look at the mausoleum of Poznariski,' Marek said.
'Oh, Poznariski,' Edek said. 'He was very rich.'
'Very, very rich,' Ruth said.
'Where is Poznahski's grave?' said Edek.
'Not far,' said Marek. 'Follow me.' Ruth and Edek followed Marek.
Ruth felt sorry for her father. She shouldn't have apologised for him. She 
should have been more sensitive. He was eighty-one and she had dragged him into 
a cemetery. A cemetery saturated with dead Jews. Edek probably had relatives who 
were buried here. The names on the graves were probably reviving many memories 
for him. Difficult memories. She should be taking more care of her father, she 
decided.  'Wow,' said Ruth, when she saw the mausoleum which housed Israel 
Poznanski and his wife. It was enormous and imposing. " stood above and towered 
over everything else in the cemetery. Rut" had never seen a mausoleum of this 
size, built for a Jew. Four columns supported a large dome. Arched windows were 
built into the dome-Ruth walked up the steps of the monument. A locked wrought-
iron gate prevented her from going inside. She peered inside. She could just 
make out the intricate work of the mosaic tiles that lined the interior of the 
dome. The monument Poznahski had built for himself. It was quite beautiful, Ruth 
thought.  'It is very big,' Edek said.
'It sure is,' said Ruth.
'I think it is too big,' Edek said.
'A lot of people might agree with you,' she said. 'But I think it is beautiful.'
'You always must like what normal people do not like,' Edek said. He turned to 
Marek. 'That is my daughter. If ten people does like something, my daughter for 
sure will not like it,' he said. Marek looked nervous. He clearly didn't want to 
get involved in any domestic disputes.  'Israel Poznanski and his wife Eleonora 
Poznoski are buried here,' Marek said. 'Inside is a mosaic which is comprised of 
approximately two million pieces of glass.'  'Two million, oh brother,' Edek 
whispered.
'This is possibly the only Jewish tomb in the world decorated with mosaics,' 
Marek said.
'I did never see something like this, on a grave.' Edek said"
'You haven't seen many cemeteries,' Ruth said.
'I seen enough,' said Edek. He looked annoyed with Ruth. 'I was trying to be 
nice to him,' Edek whispered to her. He can hear us, Dad,' she said. 'He cannot 
hear me,' Edek said. 'He is an old man.' 'Can I take a photograph of you in 
front of Poznanski's tomb?' she said to Edek. 'What for?' he said. 'A photograph 
in a cemetery? I will be in  Cemetery myself soon enough. I don't need a 
photograph in a
'Okay, okay,' she said. The monument
 


'Here are also other monuments for the families of the wealthy Jews,' Marek 
said, pointing to nearby sites. 'There are the tombs of the family of Marcus 
Silberstein, the Prussaks, the Jarocinskis, the Rapaports and some other 
important Jewish families,' he said.
'The Rapaports,' Ruth said. 'They must be the Rapaports whose palace your father 
bought.'
'I suppose so,' said Edek. He paused for a moment. 'We was not rich like these 
rich Jews from Lodz,' he said. 'They were mega rich, I think,' Ruth said. 'We 
was normal rich,' Edek said.
'These mausoleums, sarcophaguses and tombstones are made in a variety of 
materials,' Marek said. 'Black granite, white marble, sandstone, wrought iron. 
They are built in many styles. Neoclassicism, Historical, Art Nouveau, 
Modernism.' 'He talks too much,' Edek said to Ruth. 'He can hear you,' Ruth 
said. 'I am telling the truth,' Edek said.
'Dad,' she said, in a stern tone, but Edek had already rushed off. 'I love this 
cemetery very much,' Marek said to Ruth. 'My mother is buried here,' Marek said. 
Ruth looked at Marek. He had tears in his eyes.
'It is a very beautiful cemetery,' she said. She walked on, ahead of Marek.
The beauty of the cemetery was amplified, Ruth thought, by the contrast with the 
squalor and decay of what remained of the formerly Jewish homes in Lodz. And the 
bigotry and ignorance and indifference of the Poles. The only passion Ruth had 
seen among the Polish, she thought, was a passion for hatred and a passion for 
alcohol. She didn't want to leave the cemetery. She wanted to stay. To sit here, 
with these people. To keep them company. To show them they were not forgotten.
The monument to the Jews who died in the Lodz ghetto was near
the facade of the old mortuary. Approximately fifty thousand Jews who died in 
the Lodz ghetto were buried in this cemetery, in a section called the Ghetto 
Fields. Dozens of visitors had left yortsayt candles, memorial candles for the 
dead, in the Ghetto Fields. Ruth had been reassured by the presence of other 
people's prayers and respects.
Ruth stood in front of three identically shaped tombstones. Each tombstone had a 
butterfly carved across the top. She started tidying the area around the 
tombstones. She picked up several stones, and an old bottle. She removed some 
paper and several branches. She stepped back. The tombstones looked better 
already. Ruth put down her bag and rolled up the sleeves of her coat. She moved 
some old newspapers.
She looked up and saw her father. Edek was staring at her. He
looked miserable.
'You can give them money if you want to do something,' he said to Ruth. 'If they 
have the money, they will clean up the graves.' Ruth straightened up. She 
suddenly felt overwhelmed. And tearful.
'You're right, Dad,' she said. She turned away so that he wouldn't see her 
tears.
'Come on,' Edek said to her. 'It is enough for today.' 'I'm coming,' she said.
'I did tell Marek to ring a taxi,' he said. 'Marek did say there was a telephone 
somewhere. The taxi should be here.' Marek and the taxi were waiting by the 
front gate. Thank you so much,' Ruth said to Marek. Thank you, it was very 
interesting,' Edek added. Ruth gave Marek some money. He refused to take it. 
'Please take it,' Ruth said. Marek shook his head.
My daughter already feels bad. If you do not accept her gift she will feel 
worse,' Edek said. He took the money and pressed it into Merek's hand.
Thank you,' Marek said.
 


'Can we give you a lift?' Ruth said.
'I live not far from here,' Marek said. 'I want to walk.' They all shook hands.  
In the taxi, on the way home, they passed a large billboard advertising a brand 
of footwear. Across the middle of the billboard someone had written Juden Raus 
and, for those non-German speakers, the author had added 'Jews Out'. Ruth was 
shocked. She pointed it out to Edek. The taxi driver looked at what Ruth was 
pointing out. He said something to Edek. 'I know what he's saying,' Ruth said to 
her father. 'He doesn't have to tell me. He's saying it's only children.' She 
sat back in her seat. She couldn't stop shivering.  Twenty minutes later they 
were back at the hotel. Edek looked at Ruth.
'You should have a rest,' he said.
'I think I'll have a hot bath,' she said.
'Are we going to have a dinner today?' Edek said.
'Of course we'll eat dinner,' Ruth said. 'I'll meet you in the foyer at seven 
o'clock.'  'Where will we eat?' Edek said.
'I thought we could try the Chinese restaurant we walked past yesterday,' Ruth 
said.  'Chinee?' Edek said. For years Ruth had reminded Edek to add the 's' to 
the end of 'Chinese'. But he just couldn't remember. 'Chinee, in Lodz?' Edek 
said.  'I thought it would be interesting to see what they served,' Ruth said.
'I am not having any of those worms,' Edek said.
'They're not worms,' Ruth said. 'They're prawns. In America they're called 
shrimp.'  'To me they are worms,' he said.
'You don't have to eat worms,' Ruth said, with more irritation than she had 
intended. 'You can have chicken.'  'Okay, okay,' Edek said. 'For me it is not so 
important what I eat. I can eat anything.'  'Except worms,' Ruth said.
'That is right,' Edek said. 'I do not like worms.' He paused. 'You are sure you 
want to eat Chinee in Poland?' he said.  'I just want to see what it's like,' 
Ruth said. 'You can have some chicken soup. You love Chinese chicken soup.'  
'Chinee chicken soup is very good,' Edek said.
'And so is Polish chicken soup,' said Ruth. 'So the combination should be 
wonderful.'  Edek looked more cheerful. 'I think I will stay downstairs, here in 
the lobby, for a few minutes,' he said.  'Good idea, Dad,' she said. 'See you 
later.'
She was just about to walk off when Edek grabbed her arm.
'What is our agenda for tomorrow?' he said.
'I didn't know you knew the word "agenda",' Ruth said.
'Of course I know this word,' Edek said. 'I been using it for a long time. You 
are not the only one in the family what knows plenty of words.'  'Sorry,' Ruth 
said. 'Tomorrow we're going to the Lodz ghetto, and then we leave for Krakow.'  
'Is it necessary for you to go to the ghetto?' Edek said.
'I'd like to,' she said.
'There is nothing there,' Edek said.
'I know,' she said.
'We are visiting one nothing after the other," Edek said.
'I guess that's true, Dad,' Ruth said. 'You could stay at the hotel.'
'No,' Edek said. 'I am going where you are going.'
'You've just reminded me,' Ruth said, 'that I won't be here for breakfast 
tomorrow.'
 


Edek looked startled and wounded. 'I'm just going for a run, Dad,' she said. 'I 
really feel the need to run.'
'I will wait for you and we will have breakfast together,' Edek said.
'I want to have a long run,' Ruth said. 'I probably won't be back before ten 
o'clock. That's too long for you to wait for breakfast.'
'I can wait,' Edek said.
'Dad, just have the buffet breakfast we have every morning,' she said. 'You love 
it.'
Edek looked morose. 'If you are not going to the buffet I won't go too.'
'Okay,' she said. 'You can have breakfast in your room.'
'I do not need a breakfast every day,' Edek said.
Ruth had had enough. She wanted to go up to her room and read. 'See you later, 
Dad,' she said. She didn't like lying to him. But she was really not up to a 
conversation about why she wanted to go to Kamedulska Street and buy the china.
There were no other customers in the Chinese restaurant on Al. Kosciuszki. There 
was nobody Chinese, either. The lack of anyone Chinese bothered Ruth. The 
waiters were Polish. The chef was probably Polish, too, she thought. A large 
buffet of prepared hot dishes ran down the centre of the restaurant. This was a 
bad sign. Chinese food was meant to be cooked and served immediately.
'Do you have a la carte?' Ruth asked a waiter.
'What?' the waiter said.
'Do you have a menu, or is the buffet the only choice?' Ruth said.
'All of our customers are very happy with this buffet,' the waiter said. 'You 
can eat as much as you wish for the same price.'
'So this is all that you serve?" Ruth said.
'It is plenty, madam,' the waiter said. Ruth looked at the buffet.
The food had probably been sitting in its heated bains-marie for a
long time.
'I do like a buffet very much," Edek said. 'What is wrong with a
buffet?'
'It's probably okay,' she said. 'You was the one who did want Chinee,' said 
Edek. Ruth chose a table. Edek was already at the buffet. The decor was Chinese. 
Well, Chinese-ish. Chinese paper lantern and scrolls with Chinese calligraphy, 
mingled with floral Polish curtains and floral Polish carpeting. The napkins, 
Ruth noticed, were also floral. A different floral from the curtains.
Edek was calling her. 'Ruthie, Ruthie,' he called. She looked at him. He was 
gesturing at the buffet. 'It does look pretty good,' he called out across the 
restaurant. Ruth walked over to him. He looked excited. 'This is really Chinee,' 
he said pointing to something that was labelled, in English, 'Won ton'. Ruth 
looked at the won tons. These won tons weren't Chinese dumplings. These won tons 
were half-pound Polish meat loaves wrapped and encased, like pierogi, in boiled 
pastry. They were enormous. Edek had put three of them on his plate.
'I thought you were going to have chicken soup,' Ruth said to him. Ach,' he 
said. 'The chicken soup does not look so good.'
Ruth looked at the chicken soup. It was a clear, unfatty broth with a few 
scallions floating in it. It looked, to Ruth, like the most appetising of all of 
the items on display. Ruth took some chicken soup.
Why do you take the soup?' Edek said. 'You need to eat. Have some sweet and sour 
beef. The Chinee do a very good sweet and sour meat.' The sweet and sour beef 
had enormous cubes of beef floating together with cubed potato in a brown gravy. 
It looks more like goulash, to me,' Ruth said. This is not goulash,' Edek said. 
'This is Chinee.' Edek added Bother won ton to his plate and walked back to the 
table. He looked happy. Ruth decided to keep her culinary criticism to herself 



 


'They got fried rice, too,' Edek called out.
Ruth looked at the fried rice. It looked more like cooked coleslaw, sitting on a 
bed of gravied rice. Thick slices of fried kielbasa sausage decorated the fried 
rice platter. Ruth started to laugh. It really was very funny. She laughed and 
laughed. It was good to laugh. She hadn't laughed for what felt like a long 
time. She was still laughing when she got back to the table.  'What are you 
laughing at?' Edek said.
The food is not really Chinese,' she said.
'Why not?' he said.
'It's Polish,' she said.
'It looks Chinee to me,' Edek said. 'And I did eat a lot of Chinee in 
Melbourne.'
The Chinese food in Melbourne doesn't look like this,' Ruth said.
'No, not exactly like this,' Edek said. The pieces here are a bit bigger.'
Ruth started to laugh again. Her laughter was contagious. Edek joined in. 'It is 
good to see you laughing, Ruthie darling,' he said through his own laughter.  
'It's good to laugh,' she said, wiping her eyes. She started to eat. This 
chicken soup is really delicious,' she said.  'My won ton is very very good,' 
said Edek.
Ruth finished her soup. She felt better. She decided to have another bowl of 
soup. A bowl of boiled noodles was on the buffet, next to the soup. Ruth added 
some noodles to her soup. The noodles were very thick. They looked more like 
spaghetti than noodles. This trip was proving to be a dietary aid, she thought. 
She had been worried that she would gain weight, in Poland. The government could 
probably revive the whole Polish economy if they advertised weight-loss tours of 
Poland for Jews, Ruth thought. She felt the waistband of her skirt. It was 
definitely loose.  'I did speak to my lawyer,' Edek said when Ruth returned to 
the table.
'Your lawyer in Australia?' said Ruth.
'My lawyer in Australia is the only lawyer what I got,' said Edek.
'Did you ring him?' she said.
'Of course,' he said. 'Do you think that I am such an important client that he 
should ring me in Poland?'  'You rang this afternoon?' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'What time was it in Australia?' Ruth said. 'I hope it wasn't in the middle of 
the night.' She did some quick calculations. She was relieved. It could have 
been morning in Melbourne.  'I do not know what was the time in Melbourne,' Edek 
said.
'Well, I'm glad you didn't wake him up,' Ruth said.
'He was in his office,' Edek said. 'Of course I did not wake him up. You want to 
hear what he did tell me?'  'Yes, of course,' Ruth said.
'He did say that all the talks with the Swiss banks for a settlement for the 
Jews are kaput,' Edek said.  'Kaput?' Ruth said.
'Finished,' Edek said. 'The Swiss did take away their offer.'
'That small, piddly offer that was a fraction of what they took from the Jews?' 
Ruth said.
'The Swiss do not want to negotiate anymore,' Edek said. 'They say that the 
Holocaust survivors and other Jewish groups was trying to get more money from 
the banks with threats of bad publicity for the Swiss.'  'So it's the Jews who 
are behaving badly again,' Ruth said.
'It is always the Jews,' said Edek. 'My lawyer did say that the gold what the 
Swiss did get from the Nazis would be today valued at nearly three billion 
dollars.'  'And it's still the Jews who are behaving badly,' Ruth said. 'We
 


don't need their money,' she said.
'That is true,' said Edek, 'but some Jews do.'
'It's disgusting,' Ruth said. Edek looked alarmed.
'The soup?' he said.
'No, the Swiss," she said.
'The lawyer did tell me that finally Volkswagen is going to give some money to 
those people who was forced to work for them during the war,' Edek said.  'So 
Volkswagen has finally decided to pay those people who were used as slave 
labour,' said Ruth.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'The lawyer did tell me Volkswagen did admit that they did 
employ fifteen thousand slave labourers during the war.'  Most of the people who 
were used as slave labour would be dead by now,' Ruth said.
'Of course,' Edek said.
'I wonder if Volkswagen has agreed to a settlement because they've just bought 
the Rolls-Royce Company,' Ruth said. 'They're also buying Lamborghini, the 
Italian sports car company. The Lamborghini is an incredibly expensive car.'  'I 
do know what is a Lamborghini,' Edek said.
'I wonder if Volkswagen suddenly worried about its image,' she said. 'I wonder 
if the discrepancy between their refusal to pay for the slave labour they used 
and the luxury of the cars they produce, seemed embarrassing?'  'That's very 
clever,' Edek said.
'I don't think Volkswagen was really concerned about the Jews, Ruth said. 'I 
think they were concerned about their image. They'll probably try to pay the 
poor slave labourers who survived the smallest possible amount of money.'  'This 
is probably what they are doing,' Edek said. 'Ah, forget about it,' Edek said 
suddenly. He looked disturbed.  'I told you it would agitate you if you tried to 
get back what is Owed to you,' Ruth said.
'I am all right,' Edek said. 'This goulash is very good.' 'I told you it was 
goulash,' Ruth said. She started laughing. 'It is Chinee goulash,' Edek said. 
Her father should know what it was, Ruth thought. This was his third helping. 
'You want some?' Edek said.  'No thanks, Dad,' she said. They ate in silence. 
'Oy a brokh,' Edek said, loudly. 'What's wrong?' Ruth said.
'A worm,' he said. 'Here is a worm.' He was holding a small prawn on the end of 
his fork. 'It's not a worm,' Ruth said. 'It's a prawn.' Edek examined it. 'It is 
a worm,' he said. Ruth took the small prawn from Edek's fork. She put it into 
her mouth. 'It's delicious,' she said. Edek grimaced.  'I did ring Stefan,' Edek 
said. 'I did want to make sure that he did arrive.'
'He's in Lodz?' Ruth said.
'He is in Lodz,' Edek said, with a beam. 'He does like his hotel very much.'
'I'm so pleased,' Ruth said. 'You are being sarcastic,' Edek said. 'I know you.' 
'No, I'm not,' Ruth said. 'I actually am very pleased that Stefan is pleased 
because that makes you happy.'  'It does not make me happy,' Edek said. 'I did 
want for Stefan to drive us because it will be more comfortable for you. Why 
should you sit on a Polish train? Why not instead to be in a Mercedes?' 'Why 
not?' said Ruth.  'They have got very good cakes on the buffet,' Edek said, 
after a minute. 'I know,' said Ruth. 'I saw them.'
 


Displayed at the end of the buffet after the won tons and the sweet and sour 
beef and the crispy skinned chicken, and the chow mein and chop suey and fried 
rice, was a selection of cakes. There was a black forest cake, a sour cherry 
cake, a cheesecake, an apple cake and a poppy seed cake.
'You can have a piece of poppy seed cake,' Edek said to Ruth.
'It did look very good,' she said. 'The Poles know how to make a poppy seed 
cake.'
'And a cheesecake,' Edek said. 'Maybe I will have a small piece of cheesecake. I 
just finish this first.' He ate the last of his fourth helping of sweet and sour 
beef.
'Oy cholera,' Edek said, suddenly. He looked at his fork. 'Another worm,' he 
said. Ruth took the prawn from his fork. 'This small prawn couldn't possibly 
hurt you,' she said. 'I'll eat it.' She put it into her mouth. 'See,' she said. 
'It's delicious.'
'My daughter does like worms,' Edek said. He shook his head and shrugged his 
shoulders.
chapter eleven
Ruth was woken up by a phone call from Max. It was six a.m. Ruth was completely 
disoriented. For a moment she didn't know where she was. Was she in Poland? In 
New York? In Australia? It had been years since she had thought she was still 
living in Australia.
'Bern's mother has turned out to be very good,' Max said.
'What time is it in New York?' Ruth said.
'It's late,' said Max. 'I'm at home.'
'I'll call you back in five minutes,' Ruth said. She hung up.
She sat on the edge of the bed. She felt dislocated. Max's call had rattled and 
flummoxed her. The call had felt like a communion from another time, another 
place. It was as though Max was calling from Mars. Ruth felt so removed from 
Rothwax Correspondence. She could hardly remember anything about what was going 
on in the office. She felt like she had been away, under a spell. Or adrift at 
sea. She hoped that she still remembered the business phone number. She checked. 
She was relieved that she still did.
What was Max saying about Bern's mother? Of course, Ruth remembered. Max was 
talking about the possibility of Bern's mother writing letters by hand for them. 
Ruth picked up the phone. 'I want to cancel the two wake-up calls I booked for 
6:10 a.m. and 6:15 a.m.' she said, to the hotel operator.
'Why is this?' the operator asked.
'Because I am already awake,' Ruth said. She shook her head in bewilderment. 
What other reason could there possibly be for canceling a wake-up call? She 
would never understand Poles, she thought.
 


She got out of bed and switched off both of the alarm clocks she had set. She 
had bought an extra alarm clock, in Lodz. She didn't trust the antiquated 
electric clock in the room. She brushed her teeth in the bottled water and 
swallowed her vitamins. She looked at the display of vitamins and minerals. She 
wasn't sure what they were doing for her.  She rang Max.
'Let me call you back,' Max said. 'It's cheaper that way.'
'Okay,' Ruth said. She hung up again. Why was everything in life, including a 
simple phone call, so complicated? Max was right, though. It would cost far less 
for her to call Ruth. Max wouldn't be paying the exorbitant price that was 
charged for international calls in Poland, or the hotel surcharge.  The phone 
rang.
'Bern's mother is very good,' Max said. Max sounded excited. 'Her handwriting is 
clear and not full of flourishes and swirls,' she said.  'It's not pretentious?' 
Ruth asked.
'Not at all,' said Max. 'It's intelligent handwriting.'
'Intelligent handwriting. That sounds good,' Ruth said. She felt as though she 
could do with some intelligence herself. Her head felt thick and clogged.  'She 
can do three pages in an hour,' Max said. 'She'll soon, when she gets used to 
it, be able to do four pages an hour.'  'What is Bern's mother's name?' Ruth 
said.
'Alouette,' said Max.
'Alouette,' Ruth said. 'That's a great name.'
'I suggested to Alouette that we have a trial run with her,' Max said. 'I told 
her not to leave her current job until she knows how she feels about us and how 
we feel about her.'  'Did you feel odd saying that to someone much older than 
you?' Ruth said.
'No,' said Max.
'Were you uncomfortable suggesting a trial period to someone of  colour?'
'No,' Max said.
'That's good,' said Ruth.
'Alouette is very comfortable to be with,' Max said. 'I didn't think about her 
age or her colour. I just liked her. I suggested that she work for us for a few 
hours a couple of times a week. And then we'll all decide how we all feel."  
'Perfect,' said Ruth.
'I said we'd pay her fifteen dollars an hour," Max said.
'We charge twenty-five dollars a page,' Ruth said. 'I think we can afford to pay 
her twenty dollars an hour.'  'Okay,' said Max.
'If we take her on permanently, we'll negotiate a salary,' Ruth said.
'That's what I told her,' said Max.
'Well, you sound like you're handling everything pretty well,' Ruth said.
'How are you doing?' Max said. 'I've been thinking about you all the time.'
'I'm fine,' Ruth said.
'Are you sure you're fine?' Max said.
'That's a very Jewish question, Max,' Ruth said. 'I'm fine.'
 Max laughed. 'I've been worried about you,' she said. 'I've been thinking about 
you facing all that loss. And your father facing all that loss. The two of you 
together lost in the loss. And then there's the loss of all the other Jews.'  
Ruth interrupted this messy monologue on loss. 'Edit, Max,' she said, 'edit. I 
really appreciate your concern, but I'm very tired. So, let's move on to the 
rest of the business.'  'Okay,' Max said. 'Sorry if I was a bit longwinded.'
'That's okay,' Ruth said. 'You really could have tried an alternative to the 
excessive repetitions of the word "loss", though."
 


Max laughed. 'Now I know you're fine,' she said.
'Bern loves having his mother at the office,' Max said. 'He says hello to her 
each time he passes her. He buys cookies for her to have with her coffee. It's 
great to see how close they are.'
'I'm not sure it's all that common for men to be close to their mothers,' Ruth 
said. 'I'm impressed enough by women who are close to their mothers. There seem 
to be few enough of them. Most people seem to do little more than complain about 
their parents.'
'You're not going to go on to one of your ungrateful children dialogues are 
you?' Max said.
'It would be a monologue, not a dialogue,' said Ruth. 'You never join in.'
'That's because I want children one day,' Max said. 'Anyway, the relationship 
between Bern and his mother is so cute.'
' "Cute" isn't the right word, Max,' Ruth said. ' "Cute" is such a misused and 
overused word. Bern's attitude to his mother is not cute. It is striking and 
remarkable and exceptional and heartwarming, if not almost heartbreaking.'
'Poland hasn't stopped you being so acerbic,' Max said. 'It hasn't mellowed 
you.'
'Poland has nearly killed me,' Ruth said. She was surprised at herself. Had 
Poland really nearly killed her? She certainly felt more mortal than when she 
arrived.
Ruth realised that speaking to Max had cheered her up. Made her feel more 
normal. More attached to the normal world. That was what being in Poland did. It 
made life in New York seem normal. Her old life felt so normal. The Raisin Bran, 
the weightlifting, the twelve-minute limit on the time she allowed herself for 
People magazine-The coat-hangers all facing the same direction. It all felt so 
normal-Why had she called it her old life? she wondered. This was still the same 
life. This was not a new life. She was still Ruth Rothwax. Still forty-three. 
Still on a diet. Not that much had changed.
Ruth was glad that Max had called. 'Speaking of mothers,' she said to Max, 'how 
does your mother feel about you and the married man?' Ruth was sure that she 
could hear Max squirm. 'Do we have to discuss that?' Max said. 'You're in 
Poland.'
'I know I'm in Poland,' Ruth said, with a sigh.
'My mother doesn't say anything,' Max said.
'Does she know?" said Ruth.
'No,' said Max.
'What about your father?' Ruth said.
'He doesn't know,' said Max. 'I couldn't tell them anything, separately. They 
would immediately tell the other. They tell each other everything. They're soul 
mates.'
What were soul mates? Ruth wondered. Mates who melted into each other? Souls 
with no borders? Did souls have borders? Did souls have edges and divides? Could 
you protect your soul from trespassers? Or could anyone traipse through it, once 
you'd lost the protection of a physical being? Was it easy for souls to merge? 
Easier than those beings encumbered by bodies?
Ruth shook herself. She had to stop this unearthly thinking. These otherworldly 
cogitations and considerations. She had wandered off into outer space. Into 
uncharted territory. She had missed half of what Max had said. Ruth stood up. 
She would be much better off, she decided, if she kept herself grounded.
My parents' good relationship has put an unbearable pressure on my brother and 
me,' Max said. What? Ruth thought. What a preposterous notion. There were so 
many high-flying, half-baked Psychological interpretations and premises in 
people's lives today.
was not easy to be grounded, she thought. No one was down to earth about 
anything, anymore. '"Your choice of partners will be most important decision you 
make," my mother used to say to
 


of us,' Max said. Its Probably true,' Ruth said.
 


'It sent my brother and me into partner paralysis,' said Max. 'I make sure my 
partners can't be permanent, and my brother chooses women who are distant. 
Distant from my parents, anyway. Women who'll chat endlessly about nothing with 
my mother and father. My parents are resigned to it. My brother has been with 
his current girlfriend for five years. My mother said to me that she knows that 
if they have children, the children won't be her grandchildren. She said she 
would never feel that the children belonged to her. She would be like a polite 
visitor, she said.' Max was quiet. 'I guess it's sad,'
she said.
'You can't win, can you?' Ruth said. 'Parents who are in love are oppressive and 
parents who divorce spread trauma.' Max laughed.
'The good news is that everything in the office is going well,' Max said. 'Two 
new clients called today. Both from California, so news of Rothwax 
Correspondence is spreading.'
'Good,' said Ruth. 'Tell Bern's mother that I'm looking forward to meeting her.'
Ruth showered and dressed. Her left ear was blocked with water from a defect in 
the showerhead that allowed a steady stream of water to squirt out sideways, in 
a different direction from the rest of the water coming out of the shower. For 
two days in a row, this errant stream had squirted straight into Ruth's ear, 
whenever she turned her head, while she was showering. Ruth held her head to one 
side and hopped, in an effort to dislodge the water. Nothing happened. She felt 
shaken up by the hopping. Hopping wasn't something you were meant to do, first 
thing in the morning, before breakfast, she
decided.
She sat on the bed and ate an apple. She had taken the apple from yesterday's 
breakfast buffet. It was a green granny smith. It was no good. It was hard to 
get a good apple in Poland. The apple cake was superb, but the fresh apples were 
spongy and small and bruised. She ate the apple, anyway.
Her ear felt weird. She tried some more hopping. The hopping worked. A small 
trickle of water ran out of her left ear. She felt pleased, she got her bag and 
her coat and went downstairs. The interpreter that the hotel clerk had arranged 
for her was waiting, at the front
desk.
'I am Tadeusz Kuczynski,' he said to Ruth. Tadeusz Kuczyhski looked about 
fifteen. He was tall and gangly.
'How old are you, Tadeusz?' Ruth said.
'I am twenty-five,' he said.
'Good,' she said. 'I thought you were much younger.'
Ruth was glad that she had a young interpreter. A young person was less likely 
to bring their own history, their own prejudices, their own baggage to this 
potential transaction. Ruth hoped that by arriving early she was giving herself 
a good chance of finding the old man and his wife at home, in Kamedulska Street, 
in Edek's old apartment.
She briefly explained her mission to Tadeusz. Tadeusz didn't seem to find the 
situation very complicated. 'If you pay them the right price I am sure that they 
will sell you the china,' Tadeusz said.
Tadeusz was probably right, Ruth thought. Why did she have to feel so tense 
about it? Because she wanted that china, very much. Very, very, much. Her desire 
to have the china was probably completely disproportionate to the old couple's 
need to sell the china. She was tense. No wonder she was tense. Her position was 
not a good position to be in in any negotiation.
The taxi that was taking them to Kamedulska Street was a small, nondescript, 
Polish car. It felt tinny, to Ruth. And cramped. Her knees were pushed up and 
were almost touching her chest. Why did the hotel clerk order this taxi? 
Probably because the driver was a friend, and the clerk was getting a kickback 
for every customer he provided, Ruth thought. She was agitated. She should have 
asked for a Mercedes. She had clearly become accustomed to Mercedes. The car 
stank of cigarettes. There was no need for her to wish Polish
 


people any ill, she thought. Most Poles were going to smoke themselves to death.
She wondered whether she should tap her right foot to ward off any retribution 
for that thought. Did an aggressive thought towards Poles count in the lexicon 
of untoward behaviour that merited punishment? Who knew? Whoever it was that 
decided what was to be punished and what wasn't, if there was someone or 
something overseeing all human behaviour, had a very strange system. An 
incomprehensible set of criteria. If feeling hostile to Poles warranted 
punishment she would have to tap her right foot ceaselessly, and start 
immediately. She didn't have enough time left, she thought, for ten taps for 
every hostile thought she had had about Poles. She would have to do so much 
tapping, her right foot would get worn right out.
She smiled at her unintentional pun. Why did the mixing and blending of words 
and their nuances mean so much to her? Maybe because so much of what she heard 
as a child was so blunt. The short, blurred communications from her mother and 
father were not their fault. Their stunted ability to speak the language she 
spoke was just how it was. They were too busy working in factories to go to 
English classes. When they came home from the factories, there were no tender 
discussions, no delicate explanations, no refined analysis of this word or that. 
Everything was cut short and condensed. All greetings and orders and suggestions 
and reflections ended up as sharp fragments. Impossible to piece together.
'Tadeusz,' she said, 'it is crucial that these people don't think that the china 
that I want to buy is very important to me.' She looked at Tadeusz. Could she 
trust him? How could she tell? She didn't know him. 'Because it is not 
important,' she said. 'If they want to sell it, that's fine. If they don't, 
we'll leave.'
'Of course," said Tadeusz.
Who could you trust and who couldn't you trust? The question
was even more difficult to answer in Poland. She had surprised herself by asking 
the doorman at the Grand Victoria if he could find her a couple of strong boxes. 
She had been astonished, firstly, that she had asked the doorman. She had 
thought she found him too revolting to make any requests of. Then she had been 
surprised to hear herself requesting two boxes. Two large boxes, she had said. 
What did she think she was going to find in her father's former home?
Ruth suddenly thought that she should let Tadeusz know that she could understand 
Polish. He needn't know that she couldn't understand every word. Or most 
complicated words. She didn't think the old man or his wife would be using very 
complicated language. She wasn't lying to Tadeusz, she thought, not that that 
was a moral issue or any other sort of issue for her. She could understand more 
and more Polish, though. Sometimes, she wished she understood less. She didn't 
want Tadeusz to entertain any schemes of colluding with the old couple and 
splitting the proceeds. She didn't want him to think he could hike up the prices 
and split the difference with these vendors. She didn't want him to be 
duplicitous. She was not sure that she could prevent any duplicity. Still, it 
would only be money that she would be losing, if the interpreter and the couple 
colluded. He probably wouldn't try anything, Ruth decided. After all, how did he 
know he could trust the old couple? Even to a Pole, this couple would look 
untrustworthy.
'You do not have to be so nervous,' Tadeusz said. Ruth jumped. How could he have 
known what she was thinking? He couldn't have known. He must be addressing her 
general demeanour. I'm not nervous,' she said to him.
I think you are,' he said. 'If you do not mind me saying so.' I don't mind,' she 
said. 'Plenty of people have commented on what they see as my nervous 
disposition. I'm not that nervous. I just appear nervous.'
It is not so bad to be nervous,' Tadeusz said. Maybe Tadeusz was
 


okay, Ruth thought. Any young man who thought it wasn't so bad to be nervous 
couldn't be all that bad.
'I agree,' she said to him.
Ruth wondered if she should offer Tadeusz a bonus to keep him on the straight 
and narrow? No, she decided, she was already paying him extra for the early 
start.
'Could you make sure the driver knows that he has to wait for us?' Ruth said to 
Tadeusz.
'I discussed this with the driver, before,' Tadeusz said.
'Okay,' she said. 'Could you tell him that we'll pay him for the whole trip when 
we get back to the hotel?'
 Tadeusz spoke to the driver. The driver nodded his head. Ruth was relieved. She 
didn't trust any Pole enough to leave even a taxi pick-up to chance. The driver 
would have to wait if he hadn't been paid. And she wouldn't be stranded in this 
desolate part of Lodz with two heavy boxes. Two heavy boxes? What sort of 
fantasy was she indulging herself in? She would be lucky to leave twenty-three 
Kamedulska Street with the bowl or the teapot. If the old couple were really 
trying to sell the items they had displayed, they would have made a display of 
everything they had for sale. Ruth thought that the old couple were probably 
just trying to impress her and Edek, and had forgotten where the impressive 
accoutrements they had used had come from.
The taxi turned into Kamedulska Street and pulled up outside number twenty-
three. Ruth got out of the car. She had a strange urge to cross herself. Her 
hand had flown up to her forehead. How weird. She had never crossed herself in 
her life. She didn't even know the movement. Did it begin with a touch to the 
forehead or the shoulder? The forehead, she thought, but she wasn't sure. She 
had often envied Catholics their crossing mechanism. It was so overt and seemed 
so much more substantial than touching wood, and less lunatic than tapping a 
foot. Maybe if tapping a foot was done by
hundreds of millions of people it might seem less absurd, Ruth thought. Out of 
the car, she felt frightened. She felt in need of protection. No wonder she had 
wanted to cross herself. She must have felt this Catholic habit might be more 
effective than a foot tap, in a country that was so Catholic.
She began to walk into the building. The brown dog that had been there the day 
before yesterday was still there. The dog rushed up to Ruth and wagged its tail. 
Ruth tried to ignore the dog. She stopped. Where was Tadeusz? She turned around. 
Tadeusz was saying something to the driver. What were they discussing? Ruth felt 
unnerved. The dog jumped up at Ruth. His paws were making muddy marks on her 
coat.
'Get away,' she said to the dog. The dog wagged its tail. 'It is a very friendly 
dog," Tadeusz said to Ruth. He patted the dog.
'What were you talking to the driver about?' Ruth said. 'I told him he will get 
paid nothing at all if he leaves here for even a moment,' Tadeusz said. 'I did 
not want to come out and find that he had gone for a drink, or tried to fit in a 
trip for someone else.'
'Thank you,' Ruth said. 'Don't pat the dog,' she added. 'You don't know who he 
belongs to and what he's like.' This dog is perfectly fine,' Tadeusz said. Go 
away, dog,' Ruth said to the dog. The dog rubbed its head against her. 'What 
does he want?' Ruth said to Tadeusz. Tadeusz laughed, and bent down and patted 
the dog again. The dog brushed off Tadeusz's pat.
Go away, dog,' Ruth said to the dog, again. The dog wagged its
tail furiously and looked up at Ruth. Ruth glared at the dog. The
dog nudged her with his snout. She looked at her coat. She hoped
it hadn't marked it with saliva or whatever it was that came out of
dogs snouts and mouths. 'Go away,' she said, sternly.
 


Why wasn't the dog bothering Tadeusz? How could the dog tell that it was her 
that would be bothered by these nudges and wagging and pawing? Dogs unnerved 
her. She knew that dogs were descended from wolves. And she knew what wolves 
could do. They could tear you apart. More than four million Americans were 
bitten each year by dogs. Ruth had read this recently in an article excerpted 
from the journal of the American Medical Association. Over eight hundred 
thousand of these bites had needed medical attention. There were fifty-five 
million dogs in America. About twenty Americans died every year from dog bites. 
And every year a billion dollars' worth of dog-related liability claims were 
filed.
Ruth had read quite a lot about how to approach dogs. She knew you should 
approach a strange dog with caution. You should speak to the dog. Maybe offer a 
hand with the fist closed, to be sniffed. She knew that you should never bother 
a dog that was eating, sleeping, ill or caring for puppies. If you had to wake a 
dog-a situation Ruth didn't expect to frequently encounter, herself-you should 
call the dog rather than touch it.
If a dog looked as though it might attack you, the best thing to do was to stand 
still, Ruth had read. The advice was, specifically, to pretend to be a tree. If 
the dog actually attacked you, you should roll up on the ground with your back 
in the air and your face, arms and legs protected, and pretend to be a log. 
Nothing she had ever read suggested what to do when dogs wagged their tails and 
nuzzled against you in unasked-for affection.
Ruth wanted to swear at the brown dog. But she didn't want Tadeusz to think she 
was uncouth and used obscenities. And she didn't think the dog would understand. 
Tadeusz looked at her strangely. He patted the dog, again. The dog flicked off 
Tadeusz's pat. It was clear that the dog was not interested in Tadeusz. Tadeusz 
didn't seem to mind.
'It's a beautiful dog,' he said.
'A beautiful dog?' Ruth said. She decided, after a few seconds, that this was 
not the time to disagree with him. This was not the moment for Tadeusz to think 
she was a cold, merciless dog hater. She needed Tadeusz on her side. 'I guess it 
is quite a beautiful dog,' she said. She didn't think this amendment sounded 
very convincing. 'I usually like dogs,' she said. She was sure she sounded even 
more fraudulent.
She tried again. 'She is a really nice dog,' she said.
'She is a he,' Tadeusz said.
'Oh, I'm not familiar enough with dogs to be able to detect their gender,' Ruth 
said.
'With many dogs, it is obvious,' Tadeusz said. Ruth looked at the brown dog. He 
was facing away from her. Large, black testicles were dangling between the dog's 
legs.
'I see what you mean,' Ruth said.
They went inside. The dog followed them in, but stayed in the vestibule. Tadeusz 
and Ruth walked up the stairs. The air outside the front door of the apartment 
felt bereft and empty. Ruth thought that even the presence of a dog would give 
this atmosphere a lift. She had never wished for a dog before. She felt sick. 
She took a deep breath. She knocked, loudly, on the door.
The old man opened the door. He looked at Ruth, and then at Tadeusz. Tadeusz 
introduced himself. The old man smiled. He looked at Ruth, again. 'My wife said 
she would be back,' he said. Ruth was taken aback. What did he mean his wife 
said Ruth would be back? 'My wife said,' the old man said, gesturing at Ruth, 
'that this woman's old father was not interested, but this one was. "The 
daughter will be back," my wife said.'
Ruth was shocked. So much for her theory about the old couple's forgetfulness or 
absent-mindedness. They were expecting her. The silver dish and the teapot were 
bait to lure her. And it had worked. She was here. They would know she was 
desperate to purchase the items. At the very least, they would know she was 
keen. What did
 


the old man mean, calling her father an old man? Ruth thought. Edek looked like 
a teenager next to this disintegrating and decomposing mixture of wrinkles and 
bones.
'Come in, come in,' the old man said. They stepped inside. Tadeusz began to 
translate what the old man had said, but Ruth cut him off. 'I understood exactly 
what he said,' she said. She tried to put a pleasant expression on her face. She 
wanted the silver bowl and the china, even if it meant paying a bit more. Even 
if it meant paying whatever this revolting old man was asking. She had to stop 
thinking like this. She was sure her thoughts were showing. She tried smiling. 
She was sure she merely looked nauseous.
Ruth, Tadeusz and the old man were standing in the living room. The old man's 
wife was nowhere to be seen. She must have left this dirty work to her husband, 
Ruth thought. The wife had probably been right to do this. Of the two of them, 
her husband was definitely the more charming.
'My wife said she would be back,' the old man said, again. He beamed and rubbed 
his hands together in what seemed like a gesture of heady anticipation, to Ruth. 
Tadeusz nodded.
'Tell him I am pleased that he is glad to see me,' Ruth said. Tadeusz relayed 
the greeting.
'I am most happy to see you,' the old man said to Ruth. 'Tell him that I admired 
a couple of his possessions when I was last here,' Ruth said. 'And then say that 
I wondered if there was any possibility that he would allow me to buy them as a 
souvenir of my visit.' Tadeusz and the old man seemed to converse for longer 
than was needed. Ruth couldn't quite catch the gist of what the old man was 
saying. 'He says that he understands how important souvenirs are,' Tadeusz said.
Ruth was about to describe the silver bowl when she noticed that the teapot, 
bowl, the milk jug, the sugar container and the plate were already set out on 
top of the small sideboard. 'He really was
expecting me,' she said to Tadeusz. 'He said so,' said Tadeusz. 'Ask him how 
much he wants for all of those items,' Ruth said, pointing to the small 
collection that had been assembled in preparation for
her visit.
'Name a price,' the old man said.
'He wants you to make a suggestion,' Tadeusz said. Dozens of suggestions flew 
through Ruth's head. In most of them the old man wound up dead. She didn't think 
it would be wise to voice any of
them.
'I'll pay you in U.S. dollars,' Ruth said. Tadeusz relayed this to
the old man.
'He says that is what he expects,' Tadeusz said to Ruth.
Ruth was startled. The old man had obviously thought this through.
'Ask him, again, how much?' Ruth said. Tadeusz asked. The old man refused to 
name a price. Ruth decided she had to make a move.
'Fifty dollars for the silver bowl and fifty dollars for the tea set,' Ruth said 
to Tadeusz. The old man opened his mouth and laughed heartily at Ruth's offer.
The view inside his mouth made Ruth retch. Brown and yellow rotting stumps were 
wedged into very discoloured gums. She put her hand to her stomach. She really 
didn't want to throw up, although the thought of being sick all over their 
carpet was quite appealing.
'Tell him I'm not interested in playing games,' Ruth said to Tadeusz. 'Tell him 
I'll give him two hundred and fifty for the lot. " he doesn't agree to that, I'm 
leaving.' She wasn't lying. She was telling the truth. She was fed up. She 
wanted to leave. This wasn't what she had expected. She hadn't expected such a 
blatant set-up and such blatant exploitation. She was ready to go. She wished 
she hadn't come.
The old man must have read her expression. He clapped his hands
 


together, and pronounced it a done deal. 'A good business arrangement for both 
of us at this price,' he said. Ruth didn't need Tadeusz
 


to translate the old man's pleasure. The old man had brought in a box and some 
scraps of paper.
'Pack the things up for me as fast as you can,' Ruth said to Tadeusz. 'I've got 
to get out of here. I'll give him the money as soon as everything is packed.' 
Tadeusz packed the silver and the china. He wrapped each piece, carefully. Ruth 
was grateful for the care he was taking.
Ruth wondered if she could give the old man a shove as she handed him the money. 
She decided against it. She didn't want to touch him. Ruth took the money from a 
zippered compartment in her bag. She handed it to Tadeusz and asked him to give 
it to the old man. She shut her bag. She had several bundles of American 
currency in different parts of her bag. She had been to a Kantor yesterday. She 
had cashed two thousand dollars' worth of traveller's cheques. She had known she 
would have to pay Stefan quite a bit for the trip to Krakow. She wasn't sure how 
much. And she had wanted to make sure that she had enough for the china, and the 
interpreter, and the taxi driver and the doorman. She knew that the doorman 
would be charging her for the boxes. 'I will get very special boxes for you,' he 
had said. Ruth knew that 'very special' was a euphemism. A way of letting her 
know that the boxes would not be free.
The old man fondled his American currency before counting it. Ruth felt sick. 
She tried to calm down. At least this had cost her less than she had expected. 
Tadeusz was carrying the box. 'Goodbye,' she said to the old man. Ruth turned to 
leave. She needn't have said goodbye, she realised. There was no point in 
pretending politeness anymore.
'Does she want to see more?' the old man said to Tadeusz. Ruth wheeled around. 
She was shocked. What was the old man talking about? She could feel her legs 
trembling. 'Ask him what else he's got,' she said.
The old man beckoned for them to follow him. He led them into a small dirty 
kitchen. A pitted and dented kitchen table was covered
in china. The same china as the plate Ruth had seen. Ruth could hardly breathe. 
She had forgotten about the dinner plate. She had meant to ask the old man about 
it. She looked at the plates and bowls and cups and saucers in front of her. 
There were so many pieces. They were so beautiful. She thought she was going to 
pass out. She gripped the side of the table.
The dinner plates and bread and butter plates and bowls and cups and saucers 
looked like family, to her. Each piece was in mint condition. The gold fluting 
unscratched, the china uncracked. She couldn't see one chip. How had all of this 
been preserved? All of these pieces from another life.
She started to weep. Tears poured down her face. 'I knew that she would find 
these dishes attractive,' the old man said. Ruth wept even harder. A wave of 
biliousness swept over her. 'Please God, don't let me be sick,' she said to 
herself. She needed to think. She wanted to buy this china. This china that had 
been part of a family life. A family life she had longed for. 'Please God, let 
me buy this china,' she said. She felt a bit better. She wiped her eyes and blew 
her nose. What a time to turn to God, she thought. She had never prayed to God 
before. Not even when she was a child. God was verboten, in their house. Well, 
she could hardly expect God to rush to her aid. Ruth was sure that if there was 
a God, he would want to see some evidence of a belief in him, beforehand. He 
wouldn't just dash off to any unexpected request for help. You couldn't just 
call on God, out of the blue. She blew her nose again. She could hardly look at 
the china. She didn't want either of these men to know how much it meant to her.
'There are eighteen dinner plates, twenty smaller plates, twenty bowls, twenty 
cups and twenty saucers,' the old man said.
'What does he want for them?' Ruth said to Tadeusz. The old man 'looked tough. 
All pretence of a civilized exchange was gone. 'Based on the previous price we 
agreed on for the other pieces of china,'
 


he said, 'I calculate that this is worth three thousand dollars.'
Ruth felt winded. It wasn't so much the price as the pre-planned trap and the 
supposition that she would return and fall right into it. And they had been 
right, the old man and his wife. She had done exactly what they had predicted 
she would. Tadeusz walked over to her and touched her on the arm. She jumped. 
'What do you want to do?' he said.
'You can take it or leave it,' the old man said. Ruth felt light-headed. She 
stumbled. Tadeusz caught her. 'You are making a difficult situation more 
difficult,' Tadeusz said to the old man. 'There is nothing too difficult going 
on here,' the old man said. 'She just has to pay the money and she gets what she 
wants.' Ruth sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. She put her head between her 
legs. 'Tell him I haven't got three thousand dollars,' she said. 'She can get 
it,' the old man said. Ruth was still dizzy. 'Let's go,' she said to Tadeusz. 
The old man looked at her. 'She won't go,' he said to Tadeusz. 'She can't bear 
to separate herself from this stuff. My wife always said we should keep it. She 
said, someone will come looking for it, one day. It took fifty-two years, but my 
wife was right.' 'We thought that she was going to buy it last time she was 
here,' the old man said. 'But my wife said she could see the girl was not ready 
to buy. My wife said to wait. We waited. And look what we got. The same girl. 
She is a little older and she has brought the money with her this time.'
Ruth couldn't believe what she was hearing. She remembered, vaguely, that the 
old man had offered her a cup of tea, all those years ago. Had he brought out 
the tea service then? He must have. But it had been no use. She hadn't known 
what she was looking at. She felt exhausted.
'I'll have to give you a mixture of dollars and zlotys,' she said to
the old man.
, Tadeusz translated for her. 'That is perfectly acceptable to me.
the old man said with a bow. He smiled at Ruth. The success of the transaction 
had obviously improved the old man's humour and his manners. His mood looked 
decidedly lighter. Ruth fished around in her bag, for the various places she had 
put her money. 'Could you pack all of this, please?' she said to Tadeusz. The 
old man had had two cardboard boxes ready under the table. 'Of course,' Tadeusz 
said. Ruth counted her money.
She gave the cash to Tadeusz. She needed as much distance between her and this 
dirty old man as it was possible to have in this cramped kitchen. She looked 
away while he caressed and fondled each note as he counted the money.
'I'll carry one of the boxes,' she said to Tadeusz. 'They are heavy,' he said.
'I'm strong,' she said. She wasn't going to leave anything to chance. If they 
walked out with only one box, she was sure the other would disappear. And she 
wasn't going to wait, on her own, in this apartment, with the old man, while 
Tadeusz took the boxes downstairs. 'Let's get out of here,' she said to Tadeusz. 
She bent down to pick up the smaller of the boxes.
'I have a few more items you might be interested in,' the old man said.
Ruth felt as though someone had punched her. She tried to straighten herself up. 
The thump had been palpable. It was right below her chest. It felt as though it 
had punctured her lungs. Perforated some part of her. She started wheezing. Both 
men stared at her. 'She will be okay in a minute,' the old man said. Ruth sat 
back down in the chair. Was she having a heart attack? What was happening to 
her? She didn't want to die in this apartment. She realised that every part of 
her body was clenched. Her teeth, her hands, her head. she tried to relax.
Can I help you downstairs?' Tadeusz said. 'I think we should leave.' Ruth shook 
her head. She wasn't going to leave without the china.
 


'I will run down with the boxes and then return for you,' said Tadeusz. Ruth 
shook her head again. Her breathing was becoming less laboured.
'I haven't got any more money,' she said to the old man. Tadeusz translated.
'Jews always have a little something put away,' the old man said.
Ruth felt furious. She tried to show the old man her disdain for him, but the 
wheezing returned and made the demonstration of her contempt impossible. Ruth 
realised that she had understood every word this disgusting, stained old man had 
said. Years of not understanding Polish had vanished. Years of incomprehensible 
Polish phrases and sentences seemed to be over. She could understand every word. 
Polish verbs and adjectives and nouns and adverbs coalesced into meanings, 
instead of melting into gibberish as they used to do. Why was it that this old 
man's words had cleared her blockage? Why had his wretched and repugnant 
proposals produced a clarity in her?
This was the closest she had come to having something tangible from the past. 
The past that had destroyed not only those who were murdered, but those who were 
left alive. The proximity to any part of that past was an enormous incentive, 
Ruth thought. An incentive to understand the language of the enemy. Her 
breathing had eased. She still felt as though she might throw up. She had to get 
out of this apartment. There was nothing left in this apartment, for her, 
anymore. She knew that she would never come back. She had seen enough.
'What have you got?' she said to the old man. The old man didn't need Tadeusz to 
interpret. He had understood the gesture Ruth had made with her head. It was a 
defiant gesture. Ruth had been surprised at the defiance she had managed to 
muster.
The old man pulled a large brown paper bag out from under the table. Ruth looked 
into the bag. She couldn't see what was inside.
The bag stank of mothballs. The old man, leaned down, and with a flourish pulled 
an old overcoat out of the bag. 'Why should she want an old man's overcoat?' 
Tadeusz said to
the old man.
'We don't need him,' the old man said, nodding in Tadeusz's
direction.
He held up the coat. Ruth could see that it was an expensive coat. It was dark 
grey. Probably made out of wool. The plush pale grey satin lining was still 
intact. And clean. All the seams were double-stitched. And the tailored shape of 
the collar and subtlety of the line of the body of the coat suggested it had 
been designed and made by a master tailor.
'Whose coat is it?' Ruth said.
'Your grandfather's,' the old man said. Ruth thought she must
have misheard.
'What did he say?' she said to Tadeusz.
'He said this coat belonged to your grandfather,' Tadeusz said. 'She understood 
what I said,' the old man said to Tadeusz. 'How do you know this was my 
grandfather's coat?' Ruth said. 'It could be anyone's.'
'If it was anyone's coat I would not be showing it to you,' the old man said. He 
put his hand into one of the pockets of the coat and Pulled out the lining. The 
initials I.L. were embroidered in dark grey on the top of the lining of the 
pocket. Ruth looked at the initials and started to weep. Did this coat belong to 
Israel Rothwax, her lather's father, her grandfather? How did this sickening old 
man know her grandfather's initials?
It could belong to anyone else with the same initials,' Ruth said, rhe old man 
laughed. He turned back the collar of the coat. At the of the collar, 
embroidered, again, in dark grey was the name . The embroidered letters looked 
almost human, almost , to Ruth. So much more than a series of stitches. She sank 
back
 


down onto the chair and wept. She wept like a child. She couldn't stop weeping. 
Neither of the men in the room said a word. Ruth tried to stop crying. She wiped 
her face with her hands and blew her nose with her last Kleenex. But the tears 
kept coming and her nose kept running. She couldn't breathe. Her nasal passages 
were completely blocked.
But she couldn't stop crying. This man's apartment was no place to shed tears, 
Ruth thought. Or maybe it was exactly the right place. She had no more Kleenex. 
She sniffed. She had to stop crying. She had cried so much this morning, surely 
her tear ducts would be just about dried up. She dabbed at her eyes with the 
sleeve of her coat. Her eyes were sore. The coat fabric had been waterproofed 
and wasn't absorbent. She felt as though she was drowning in a sea of tears and 
mucus. She had to get out of there.
'How much for the coat?' she said.
'The coat comes with something else,' the old man said. He pulled a faded, 
yellowed envelope out of one of the pockets. Ruth stopped crying.
'What is that?' she said.
'Something you will be interested in,' the old man said.
He opened the envelope and removed four photographs. He spread the photographs 
on the table in front of Ruth. They were old sepia-toned photographs. Snapshots 
of a family. An older couple, on their own, were in the first photograph. They 
were possibly in their fifties or sixties, it was hard to tell. In other 
photographs, the older couple were with several younger adults, men and women in 
their twenties or thirties. Two small children were in the last photograph. Two 
girls.
'Who are they?' she said to the old man.
'I don't know,' he said. 'That is for you to find out.'
'You don't know these people?' Tadeusz said to Ruth. 'You could be paying for 
nothing.'
Ruth looked at the photographs. She didn't know who any of the
people were. The older couple looked stolid and solid. Both of them dressed in 
black. The woman had her hair pulled back into a bun. She was a substantial-
looking woman. Tall, with square shoulders and a big bust. A very big bust. 
Could this woman be Luba Rothwax? Ruth thought. Could this woman be related to 
her? Not if chest size was any indication. Her own breasts were relatively 
small. Well, maybe not small, she thought. But medium, at the most. The older 
couple looked grim, too. Dour. She didn't think they were her relatives.
These people don't belong to me,' she said.
'Look again,' the old man said. 'Look at the children. Look at the older girl.'
Ruth looked at the photograph the old man was holding out. Something in Ruth's 
body misfired. It felt like a malfunction in the wiring of her electrical 
circuits. There were flicks and twinges in her head. They felt like kinks and 
stitches. Nips and pinches. She went hot and cold all over. Parts of her face 
were burning and other parts of her were cold. Her hands and knees were shaking. 
The two small girls in the photograph looked about six and eight. They both had 
curly, dark hair, parted at the side. The curls on the right fell into ringlets 
and jutted out at exactly the same angle as her own hair.
Ruth looked at the photograph, again. Both of these girls could have been Ruth. 
If someone had showed her a photograph of either of these girls, Ruth would have 
sworn that the girl in the photograph was her. That was exactly how she looked 
in all the photographs she had of herself at the same age. But the girls in the 
photograph were girls Ruth had never met. Ruth realised the photographs had been 
taken outside this building. In front of twenty-three Kamedulska Street. 
Everybody in the photographs was well dressed. The girls had ribbons tied into 
large bows, in their hair, and embroidered socks and shiny shoes.
Ruth looked closely at one of the younger women. She felt sick.
 


The woman looked so like her. The same eyes. The same mouth Who was she? Was she 
the mother of the two girls?
'How much?' she said to the old man.
'How much will you pay me?' he said.
'I haven't got much left,' she said.
'You can come back,' he said.
'Tell him he's a bastard and I hope he burns in hell,' Ruth said Tadeusz 
remained quiet. The old man laughed.
'I'll settle for another thousand dollars,' he said. Ruth gasped. 'It's worth 
paying me,' he said. 'You can't put a value on these things.'
'Tell him it will have to be in zlotys,' Ruth said.
'Zlotys, dollars, francs, I'll take anything,' the old man said. Ruth opened her 
bag. It was lucky she always carried plenty of zlotys with her. She did a quick 
conversion, in her head. She estimated it would be roughly three thousand 
zlotys. She counted out the zlotys. She gave them to the old man. He counted 
them, again.
'I need to leave straight away,' Ruth said to Tadeusz. She put the envelope with 
the photographs in her bag. Her hands were still shaking. Tadeusz folded the 
overcoat on top of one of the boxes of china.
'You know anything about buried gold?' the old man said to Tadeusz. Tadeusz 
didn't answer. 'We are sure they buried something,' the old man said.
Ruth wanted to punch him. She wanted to punch and punch until she had pummelled 
his smug expression into mush. Until she had broken every bone and every piece 
of cartilage in his face. She sneered at him. 'I hope you burn in hell,' she 
said.
Before this trip, she had thought she didn't believe in hell. 'Burn in hell,' 
she said to the old man, again. He smiled at her. She thought he must have 
misunderstood what she was saying. He looked at her and laughed. She knew by his 
laugh that he had understood the essence of what she had said. 'I hope you rot 
in hell,' Ruth said. The
Id man looked at her, and laughed again. This time he laughed even harder. It 
must have struck him as funny, Ruth thought. The whole morning was probably 
hilarious for him.
'Can you carry the box?' Tadeusz said.
'I can carry anything,' she said. She picked up the box, and walked out of the 
apartment. Tadeusz followed her.
'Come back if she tells you about any gold," the old man shouted to Tadeusz. 
'I'll split it with you.'
'Are you alright?' Tadeusz said to Ruth at the bottom of the stairs.
'I am alright,' she said. The brown dog was still at the front entrance. He ran 
up to Ruth. 'Shoo, shoo,' she said to the dog. The dog stayed by her side. 'Get 
out of my way,' Ruth said to the dog. The dog stayed put. Ruth lifted her foot 
and kicked the dog. She must have kicked hard because the dog started 
whimpering. 'Sorry dog,' she said.
The taxi was still there. Ruth was glad that she hadn't paid the driver. It had 
made sure that he had waited for them. Tadeusz put the china in the trunk of the 
car. 'Be very careful with it,' she said to Tadeusz. The dog sat on the footpath 
and looked at Ruth. He looked hurt. 'Sorry dog,' she said, again.
Ruth was relieved to be back in the taxi. The taxi, as dilapidated and foul-
smelling as it was, felt like a haven to Ruth, a sanctuary. 'Back to the hotel, 
please,' Tadeusz said to the driver. They drove off. Ruth looked back at twenty-
three Kamedulska Street. The brown dog was still sitting on the footpath. His 
head was turned towards the taxi. Ruth wondered if the dog could still see them.
The taxi turned the corner and the dog and the building were gone. Ruth felt 
almost numb. How had the old couple got hold of the china and the coat and the 
photographs? What else had there been? Had there been other items of clothing 
they had taken? Other
 


photographs? Other pieces of furniture or tableware? Had they taken them out of 
the apartment after Edek and his family and the other families had left, or had 
it been an intermediary, another Pole, who had got to the goods first, and sold 
them to the new occupants of the building? Had the old couple saved these 
pieces? What else had they had? Had they sold other items in the meantime? 
Fifty-two years was a long time to wait for a sale.
Did someone divide out what was in all the apartments in Kamedulska Street? Or 
did the Poles grab whatever they could get? And why keep a coat? For 
identification? The name 'Rothwax' embroidered on the inside was certainly 
identifying. Or was it? Could the Poles have embroidered it on, themselves, 
after the war?
Edek would know the authenticity of the coat, she thought. It did look authentic 
to Ruth. Far too expensive for these Poles to have been the purchasers. They may 
still have embroidered the name on to the coat. But how would they know whose 
name to embroider? Was the name Rothwax on the apartment? Was the name Rothwax 
on hundreds of other items they found? Ruth thought that she would never know 
the answer to these questions. These questions would just join a long list of 
other unanswerable questions about that time. That demented, fragmented, mad 
time.
'I need to get this china shipped to America,' Ruth said to Tadeusz. 'To New 
York. Do you know a shipping company?' Tadeusz thought for a minute. 'Yes,' he 
said. 'There is a company which ships around the world not far from the hotel.'
'Is it a reliable company?' Ruth said.
'It is American,' Tadeusz said.
'An American company?' Ruth said. 'That's perfect.'
'There is also a Polish company,' Tadeusz said. He hesitated. 'You would prefer 
the American?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said. 'Wouldn't you?'
'Perhaps,' he said.
Ruth looked at her watch. 'Could we go straight there?' she said to Tadeusz. 'Of 
course,' he said.
Tadeusz carried the two boxes of china into the offices of the International 
Shipping Company on Piotrkowska Street. Ruth waited in the taxi until he had 
carried both boxes in. She felt a sense of happiness seeing the boxes being 
delivered to the shippers. She paid the taxi driver. She was grateful to him for 
not contributing any detours or diversions. She gave him the equivalent of one 
hundred American dollars. He beamed.
'Can I have these packed and shipped?' Ruth said to the clerk at the shipping 
company.
'No problem,' he said. He was American. Ruth wanted to hug him.
'It's china and the pieces are fragile,' she said.
'We ship a lot of glass product,' he said. 'It will be wrapped and packaged very 
securely.'
'Good,' she said.
'How soon do you want it?' he said.
'As soon as possible,' Ruth said.
'Air Express?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said. She didn't care how much it cost. She paid for the shipping 
with her American Express card. She felt elated.
She put the receipt, and the tracking number, carefully in her wallet. There was 
plenty of room. Her wallet was almost empty. There was a Kantor next door to the 
shipping company. She changed some money and paid Tadeusz. 'You were very good,' 
she said.
'Thank you. You look much better,' he said.
'I feel better,' she said. They shook hands. 'I'm going to walk back to the 
hotel,' she said. She walked along Piotrkowska Street holding
 


the paper bag with her grandfather's overcoat. She hugged the bag to herself. 
She didn't mind the smell of the mothballs.  'I don't need the boxes after all,' 
she said to the doorman, when she got back to the hotel.
'It was a pleasure to get them for you,' he said and moved his face closer to 
Ruth's. She tried not to back away too obviously. 'I managed to get very strong 
boxes,' he said.  'Thank you very much,' she said. 'How much do I owe you?' 
'Fifty dollars,' he said.
Ruth had had enough negotiations for one morning. 'I'll change a traveller's 
cheque at the desk and give the money to you,' she said to the doorman.  'What 
would you like me to do with the boxes?' he said. 'Should I take them to your 
room?' Several suggestions of what the doorman could do with the boxes remained 
unspoken, inside her. Restrained by a tight grip on her vocal cords.  'You can 
do whatever you like with them,' she said. Her throat hurt.
Back in her room, she looked in the mirror. She looked a bit bedraggled. She 
washed her face. It was strange, she thought, how washing made you feel better. 
What were you washing away? She was washing streaks left by her tears. Tears 
really did streak your face, she thought. Well, faces that had foundation 
applied to them. She put on a new layer of make-up. It was just a light 
foundation, but it covered all the small blemishes. She thought she looked much 
better. She called her father and arranged to meet him in the lobby. She re-
packed the coat into a better bag. A Saks Fifth Avenue bag she had had her shoes 
in.  'You do look terrible,' Edek said when he saw her.
'Don't say that, Dad,' she said. 'You've said that so many times  since we 
arrived in Poland.'
'It is the truth,' Edek said. 'In Poland you do not look so good. The truth is 
the truth.'
'Do you want a cup of tea?' she said. 'I'm going to have one.'
'No thank you,' Edek said.
'Would you like anything else?' Ruth said. 'A cup of coffee? A hot  chocolate?' 
'Maybe a small hot chocolate,' he said.
Ruth ordered the hot chocolate, the tea, and a slice of apple cake for herself. 
She was hungry, and she thought her blood sugar could do with some lifting.  'I 
am glad that you are going to have something to eat,' Edek said.
'So am I,' she said. 'Did you have breakfast?'
'Of course I did have breakfast,' Edek said. 'I did go to the buffet like you 
did suggest.'
'I'm so pleased,' she said.
'It was a bit funny, to tell you the truth, to eat in a dining room by myself,' 
Edek said. 'But they did have a very good breakfast this morning.'  'Better than 
the other mornings?' Ruth said. 'They did have bratwurst this morning,' Edek 
said. 'And knackwurst and weisswurst.' 'Wow,' said Ruth.  All of them was very 
good,' Edek said. 'And the eggs was just now I like them. Not too hard. And the 
compote was only plums today. I like this compote very much.'  'I like plum 
compote, too,' Ruth said. Edek looked happy. She as pleased he had had a good 
breakfast.
You didn't have a bad reaction from the worms from last night?' he said.
I did not eat the worms,' Edek said. 'Only my daughter did eat the worms. And my 
daughter does not look so good.'
 


'I thought I saw you eat half a worm?" Ruth said. Edek looked worried. 'I'm only 
joking," Ruth said. 'Anyway, they're not worms, they're prawns. And I'm fine.'
A waiter brought them the tea and the hot chocolate and the slice of apple cake. 
Ruth looked at the apple cake. It was exactly the way she liked apple cake. 
Bursting with stewed and baked apples. She felt very hungry. She took a forkful 
of the cake. It was delicious. She felt instantly better. That one mouthful had 
revived her. Or had it? Surely the sugar couldn't get into your bloodstream that 
fast? She finished the rest of the slice of apple cake. It was like ingesting a 
sedative. Each mouthful that she took had soothed her, made her feel calmer. 'My 
daughter does like an apple cake,' Edek said.
She hoped Edek wasn't going to say anything else. She already felt self-
conscious enough. She never ate cakes or any other food considered to be 
fattening in front of anyone else. It came from years of every calorie she 
consumed being observed by Rooshka. This acute observation by her mother had 
resulted in Ruth only eating grilled fish and vegetable salads, in public. If 
she had anything sweet, she had to eat it in private.
'Look at how quickly you did eat the apple cake,' Edek said. 'Dad,' she said, 
'do I comment on what you eat?' 'I wouldn't mind what you would say,' he said. 
'Oh yes you would,' she said, in a tone that she hoped conveyed that she was 
capable of a broad range of comments on his food and on his eating. It seemed to 
work. He dropped the subject. 'I did book Stefan for twelve o'clock,' Edek said. 
'I think we'll have to change it to a bit later," Ruth said. 'We won't have 
enough time for the ghetto. Could you call him and ask him to pick us up at two 
o'clock?'
'We have to go to the ghetto?" Edek said. Ruth looked exasperated. 'Okay, okay,' 
Edek said. 'I ring Stefan now.' He ran off to the phone near the front desk.
Ruth looked down at the Saks Fifth Avenue bag. It was on the floor, beside her. 
She wanted to show Edek the coat and the photographs. She hoped he wouldn't be 
upset by them. Edek came back.
'That is fine with Stefan,' he said.
'Of course it's fine,' she said. 'We're paying him. He has to do what we want.'
'Why are you in a bad mood?' Edek said.
'I'm not,' she said.
'You are in a bad mood,' Edek said.
'I'm fine," she said.
'Forget about it," Edek said. 'Stefan was very very happy with his hotel. He 
said he did have a very good sleep last night.'
'Oh good,' Ruth said. 'We need him to be in good shape for the drive to Krakow.'
Ruth took a deep breath. She leaned down and picked up the bag. 'Dad, I had to 
lie to you about what I was doing this morning,' she said. 'I didn't want to 
worry you, so I said I was going running. But I went back to Kamedulska Street.'
Edek looked shocked. 'You went to Kamedulska Street by yourself?' he said.
'No, I had an interpreter with me and a taxi driver waiting outside for me,' she 
said.
'You went alone to a Polish home with two Polacks?' Edek said.
'I told the manager of the hotel where I was going, and that it could be 
dangerous,' Ruth said. 'I told him to ring the police if I Wasn't back at the 
hotel by ten o'clock, and to let you know.' 'What time did you go?' Edek said. 
'Eight o'clock,' she said.
By ten o'clock you could easy be dead,' Edek said. Ruth had forgotten she had 
called the manager, the night before. The manager had clearly forgotten, too. It 
was 10:30 a.m. There was no sign of the manager or of any police in the hotel, 
and the manager
 


had not called Edek. So much for her foolproof security arrangements. 'It was a 
stupid thing to do,' Edek said. 'They could kill you in a second.'
'It's not so easy to kill Jews, today,' Ruth said. 'It is not so hard, too,' 
said Edek. 'I went back to buy the china,' Ruth said. 'My mother's aid teapot?' 
said Edek. 'Are you crazy? To go early in the morning by yourself with two 
Polish men to a house where there is more Polacks? Don't you know what happened 
in Kielce after the war? A pogrom. They did kill more than fifty Jews. And this 
was after the war. This was Jews who was looking for their families, for their 
homes.'
Edek looked agitated and irate. Ruth was surprised. He hadn't seemed 
particularly concerned about their safety, in Poland. He hadn't seemed concerned 
at all. Maybe he felt that Jews were okay as long as they stuck to brightly lit 
main streets, and kept out of Polish homes. She realised he had been reluctant 
to walk too far from the hotel, at night.
'I know about Kielce,' Ruth said. 'They killed forty-two Jews in Kielce, On July 
4th, 1946. They were shot and stoned or killed with axes and clubs. They were 
killed by a crowd of Poles who were incited by the same old rumours of Jews 
kidnapping and murdering Christian children for ritual purposes. The same old 
story.' 'China is only china,' Edek said. 'It is not alive.' 'But I am,' Ruth 
said. 'And I got the china. There was much more of it than we saw.' 'Really?' 
Edek said.
'There was the tea service,' Ruth said, 'and then there were eighteen dinner 
plates, twenty bread and butter plates, twenty bowls, twenty cups and twenty 
saucers!'
'They did have so much pieces?' Edek said. He shook his head. 'It is something 
impossible to believe,' he said.
'And everything was in perfect condition,' Ruth said. 'Not one crack on a cup or 
saucer or bread and butter plate.'
'We did use these small plates not for bread and butter,' Edek said. 'We did use 
them for Vorspeisen, for appetisers.' He shook his head again. 'My mother did 
serve herring and an egg salad on such small plates.'
'Well I've got them, now,' Ruth said. 'We can eat on them, together.'
'What for?' said Edek. He looked sad.
'Does it make you feel sad?' she said.
'No,' he said. 'How can some pieces of china make me feel sad? The sad things 
did already happen, and not to this china.'
Suddenly the thought of the cost of the china occurred to Edek. Ruth could see 
it coming. She had known it would be only a matter of time before Edek asked her 
how much she had paid.
'What did you pay for this stuff?' Edek said.
'I'll tell you in a minute,' she said. 'But first I want to show you something 
else.'
Ruth removed the coat from the bag. She stood up and held the coat out, in front 
of her. Edek looked bewildered. And then an expression of pain mingled with 
disbelief came across his face. He didn't say anything. He just kept shaking his 
head. Ruth waited for him to speak. She found Edek's silence disturbing. He 
looked as though "he was going to cry. She thought that maybe this was too much 
for Wm. She shouldn't have produced the coat, now. She was just about to speak 
when Edek spoke.
'This coat did belong to my father,' he said.
I thought it might have,' Ruth said. She showed him the embroidered
name and initials on the coat's lining. Edek kept shaking his
head. He looked very vulnerable. Ruth wished that she had waited
to show him these purchases. Why was she calling them purchases?
she thought. They were not ordinary shopping items. They were not
 


purchases, they were discoveries. Discoveries unearthed after decades As 
important to her as archaeological relics uncovered by archaeologists. She could 
tell so much about Israel Rothwax and his wife Luba from this coat. She could 
see how big he was, and she could see in what beautiful condition Luba 
maintained his clothes. Not one part of the lining was marked or torn. Maybe 
tidiness and order were inherited traits. She kept her most formal clothes in 
plastic clothes bags, in her cupboard. If something tore, she had it mended. She 
cleaned every item straight after it was worn. Maybe that was a Rothwax quality. 
A thrill ran through her. The thrill of being able to link herself to a family. 
To be part of somebody else. She had only ever been part of Rooshka and Edek.
'I'm so happy to have this coat,' Ruth said to Edek.
'It was very dangerous what you did,' Edek said. He shook his head
again. 'The last time I did see my father in this coat was at my sister
Fela's wedding anniversary,' Edek said. Ruth was worried. Edek
looked as though he was on the verge of tears. She didn't want him to
cry. 'I remember Fela's husband, Juliusz, did help my father to take the
coat off when my father did arrive to the anniversary party,' Edek said.
Fela's husband, Juliusz, Ruth thought. She had never heard Juliusz
mentioned before. He sounded like a nice man, helping Israel off
with his coat. Ruth knew that the knowledge about Juliusz helping
someone take off a coat was not enough information to give you a
full picture of a person. But it was a start. Juliusz must have had
good manners and he must have been fond of his father-in-law.
'I did like Juliusz very much,' Edek said. Juliusz definitely must have been a 
nice man, Ruth decided. She was glad that Fela was in a good marriage. A 
contradictory thought surfaced in her. How did she know that her father's sister 
Fela had a good marriage? The fact that Edek liked Juliusz didn't on its own 
make Juliusz a wonderful husband. She didn't want to ask her father. She felt 
she was already causing him plenty of turbulence.
'I've got something else, Dad,' she said. 'It might give you a shock, so prepare 
yourself. It's something you haven't seen for a long time.' Edek tried to look 
composed, but Ruth could see his apprehension and his distress. She really 
should have waited, she thought, before presenting all of this to her father. 
She should have waited until he was back at home, in his apartment, in 
Melbourne. But she had already started the whole thing off, and she couldn't
stop now.
She got out the old envelope and removed the photographs. She handed them to 
Edek. Edek held them in his lap. He looked at them for a long time. He didn't 
move. He was so still he looked as though he had stopped breathing. Ruth wanted 
him to say something. She wanted to see that he was alright. Edek didn't speak. 
He raised his head as though he was going to say something. Then he lowered it 
again. And then he began to weep. He wept and wept.
The sight of her father crying was too much for Ruth. She began to weep, too. 
They sat, side by side, on a sofa, in the lobby of the Grand Victoria, and wept. 
Finally, Edek pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Ruth tried to stop 
crying. She wiped her eyes with a wad of tissues. They were Polish tissues and 
much rougher than their American counterparts. The tissues hurt her skin. She 
had to be strong, she told herself. She couldn't dissolve into a weeping mess. 
She had caused the distress that Edek was experiencing. The least she could do 
was look after him.
'This is my mother and father,' Edek said.
'I thought it was,' Ruth said. She started to cry, again.
'We shouldn't cry, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'My mother and father is already dead. My 
sister Fela is dead. Juliusz is dead. Tadek, who is also in these pictures, is 
dead. His wife Maryla is dead. Everybody is dead. It is too late to cry.'
 


Ruth looked at her father. Edek's face looked crumpled. Crumpled
grief. His eyes were wrinkled and furrowed, his mouth knotted
 


and distorted. His shoulders had sunk. In sorrow. Weighted with a sadness that 
couldn't be submerged or defeated. Her father looked buckled and broken. Ruth 
felt frightened.  'I'm sorry,' she said to Edek. 'I shouldn't have inflicted all 
this on you, now.'
'You did not do anything,' Edek said. 'The things that was done was done by 
other people."
'But I shouldn't have brought all this up, now,' Ruth said. 'When would be a 
better time?' Edek said. 'Never.' He straightened himself up. 'I am sorry I did 
cry,' he said to Ruth. 'A man my age should not cry.'  'Dad, you've got a lot to 
cry about,' Ruth said. Edek wiped his eyes, again, and sat up. He spread the 
photographs out on his knees. 'This is my sister Fela,' he said. 'And her 
husband Juliusz what I did just tell you about.' He handed Ruth the photograph. 
Ruth looked at Fela and Juliusz. What a good-looking couple they were. They were 
looking at each other, in the photograph. It was a look of love. Ruth thought 
that they must have been madly in love. Or at least quite in love to be still 
looking at each other that way. They had obviously been together a while. They 
had two children. Ruth wondered if it was possible to be quite in love. Or was 
quite in love, too mild to be love? Was anything less than madly in love, not 
really love? She looked at the photograph again. Fela and Juliusz looked madly 
in love, to her.  'Here is Tadek,' Edek said, handing Ruth another one of the 
photographs. 'Next to Tadek is Tadek's wife, Maryla.' Tadek looked like Edek, 
Ruth thought. A very young, handsome Edek. 'He looks like you,' Ruth said. 
'Everybody did say that,' Edek said.  'You can really see the resemblance,' Ruth 
said. 'You were both very handsome young men.'
'You can recognise me from this photo of Tadek,' Edek said.
'Yes,' Ruth said. 'Tadek looks like the photograph of you, after the war, before 
I was born.'
'Of course,' Edek said. 'I did forget about those photographs.'
'You were so handsome,' she said.
'I am not so bad now,' Edek said. He smiled at Ruth. His smile cheered her up.
'You're not so bad at all, Dad,' she said.
'I do not know why Tadek's two boys was not in the photographs,' Edek said. 
'Maybe they was somewhere else at the time.'
'The photographs look as though they were all taken on one day,'
Ruth said. 'You are right,' Edek said. 'Maybe Tadek's boys was with Moniek's  
children that day.'
Tadek's children. Moniek's children. Juliusz, Maryla. All these people she had 
never heard about. All related to her. All family.  'Who are those two girls?' 
Ruth said, pointing at the photograph Edek was holding.
Edek looked at the photograph. 'They was such lovely girls,' he said. 'Quiet, 
and good at school. Very good at school.' 'Who are they?' Ruth said.  'They are 
nobody anymore,' Edek said. 'They are dead.' He looked morose, again.
Who were they, Dad?' she said.
'They were Fela's daughters,' he said. He looked as though he was going to cry, 
again. 'Liebala, the older one, was my favourite. Always smiling. Always 
talking. She did love to talk. "Uncle Edek," she called me- Uncle Edek, can I 
come on the doroszfca? Uncle Edek, can I walk with you? Uncle Edek. Uncle 
Edek!"' Edek put down the photograph and wiped his eyes.  'Are you alright, 
Dad?' Ruth said.
1 am alright,' he said.
What was the younger girl's name?' Ruth said.
 


'Hanka,' Edek said. 'Hanka was very nice too. A bit more quiet than her sister, 
but very nice.' Edek sniffed and wiped his eyes, again He put his handkerchief 
back in his pocket. The handkerchief looked very wet.  'Don't you think Hanka 
and Liebala look like me?' Ruth said.
'I always did know this,' Edek said. 'So did Mum.'
'Why didn't you tell me?' Ruth said.
'What for?' said Edek. 'To tell you the truth,' Edek said, 'I did try myself not 
to think of it too much. It is not so easy to have a child who reminds you so 
much of other children. Children what are dead.' Edek looked as though he might 
start crying again.  'Of course, Dad,' she said. 'I understand.'
'They was clever girls, both of them,' he said.
'I'm glad they were clever,' Ruth said.
'Especially Liebala,' Edek said. He held his mouth together, in an effort to 
stem any more tears.
'Let's put the photographs away, now,' Ruth said. 'I'll have copies of them made 
in New York and give you a set.'  'Probably they do such copies, in Poland,' 
Edek said.
'I'm not giving these photographs to any Pole,' Ruth said.
Edek laughed. 'Maybe that was not such a good idea,' he said.
'I'm going to have the coat altered so it fits me, in New York, too,' Ruth said. 
Edek shook his head at her. 'It's going to look great,' Ruth said.  Edek 
laughed. 'You are crazy,' he said. Ruth was glad that her craziness was making 
Edek laugh. Edek took one last look at the photographs before he handed them 
over to Ruth.  It must be so strange for him to look at these photographs, Ruth 
thought. He hadn't seen these people for so many years. So many decades. And, 
here he was, looking at an image of them. An image that had preserved them, 
perfectly, looking exactly the way they had looked when he last saw them.  'I'm 
happy we got these,' Edek said. 'Better to remember my mother and father and 
Fela and Tadek like this than how they was in the  ghetto.'
Of course, Ruth thought. How stupid of her. This wasn't how he had last seen his 
mother and father and sister and brothers. His last view of them hadn't been 
like this at all. Not one of them had been well dressed when he had last seen 
them. Not one of them had been well fed. Fela's high cheekbones wouldn't have 
had a coating of flesh when Edek had last kissed her. They would have been sharp 
and angular. Probably protruding a long way out off the rest of her face. And 
what had happened to the girls in the ghetto? To Hanka and Liebala? Ruth didn't 
dare ask.  'Make me two copies of the one with my mother and father,' Edek said. 
'The one which is only my mother standing next to my father.'  'Okay,' Ruth 
said.
'I want to send one to Norman,' Edek said.
'To Norman?' said Ruth. 'What do you want to send it to Norman for?'
'I want to show him what my mother and father did look like,' Edek said. 'He 
will be interested.' Ruth dropped the subject. She didn't want to agitate her 
father. She had put him through enough, this morning.  'How much did you pay for 
all this stuff?' Edek said. This was the question she had been hoping to 
deflect. She didn't answer. 'How much did this stuff cost you?' said Edek.  
'It's not stuff,' Ruth said.
'It is stuff what is important to us,' Edek said. 'But it is stuff.'
'Quite a bit,' Ruth said. How much is such a bit?' said Edek.
Three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars for the set of china and the silver 
bowl,' Ruth said.
Edek whistled. 'Oh brother,' he said. 'Three thousand and two hundred dollars 
for some china and some photographs.'
 


'No, the photographs and the coat were extra,' Ruth said.
'Extra?' said Edek. 'Three thousand two hundred and fifty American dollars was 
not enough?' He paused for a second. 'It was American dollars what you was 
talking about, not Australian dollars?' he said.
'They were American dollars,' Ruth said.
'Of course,' Edek said. 'Everybody wants American dollars. How much was the coat 
and the photographs?'
'Another thousand dollars,' Ruth said.
'Another thousand,' he said, in disbelief. 'Those bestids.'
Not even the way he pronounced 'bastard' could cheer Ruth up. Edek's version of 
'bestid' usually lifted her spirits. She felt appalled at how much she had 
spent. She could see that her father was appalled too.
'Those bestids,' Edek said again.
'It's not such a huge amount of money for me to spend,' Ruth said. 'I could 
spend it on a vacation or on a piece of furniture.'
'It is not the four thousand dollars,' Edek said. 'It is the fact that you did 
give this four thousand two hundred and fifty dollars to those Polacks.'
Her father was right, Ruth thought. It was not the amount of the expenditure 
that was the most bothering aspect of this, it was who the money was handed to. 
It was given to people who had already profited from the death of his mother and 
father and sister and brothers and nephews and nieces.
'Those bestids,' Edek said again. Ruth thought that one day she should teach 
Edek a few more obscenities. He was stuck on bestid. There were several more 
potent profanities. Bestid seemed too timid to Ruth. There was a string of much 
stronger words for cursing.
 'They did get what they wanted, those bestids,' Edek said.
'We got what we wanted,' Ruth said.
'I did not want this,' Edek said. 'I did,' she said. Edek was quiet.
Ruth put the photographs back in the envelope. She folded the coat and returned 
it to its new home. A Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. Edek slumped back against 
the back of the sofa. The price that Ruth had paid for the coat and the china 
and the photographs seemed to have deflated him. He looked depressed.
'What use is it to pay such a lot of money?' Edek said. 'What use is these 
photographs? I already did know what my mother and father did look like.'
'I didn't,' Ruth said.
'I suppose so,' Edek said. 'But nobody else does want to see them. There is no 
grandchildren. There is nobody.'
Ruth was surprised. Edek didn't usually dwell on her lack of children or his 
lack of grandchildren. It must be the effect of looking at the photographs. 
Seeing how truncated, almost eradicated, the whole Rothwax family was, that was 
getting to Edek. Ruth felt bad. 'I guess I could still have children,' she said. 
'You will not,' said Edek.
Ruth felt cold. She could feel herself shivering. She knew it was warm in the 
lobby. She was shivering because she was overwrought. There was too much to deal 
with. Why did Edek have to bring up children now? It made sense. They had just 
been looking at two of the beautiful children who were lost. Lost to their 
mother and father. Lost to their grandparents. Lost to their aunties and uncles. 
Lost to Edek, and lost to Ruth. Two of the many beautiful children who'd
been lost, in Lodz.
I am happy you did get what you wanted,' Edek said to Ruth. The photographs mean 
so much to me,' she said. Edek nodded his head. 'Maybe you're not up to a visit 
to the ghetto,' Ruth said to Edek. 'Maybe you should stay here and have a rest.'
 


'I am coming with you,' Edek said.
 


Okay,' she said. 'I'll put these things upstairs and then we'll get a cab.'
'Maybe I will call Stefan to drive us to the ghetto?' Edek said.
'We're going to be on the road with Stefan for hours, driving to Krakow, this 
afternoon,' Ruth said.  'He is not so bad,' Edek said. Ruth groaned. She wasn't 
ready to face Stefan, yet.
Td like a break from Stefan,' she said. 'Unless you'd really like to see him 
sooner.'
'Are you stupid?' Edek said. 'I did only suggest it to be more convenient for 
you.'
'Oh, good,' Ruth said. 'We can get a Mercedes though. I've become a convert to 
the benefits of driving in a Mercedes.'  'A Mercedes is such a good car,' Edek 
said. 'One of the best.'
Ruth started to relax. They were on to more comfortable territory. The glories 
of a Mercedes car were something they could both, now, agree on.  'Stefan's 
Mercedes is a specially good one,' Edek said. Ruth was just about to tell Edek 
to call Stefan when Edek said, 'Ah forget about it, I will find another 
Mercedes.'  'You arrange the Mercedes,' Ruth said. 'And I'll meet you back here 
in ten minutes.'
Ruth took Israel Rothwax's coat out of the Saks Fifth Avenue bag. She didn't 
want any of the staff to think it was a valuable coat. That was ridiculous, she 
thought. Most of the staff of the Grand Victoria, in Lodz, would never have 
heard of Saks Fifth Avenue. Still, the Saks bag looked classy. And it was best 
to be safe. Ruth hung the coat in the closet, next to the rest of her clothes. 
She realised that everything she owned would soon smell of mothballs. She didn't 
mind. These mothballs had a different connotation from most mothballs.  She put 
the photographs inside a guidebook to Poland. She didn't think anyone would want 
to steal a guidebook to Poland. She went  downstairs. She found her father 
standing in front of what had to be the biggest Mercedes in Lodz. He was 
smiling. Ruth walked up  to him.
'This is a big Mercedes,' she said.
'It is the biggest model what Mercedes does make,' said Edek.
'I'm impressed,' Ruth said. 'Where did you find it?'
'I did ask the doorman,' Edek said. 'He did tell me he has a friend with a very 
big Mercedes. So I said, book him for us, please.'  'What are we paying for this 
car?' Ruth said, although she felt that the question was redundant next to her 
expenditure this morning.  'This Mercedes is the same price as any other 
Mercedes,' Edek  said.
'A bargain,' she said. Edek laughed.
'This whole trip to Poland,' he said, 'is one big bargain.'
They got into the car. 'Tell the driver we'll only be about an hour.'
'I did tell him already, half an hour,' Edek said.
'I'm sure he won't mind if we take a bit longer,' Ruth said. Edek bounced 
himself up and down on the back seat.  'This Mercedes is very comfortable,' he 
said.
'It sure is,' she said. She sank back into the seat. She was so tired. She 
hadn't realised how tired she was.  Edek reached into the pocket of his parka. 
He pulled out some dried apricots. 'I did take these apricots from breakfast,' 
he said. Have some of them. You will feel better.' She must look as tired as she 
felt, she thought. She took two of the dried apricots. 'Thanks, Dad,' she said.  
They were nearing the ghetto area. Ruth wondered what her father  was thinking. 
Was he remembering the potato peels he and Rooshka  had to turn into salad? 
Salatka they called it. Or was he remembering  the decline in the availability 
of potato peels? It had happened
 


on November 26th, 1942, Edek had told her. The Department of Soup Kitchens had 
ordered a reduction in the potato content of the workshop soup. There had been a 
large delivery of cabbage, which had to be used up. The soup was tastier, but 
had less nutritional value. Edek had said that you could feel the difference. It 
was even harder to work hard on cabbage soup.
Was he remembering the day after the cabbage announcement when a rumour swept 
the ghetto that the straw-shoe workers were to be transferred to Poznari? The 
Germans thought it would be easier to transfer the Jews than keep shipping the 
straw from Poznari. Edek had told Rooshka, who was working in the straw-shoe 
workshop at the time, that they would go into hiding if this order came through. 
They were not to be separated by anything, he had said.
The Mercedes turned left from Ogrodowa Street into Zachodnia Street. Ruth had a 
map of the former ghetto with her. They were at the corner of Zachodnia and 
Podrzeczna Streets. Ruth knew that this intersection marked the entry into what 
had been the Lodz ghetto. There was nothing marking the spot. She told Edek 
where they were. 'I do not recognise anything,' he said.
'All the buildings were demolished,' she said. 'I will show you where Mum and me 
did live for the first two years when we will drive past the street,' Edek said.
They passed Lutomierska Street where the old Jewish cemetery of Lodz used to be. 
The first deportations from the ghetto had set out from this site. The cemetery 
was no longer there. The Nazis had destroyed it. They had used the headstones 
and tombstones to build roads so that they could get to the rest of the Jews 
they had to kill, more efficiently. A bit further on, on the corner of Rynek 
Bahicki, there was a memorial plaque in memory of the Jewish and gypsy victims 
of Nazi war crimes. Ruth wondered how many Poles had looked at that plaque.
'Himmler came to the ghetto, one day,' Edek said.
'SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler?' said Ruth. 'Yes,' Edek said. 'Himmler 
himself. I remember it was a Saturday. It was June 7th, 1941. He came in a big 
black beautiful car. Probably a Mercedes. The car had a top what was open. 
Probably because it was summer. I remember the licen plates what was on the 
car.'
Edek always dropped the Y sound at the end of the word licence. He always said 
'licen'. Why was she thinking about that? This was no time to be distracted by 
Edek's or anyone else's pronunciation. 'You saw Himmler?' Ruth said.
'Of course I did see Himmler,' Edek said. 'Otherwise how could I tell you about 
his licen plates? I did never forget those licen plates. Instead of numbers, was 
an SS insignia and the number I.'
Ruth shook her head. She wondered if Himmler was the first person to have had 
personalised number plates. If he had, he had ushered in a craze. Half of most 
of the cars on the road in America, now, seemed to have personalised number 
plates. Why was she having such banal thoughts? Surely there was something more 
significant about Himmler's visit to the Lodz ghetto than whether he had been a 
forerunner of a craze for personalised number plates. She didn't want to take 
this visit to Poland lightly. She wanted to take in as much as she could. She 
had been wanting to do this for so many
years.
I did always remember that day,' Edek said. 'It was the same day that the Kripo, 
the criminal police, did kill a very nice boy who was living near to us, Elia 
Hersz. He was seventeen. He was a clever boy. He always did say to me and Mum 
that we did have to keep our spirits up. That this would not last long. It did 
not last too long for him. They killed him at nine o'clock at night. He was not 
supposed to go out at night. As a matter of fact nobody was allowed to go out of 
their house that whole day. I do not know why. Maybe they did not want Himmler 
to have to look at people what did not look so good.'
 


'You'd think that looking at ragged and diseased and malnourished Jews would 
have pepped Himmler up for the day,' Ruth said. 'Who knows,' said Edek.
'Why were you out if there was a curfew?' Ruth said. 'Mum's mother was very sick 
and Mum did want to send her some of her bread,' he said.
'So you took the bread?' said Ruth. 'I did take the bread,' Edek said.
They were at the intersection of Zgierska and Limanowskiego Streets. These 
streets were major transport routes from the centre of Lodz, to the north and 
the west. The intersection of these streets divided the ghetto into three parts. 
The parts were connected to each other by wooden bridges. Ruth had looked at 
many photographs of poor Jews crossing that bridge. Poor Jews. Why did those two 
words run together so naturally for her? They were not two words the rest of the 
world coupled very often.
'I cannot recognise anything,' Edek said. He sounded distressed. 'I did want to 
show you the places where Mum and me did live. I did know every street in the 
ghetto. Now I do not know where anything is.'
'That's because they got rid of it all,' Ruth said. 'They should have left it 
how it was. It could have been a walk-through museum. Far more effective than 
any exhibits you could label and encase in glass. 'I want to show you where Mum 
and me did live,' Edek said. 'Drive very slowly,' Ruth said to the driver. Edek 
repeated that to the driver, in Polish. He slowed to a crawl.
They were in Czarnieckiego Street. Ruth knew that the ghetto's central prison 
complex was at fourteen Czarnieckiego Street. She knew that it had consisted of 
fourteen separate buildings. There was nothing of the prison left now. The 
street was full of the regulation communist-inspired residential architecture.
'The prison used to be here,' Ruth said to Edek. Edek looked around
him. He looked bewildered and confused. 'We're on Czarnieckiego Street,' Ruth 
said. 'But there's nothing left of the prison.' 'I do not recognise anything,' 
Edek said. He sounded quite flat.
Almost depressed.
Ruth wasn't sure why the absence of anything recognisable from the Lodz ghetto 
was so upsetting to him. Maybe because so much of his past was impossible to 
locate. Impossible to believe. Impossible to understand. Maybe with all of that 
uncertainty, you needed something to point at. Something more concrete than 
horror.
'I am happy that the prison is not anymore here,' Edek said. 'I have not such 
good memories of this prison.' Ruth didn't know her father had had anything to 
do with the prison. There was so much she didn't know. No matter how much she 
read about the Lodz ghetto, she couldn't read enough. Enough to understand what 
it was like. Enough to understand how it had happened. She could read about the 
ghetto forever, she thought, and it would never be enough. She thought of an 
order that had been issued in the ghetto on June 27th, 1942. The order warned 
that all German officials in uniform and in plain clothes were to be greeted by 
residents of the ghetto with a salute. Ruth found it unbelievable that on 16th 
February, 1944, when most of the Jews had died or been transported to Auschwitz, 
the Nazis were still issuing orders for Jews to salute. The 1944 order gave the 
Jews detailed instructions on what constituted a proper salute. Most of the Jews 
who were being required to salute could barely walk, let alone salute.
The same day as the first order to Jews to salute had been posted,
June 27th, 1942, Hans Biebow, the Commandant of the Lodz ghetto,
lodged a formal objection to the wording of the death notices of
Jews recorded by the Jewish elders of the ghetto. Biebow ordered
that references to hunger, starvation, or swelling from hunger, cease.
from now on he wanted the cause of death, from hunger, to be listed
"malnutrition. The pettiness of the requirements and orders never
 


ceased to amaze Ruth. Nothing was too inconsequential or mundane or banal enough 
about Jews and their lives for the Germans to leave it alone. They had to tamper 
and add and subtract and play with Jews, ceaselessly. They were never content.
Ruth had seen a photograph of Hans Biebow. He was a handsome young man. In the 
photograph he was relaxing in the ghetto, in an armchair, next to a table laden 
with oysters, clams, canapes, lobster and sausages. This photograph was taken at 
the same time as Edek was picking up his twenty-kilogram ration of turnips for 
the winter. He'd had had to stand in line in the cold for hours, to pick up the 
turnips. He had been so cold. He had lost most of his weight, and was little 
more than skin and bones. Then he had had to drag the already rotting sack 
behind him, all the way home. Halfway home the sack burst. Turnips went 
everywhere. He saved as many as he could. When he got home, he cried.
'Do you remember the story I did tell you about the turnips?' Edek said. Ruth 
was startled. 'I was just thinking about that,' she said.
The too,' Edek said.
'There is nothing here, anymore,' Edek said.
'There never was,' Ruth said. They were both quiet.
'I do not think I can find where Mum and me did live,' Edek said.
'You first lived near the hospital on Lagiewnicka Street, didn't you?' Ruth 
said.
'You do remember everything,' Edek said. He looked pleased with Ruth for 
producing this detail.
'I remember you telling me about the day they emptied that hospital,' Ruth said.
'It was September 1st, 1942,' Edek said. 'It was exactly seven o'clock. A big 
truck came and they did put all the patients on the truck. They was in a hurry, 
so they did throw some patients out of the windows of the hospital, onto the 
truck.' Ruth looked at Edek. His eyes had
filled with tears. They should leave the ghetto area, Ruth decided. She had made 
her father cry enough for one day. 'I'm sorry, Dad,' she said.
'You did not do anything,' Edek said. He looked away. Ruth felt bad. The idea of 
this trip hadn't been to make her father feel bad. 'I don't know why we're 
here,' Ruth said. 'Some things are not so easy to know,' Edek said. 'Let's get 
out of here,' Ruth said. 'I'm ready to go to Krakow.' 'I am, too, ready to go 
somewhere else,' Edek said. 'Probably anywhere that isn't Lodz,' said Ruth. 'I'm 
finished with Lodz, myself.' Was that true? Or was that impossible? Would she 
never be able to be finished with Lodz? She didn't know.
Edek told the driver to take them back to the hotel. Edek was quiet for the 
whole ride back. They pulled up outside the hotel. Even the Grand Victoria 
looked friendly and familiar, next to what used to be the Lodz ghetto.
'You want me to pack for you?' Ruth said to Edek. 'Are you crazy?' Edek said.
'That's one of my least crazy suggestions,' Ruth said. 'I agree with that, to 
tell you the truth,' Edek said. 'You got plenty more crazy ideas.' Ruth put her 
arm around her father. She gave him a kiss on the cheek.
'Thanks for doing this with me,' she said. 'I must be crazy,' he said. Ruth 
laughed. 'Let's pack and meet downstairs,' she said.
Ruth packed slowly. Everything about her was weary. Her eyes, her limbs, her 
brain. She carried things, one at a time, to her suitcase. She was so glad she 
was leaving Lodz. She felt dirty. She didn't have time for a shower. She looked 
for her perfume. Some perfume would freshen her up. She loved her perfume. She 
had been wearing the
 


same perfume, Fracas by Robert Piguet, for years. She couldn't the perfume. 
Where could she have put it? She looked in the bath room. She had already 
emptied the bathroom cupboard. The perfume wasn't in the bathroom. She looked 
through her suitcase. The perfume wasn't there. She felt annoyed with herself 
for misplacing the perfume. She hated it when she was careless.
She looked at a list she had made herself of things to pack in her smaller bag. 
The photographs from Kamedulska Street were on the top of the list. She would 
die if she lost them, she thought. Then she realised how absurd that thought 
was. People didn't die when they lost other people, let alone a few photographs. 
But she didn't have the people to lose. She only had these photographs. She 
packed the envelope with the photographs carefully into her bag. She looked for 
the rolls of film she had bought. She had the new film in a bag with film she 
had already used. She wanted to take some photographs on the way to Krakow. She 
opened the bag. It contained only the used film.
Ruth was puzzled. She really must be losing it, going nuts, she thought. She 
remembered putting four new rolls of film into this bag. Then it hit her. Of 
course, the perfume and the new rolls of film had been stolen. She sat down on 
the lumpy bed and started to cry. She cried and cried. She felt stupid for 
crying over lost perfume and rolls of film. She knew she was crying for far more 
than that. She had to stop crying, she thought. She wiped her eyes. She finished 
packing.
She called Edek. 'Are you ready?' she said.
'I am nearly ready,' he said. 'But I cannot find my razor blades. I did have a 
new packet. It had twelve razor blades. Those ones what you throw away.'
'Disposable razors,' Ruth said.
'I cannot find where I did put them,' Edek said.
'I think you might find them in the pocket of one of the employees of the 
hotel,' Ruth said.
'What?' said Edek.
'My perfume and some rolls of film for the camera are gone, too,' Ruth said. 
'They've been stolen.'
Edek started to laugh. 'I did think I was going crazy,' he said.
The too,' she said.
'Maybe we are crazy?' he said. 'Who else would come to Lodz?"
'I can't believe they stole our stuff,' Ruth said.
'They did take my razor blades and your perfume?' Edek said.
'And the film,' she said. Edek started laughing, again. He laughed and laughed. 
His laughter made Ruth laugh.
They got us, again,' Edek said when he stopped laughing.
'I'll see you downstairs,' Ruth said. She was still laughing.
Stefan had arrived when Ruth got downstairs. Edek was embracing him. Stefan 
looked pretty pleased to see Edek. Ruth waved to Stefan, and walked to the front 
desk to pay the hotel bill. She had to wait ten minutes for the hotel's computer 
to print out the receipt. She looked for Edek. He was handing out tips. Tips for 
the doorman. Tips for the porter. Ruth walked quickly over to him.
'Why are you tipping everyone?' she said. 'They stole our stuff.'
'How do you know it was them who did steal our stuff?' Edek said.
Maybe he had a point, she thought. She went back to collect the receipt. She 
smiled at the porter and the doorman. She was so happy to be leaving. She got 
into the Mercedes. She was happy to be in the Mercedes. She was even happy to 
see Stefan.
They got out of Lodz in record time. Ruth wondered whether Edek had asked Stefan 
to get a move on. She was sure Edek was as happy to leave Lodz as she was.
Soon, they were in a more rural part of Poland. The countryside looked peaceful, 
to Ruth. Farmhouses and chickens. Small cottages
 


and snow-covered shrubs. The odd cow and a couple of horses Some goats tethered 
to posts. Everything was so quiet. So benign Most of the homes were adorned with 
religious symbols. Jesus on the cross, shrines to the Madonna, lone crosses. 
Some of the shrines were very elaborate. Housed in buildings in front of the 
homes, they were almost small chapels. Barely one home was without a display of 
its occupants' religiosity. These testaments to godliness dotted the landscape.
They passed donkeys and carts. Donkeys loaded with coal, and donkeys carrying 
straw. They passed a man making a broom out of branches of a tree. Ruth was glad 
that they were out of the city. They drove past an enormous sculpture of the 
Madonna in front of a farmhouse. 'Look at that Madonna,' Ruth said to Edek. But 
Edek didn't hear. He was in the front, talking to Stefan.
A minute later Edek turned around to Ruth. 'Was you talking about Madonna?' he 
said. Ruth was about to explain it was an image of the Madonna, the Virgin Mary, 
not Madonna, the celebrity, when Edek said, 'She is going to be a star, this 
Madonna.' Ruth didn't have the heart to tell him that Madonna was already as big 
a star as it was possible to be. Last year Edek had predicted that Michael 
Jackson would make it big. It wasn't a Michael Jackson revival that Edek was 
forecasting. Edek hadn't noticed that Michael Jackson had ever hit the big time.
Stefan had turned off the side roads and gone onto a highway. Ruth was sad to 
leave the more bucolic setting. Edek and Stefan had been talking to each other 
since they had left Lodz. Ruth heard Stefan compliment Edek on his Polish. 'You 
have done my day', Edek said to Stefan. Ruth wasn't sure whether to point out 
that what Edek meant was 'you have made my day', or to let him know he had been 
speaking English to Stefan. Suddenly Edek realised his mistake. He roared with 
laughter. 'I did speak English to you,' he said to Stefan. Then he slapped his 
head, and explained the double slip-up
Stefan. They both roared with laughter. Ruth smiled. She was glad that Edek was 
happy.
Two minutes later, there were loud guffaws from Stefan and Edek. The car slowed 
down. Ruth looked out of the window. Ahead of them, almost in the middle of the 
highway, were two women. Two women gyrating wildly with their pelvises. Both 
women had their pelvises pushed out in a movement that couldn't be mistaken for 
anything that wasn't suggestive of sex. These women were suggesting sex to 
whatever possible passers-by they were able to flag down with their hips.
Ruth couldn't believe her eyes. She had never seen prostitutes like these. One 
woman had an enormous head of yellow hair, bright red cheeks, thickly-rimmed 
black eyes and a big pink mouth. The other woman was black-haired and black-
eyed. They were both wearing short shorts underneath winter coats. The black-
haired one waved to a truck driver who pulled off the highway.
'She did get a customer,' Edek said to Stefan.
'You'll have to speak Polish if you want him to understand,' Ruth said, although 
she had been reluctant to let Edek know she had seen the prostitutes. It would 
have been impossible not to see them. Stefan had slowed down to a crawl. Edek 
and Stefan were looking at the women, and chuckling. They lowered their voices. 
Ruth couldn't hear what they were saying. She decided that it was just as well. 
It was better for her state of mind not to know what they were saying.
Ruth realised why the prostitutes were jutting their hips out and gyrating with 
such exaggerated, crude movements. They had to exaggerate. The women had a very 
brief time period, a small window of opportunity, in which to get their message 
across. A subtle movement would never be noticed by a speeding truck driver.
We're not going to stop, are we?' she said to Edek. Stefan must have heard the 
stern tone in her voice. He speeded up.
She should do some work in the car, she thought. She should
 


write a fax to Max telling her that it was not possible to sell the copyright to 
any of her letters. It was too problematic to try to guarantee that no one else 
would ever be given the same letter. How many words would she have to guarantee 
not to repeat? Any sentence contained in the letter? Any word? It was clearly 
not a viable proposition. Max would just have to tell Mr Kendall that he 
couldn't buy the copyright to the refusal-to-lend-his-name-to-the-fund-raising-
event letter she had written for him. She got out a pen and paper. She would 
outline the difficulties of selling a copyright, to Max, in a fax. She looked at 
the blank sheet of paper. She felt too tired to write anything. She was too 
tired to compose a shopping list. She was exhausted. She put the paper away.
She could feel herself drifting off. She tried to stay awake. She never slept 
during the day. She had read that insomniacs should never nap. She wasn't an 
insomniac. But she did suffer from occasional sleeplessness. She thought that 
not sleeping during the day was a good preventative measure to allay any 
potential insomnia. She was finding it harder and harder to stay awake. She 
contemplated beginning a conversation with Edek. But he was so happy chatting to 
Stefan. She didn't want to disturb his happiness. She wondered how long it would 
be before they arrived in Krakow.
'Ruthie darling,' Edek said.
'What do you want?' she said.
'You are asleep.'
'No I'm not,' she said. 'I never sleep during the day.' She looked out of the 
car window. It was dark outside. She must have fallen asleep. 'Where are we?' 
she said.
'We are nearly in Krakow,' said Edek.
'Nearly in Krakow?'
'I told you you was sleeping,' Edek said.
Ruth was disoriented. She must have slept for over two hours. She felt very 
groggy. 'I was very happy that you was sleeping,' Edek
said-'Did you sleep?' Ruth said.
'No,' said Edek. 'But I am not so tired what you are.'
'Lodz was pretty tough, wasn't it?' she said.
'You can say that again, brother,' Edek said.
They pulled up outside the hotel. Ruth found some peppermint Tic-Tacs. She hoped 
that the strong flavour would pep her up.
'Will you pay Stefan while I check in?' Ruth said.
'Okey dokey,' Edek said. Okey dokey, Ruth thought. Why was her father in such a 
good mood? Maybe it was because they had left Lodz. Anybody would be in a good 
mood leaving Lodz.
Ruth put her credit card down on the desk in front of the receptionist, a man 
who was about thirty. 'Two rooms for Rothwax,' she said.
'You are here to visit the Auschwitz Museum,' the receptionist said. Ruth was 
shocked. How did he know what she had come to Krakow for? Could he tell she was 
Jewish just by looking at her? Or maybe he recognised Rothwax as a Jewish name. 
Were all Jews who visited Krakow headed for Auschwitz?
'I'm not here to see the Auschwitz Museum,' she said, loudly, to the 
receptionist. 'I am here to visit the Auschwitz death camp.' The receptionist 
coughed nervously. He looked disconcerted. She hadn't meant to say it so loudly. 
'I'm here to visit the Auschwitz death camp,' she said, in a quieter voice. He 
lowered his eyes.
'I can get you a very good driver,' he said. 'The Museum is approximately forty 
miles west of Krakow.'
'The death camp, you mean,' Ruth said.
He nodded. 'I can get you a very good driver with a Mercedes,' he said.
 


Poles seemed to be very good at producing drivers with Merced for Jews, Ruth 
thought. Maybe it wasn't just Jews who were offered drivers with Mercedes. 
Mercedes for Jews, Ruth thought. A bizarre business. Edek had joined her.
'We do want two rooms not too far from each other,' he said 'I want to be near 
to my daughter.'
'Of course,' said the receptionist.
'Stefan is very happy,' Edek said. 'I did give him a good tip.'
'I'm sure you did,' Ruth said.
'You have two rooms next to each other,' the receptionist said.
'Thank you very much,' said Edek.
'Should I book the driver for you for the Auschwitz Museum?' the receptionist 
said to Ruth.
'It's a death camp,' she said.
'What for do you argue with him?' Edek said.
'I don't know,' she said.
'Stefan is waiting to say goodbye to you,' Edek said.
Ruth walked over to the front door where Stefan was waiting. Stefan smiled at 
her. 'Thank you very much,' Ruth said to Stefan. Edek and Stefan embraced each 
other. 'Travel well,' Edek said to Stefan. 'You travel in good health,' Stefan 
said to Edek. They hugged again. Ruth shook her head. She really couldn't 
understand this friendship. Was it a friendship? She didn't know. She was much 
too tired to work it out. 'Goodbye, Miss Rothwax,' Stefan said to Ruth. Ruth put 
out her hand. Stefan leant down and kissed her hand. She smiled at him.
'Thank you for looking after us,' she said.
chapter twelve
The sound of someone singing 'All I want is a room somewhere. Far away from the 
cold night air' came ringing across the Planty, the park that followed the 
course of the ancient ramparts and enclosed the Stare Miasto, the Old Town, in 
the centre of Krakow. It was a strange version of the song. Ruth was unnerved. 
What Pole would be singing a show tune, a song from My Fair Lady, at this hour 
of the morning?
It was seven a.m. She had been running on the path that encircled the Planty for 
an hour. It was not yet light. The unpaved path was uneven. She had been trying 
not to slip on the odd patches of ice. Very few people were about. The path was 
close enough to the street for her to feel safe. A middle-aged man was crossing 
the park, diagonally, in front of her. Was it him singing? 'All I want is a room 
somewhere. Far away from the cold night air.' There it was again. The singer 
obviously didn't know the rest of the lyrics. She looked at the man walking. He 
didn't look as though he was singing.
All of a sudden, Ruth recognised the voice. It wasn't a Pole. It was Hoss. Hoss 
was here, in Krakow. She felt frustrated and agitated.
'You recognised my singing, I see,' Hoss said. He sounded very chipper. Almost 
chirpy.
'You sound stupid singing that song,' Ruth said. Her comment didn't dent his 
lilt.
'I like this song very much,' he said. He sounded perky, jaunty.
It sounds ridiculous in a German accent,' Ruth said. 'Why are you singing?' she 
said. 'What have you got to sing about?'
 


'I feel good,' he said. 'It has been a long time since I have felt good.'
Ruth felt bothered. Why was Hoss feeling good? Did it have anything to do with 
her? Was she contributing to his wellbeing? She hoped not.  'This is the only 
song I know in English,' Hoss said.
'You don't sound as though you know much of it,' Ruth said.
'We do not, unfortunately, have music in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss said. 
'But when I speak with you I can hear things that I cannot hear the rest of the 
time.'  'Really?' she said,
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'I did not know this when I began to talk with you. But I know 
this for sure, now. I have picked up things which I definitely did not know.'  
'If you're picking things up,' Ruth said. 'You're being very selective. I 
haven't noticed an enormous shift in your position on things.'  'My English is 
getting much better, however,' Hoss said.
'That could be true.'
'All I want is a room somewhere,' Hoss sang, again.
'Please,' Ruth said. 'Don't. You wouldn't sing it if you understood how absurd 
you sound. The song is supposed to be sung by a young cockney girl, anyway, a 
flower-seller.'  'Really?' said Hoss. 'I did not know this. Why does she want a 
room?'
'She's poor and cold,' Ruth said. 'But she meets a mentor, a professor who 
teaches her manners and correct speech.' Ruth couldn't believe what she had just 
said. She had detailed the plot line of My Fair Lady, to Rudolf Hoss. She must 
be losing her mind.  'So this is a story about weeding out the illiterate and 
the ignorant,' Hoss said. He sounded pleased with himself.  Why was Hoss so 
happy? Ruth wondered. She stopped running-She realised she had been running and 
talking. Something she had  never been able to do, simultaneously, before.
'You can't apply your racial hygiene and purity theories to everything.' she 
said to Hoss. He laughed.  'Did you notice my pun?' he said.
'Yes,' she said. 'It was very clever. A flower-seller being weeded out.' Hoss 
roared.
'My English is definitely superior, now,' he said, adamantly. 'Definitely 
superior.'
'You'll lose all of your credibility if you continue to sing that song,' Ruth 
said. 'It's too bizarre. Too improbable.'  'Is it more improbable than most 
things?' Hoss said.
'I think so,' said Ruth. 'Anyway, it's farcical. You're a Nazi. You should be 
singing Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles.'  'I would have to sing this very 
quietly,' Hoss said.
'That's true,' she said.
Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles, Hoss hummed to himself. Ruth bent down to 
tie up her shoelace. She really needed some new running shoes. She was sure she 
had done more than five hundred miles in these shoes, and she knew they lost 
most of their shock absorbency after five hundred miles. How could she be 
thinking about her shoes and their shock absorbency? She was in Poland, in 
Krakow, in the Planty, early in the morning, talking to Rudolf Hoss.  'I thought 
I'd got rid of you, permanently,' she said to Hoss.
'It is not so easy to get rid of me,' Hoss said.
'You mean it is possible?'
'If you do not know this why should I tell you?' he said.
'I tell you things,' Ruth said.
'And I reciprocate,' Hoss said. 'That is a very good word, isn't it. I think I 
pronounce it rather well.'  'You pronounce it very well, for a German," Ruth 
said.
Hoss snorted. He cleared his throat. It was strange to listen to a
 


dead person clearing their throat. It sounded the same as anyone else she had 
ever heard clear their throat.  'You do not know something which you need to 
know,' Hoss said.
'I don't know many things I need to know,' Ruth said. She adjusted her 
pedometer. It was digging into her waist. She left her headphones on. The cold 
sometimes gave her an earache.  'This is something which you need to know,' Hoss 
said. 'It is something unknown. And I know what it is.'  'Don't give me that 
something unknown, hocus pocus, that I know something you don't know, shit," 
Ruth said. 'I don't believe in all that.'  'Still?' said Hoss. 'You still do not 
believe?'
'I don't believe in voodoo, witchcraft, vixens, shamans or sorcerers,' she said. 
'I don't believe in God or conjurers or witch doctors or sirens or evil 
spirits.'  'I would not put God in the same category as the rest of this pagan 
assortment,' Hoss said.
'Why not?' she said.
'Just trust me,' Hoss said. 'Take my advice on this matter.'
Ruth shrugged her shoulders. She felt reinforced by the listing of her beliefs 
or lack of them. As though the itemisation, the inventory, had strengthened and 
reinforced her conviction.  'Your father knows something you do not know,' Hoss 
said.
'Of course he does,' Ruth said. 'I haven't lived his life.'
'He knows something which you need to know,' Hoss said. This something he has 
known for many years. For decades. Ask him about this.'  'You're giving me more 
advice?' Ruth said. 'Wow, I'm so lucky.'
'I can see that you are not sincere about this statement,' Hoss said.
'You can see?' Ruth said.
'I can see,' said Hoss. He took a deep breath. Ruth could hear the intake of 
air. So Hoss still breathed the same air as everyone else. The same air that she 
was breathing. How weird, Ruth thought.  'Edek Rothwax has chosen not to tell 
you about this,' Hoss said.
'You know my father's name?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Hoss. 'Why are you surprised? You and I know a lot about each 
other.' Ruth took a sip of water. She felt dehydrated. 'I am trying to help 
you,' Hoss said.  'What a joke,' Ruth said. She laughed.
'I am serious about this,' Hoss said. 'I want to help you.'
Ruth felt quite calm. She could cope with Hoss as long as he remained himself. 
When he seemed in danger of metamorphosing into Mother Teresa, she lost all of 
her patience with him. She was surprised at her admission that she could cope 
with Hoss. It was a revelation to her.  'Don't mess with me,' she said to Hoss. 
'Do you understand what that means?'
'I understand this expression,' Hoss said. 'I told you I have been able to 
absorb many more things since we met. The most evident aspect of this is the 
improvement in my English.'  'Well, don't pretend to want to be helpful to me,' 
Ruth said. She dug her heel lightly into the ground. Hoss winced. A small yelp 
escaped from him.  'I am not pretending,' he gasped.
Ruth steadied herself. The spot she had chosen to dig her heel into had been 
frozen. She had nearly slipped. 'Fuck you,' she said. 'I'm sick of you.'  'Why 
do you persist with these obscenities?' Hoss said. 'Even taking into account my 
improved English, they do not offend me.'  'Well you'd better become familiar 
with them because English is becoming the language of the future, in Europe. 
That is if you do have a future,' Ruth said.
 


'Of course I have a future,' Hoss said. 'I have explained this to you before. 
Dead people have a future. It is as complicated a future as any person's future 
can be.'  'What sort of complications are you talking about?' Ruth said.
'There are certain things you have to relive when you are dead,' Hoss said. 
'Certain portions of your life and sometimes, of your death.'  'Really?' said 
Ruth. 'That doesn't sound promising.'
'The reliving of your life has a different connotation, in Himmel,' Hoss said. 
'I have noticed that in Himmel they seem on the whole to relive very pleasant 
aspects of their lives.'  'But not in Zweites Himmel's Lager?' Ruth said.
'No,' Hoss said. He sounded glum.
'That's good,' she said. Hoss overlooked her barb.
Ruth had an image of Zweites Himmel's Lager as a vast space populated with 
people who were reliving their living and their dying, trying to get it right. 
And in all probability repeating every aspect of their original lives. It was 
hard to change, hard to learn, even from your own experience.  'I can see you 
have quite a good picture of life in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss said.
'How do you know what I'm thinking?' she said.
'I can see your thoughts,' he said. 'It is one of the few advantages of being 
dead. You can see what other people are thinking.'  'It must help to eliminate a 
lot of lies and deceit,' she said.
'No,' said Hoss. 'People still avoid the truth. They are still able to deceive 
themselves, and they still believe they can dupe others.'  'I guess you'd know 
all about deceit and duplicity,' Ruth said. 'That would be one of your areas of 
expertise, wouldn't it?'  'I do know something about this subject,' Hoss said.
'From watching the behaviour of prisoners?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. Ruth brought her heel down hard. Hoss screamed-
'What did you do this for?' he screamed. 'I thought we were getting  on well.'
'We never get on well,' Ruth said.
'That is not what I can see,' said Hoss, panting. 'That hurt.' He sounded 
wounded. Physically wounded. 'I thought you were interested in what I was 
saying.'  'I was,' she said.
'It is a matter of great interest to me, too,' he said. 'That my colleagues in 
Zweites Himmel's Lager think that the others are gullible, pushovers, suckers, 
even though they know that our thoughts are visible.'  'My, your English really 
has improved,' Ruth said. 'Gullible, pushover, sucker.'
'I did hear the rumours about English becoming the language of Europe,' Hoss 
said. 'In Himmel they give advanced English classes to all the Europeans. In 
Zweites Himmel's Lager we have to earn the privilege.' He sighed. 'We have to 
earn the privilege for almost everything, it seems.'  'Well you must be a slow 
earner,' Ruth said. Hoss didn't reply. 'It's a pun on a slow learner,' she said. 
'It's a common English phrase.' She shook her head in irritation. Why was she 
pointing out puns and summing up musicals to Hoss?  'I heard this morning that 
the German government is closing down even more of the Goethe Institutes around 
the world,' Hoss said. 'You know of course about the Goethe Institutes?'  'Of 
course,' she said. 'The Goethe Institute is entrusted with the promotion of the 
German language, abroad. I won a prize for reciting Der Erlkonig at the Goethe 
Institute, in Melbourne, when I was thirteen.'  'I know this,' Hoss said.
'You know that?' Ruth said. She felt a bit queasy. How much did Hoss know about 
her? And, how long had he known her? How long
 


had he been watching her? Had he been watching her?
'Of course,' Hoss said. What was he replying to? Ruth thought Her question or 
her thought? She had another drink of water. She felt quite sick. Hoss always 
did this to her. He made her feel sick. 'You were suffering from nausea brought 
on by stress long before you met me, were you not?' Hoss said. Ruth nodded her 
head. 'They have already closed twenty-three Goethe Institutes around the 
world,' Hoss said. 'I lament this decline of German as a global language of 
poetry, philosophy and science.'
Ruth didn't say anything. She was trying to remember the first two lines of Der 
Erlkonig 'Wer reitet so spat durch Nacht und Wind.' Ruth thought that was how 
the poem started.
'By failing to spread the use of German,' Hoss said, 'Germany is surrendering 
its influence on world affairs.'
'That may not be so bad,' Ruth said. She suddenly felt a discomfort in Hoss. She 
wasn't sure how she could detect this. It was a small shift in something. 
Something slight. A slight pitch, a slight tone, a slight noise. A sound of 
discomfort, of disturbance, of disquiet. 'I know where you are going,' Hoss 
said. 'I'm going back to the hotel,' Ruth said.
'I know where you are going,' he said. 'I know why you came here.'
'Really?' she said. 'I wish I did.' 'This is not a time for humour,' Hoss said. 
Hoss didn't sound well. His bravado had diminished. He sounded panicked. 'You 
are going to Auschwitz,' he said. 'Oh, so that's what's disturbing you,' she 
said. Hoss coughed. 'I am not at all disturbed,' he said. 'At least you know 
that it's a death camp and not a museum,' Ruth said.
'Of course I know this,' Hoss said. 'I myself have corrected some inmates of 
Zweites Himmel's Lager.'
'I bet there are a lot of Poles up there with you using the term "Auschwitz 
Museum",' Ruth said. 'Are they the ones you have to correct the most?'
'I would say that is correct,' Hoss said. 'Although quite a few others persist 
in making this mistake.'
Ruth sighed. It was depressing that even in death you encountered the same 
denial.
'I was not the Commandant of a museum," Hoss said.
'That would feel like a demotion to you, wouldn't it?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Hoss. Ruth thought she heard a faint humph, after the 'of 
course'. 'When are you making the trip to Auschwitz?' Hoss said.
'Surely you know,' she said. Hoss didn't answer.
'Every German had to commit himself with all his heart in order for us to win 
the war,' Hoss said.
'Is that what you were doing?' Ruth said. 'I thought you were murdering Jews.'
'I was eliminating certain parts of the population,' Hoss said. 'That was my 
main aim. But it was also my job to ensure that this project contributed to the 
war. This was strictly in accordance with the directive of the Reichsfuhrer SS. 
He made it clear that the concentration camps were to contribute to the war 
effort. I had to become more heartless and more pitiless in my way of thinking 
concerning the needs of the prisoners.'
'Was that possible?' Ruth said. Hoss ignored her.
'I had to have complete faith in our victory,' Hoss said. 'I knew that I must 
work at my fullest capacity, to help us achieve our victory. At all costs.'
The cost to you wasn't that great,' Ruth said. 'I assume that you Were talking 
about the cost to yourself. Not to others.' Hoss didn't answer. 'You certainly 
cut all the costs you could,' Ruth said.
'The Reichsfuhrer SS declared that everything had to be sacrificed,'
 


'It was, as I said, certainly atrocious and deplorable,' Hoss said 'And 
excessive. But nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed 
to me to be sound.'
'Thank God, you're still yourself,' Ruth said. 'For a minute I thought you had 
turned into a humanitarian.'
Hoss laughed. A thin, snake-like slither of a laugh. The laugh made Ruth shiver. 
Was Hoss laughing at the image of himself as a humanitarian? Or was he laughing 
with pleasure at the steadfastness of his own views?
'I suspect the reasons and premises behind the mass exterminations still seem 
right to you,' Ruth said. Hoss stopped laughing.
'Now, as then,' he said. 'The question of whether this mass extermination of the 
Jews was essential or not was not something that I myself could address. I did 
not have the full facts at my disposal. I lacked an overview of the situation. I 
was without enough knowledge of the overall situation to be able to form an 
opinion.'
'Wow,' said Ruth. 'You still feel there's room for discussion about the merit of 
Hitler's program?'
'The Reichsfuhrer was the Fuhrer's representative,' Hoss said. 'It was for me 
exactly as if Hitler himself had given me this order.'
'It would probably be in your interests to cover up some of that earnest 
rectitude,' Ruth said.
Hoss seemed not to understand. 'The final solution to the Jewish question had to 
be addressed. For me to consider the merits of the Fiihrer's orders was out of 
the question,' he said.
Ruth felt depressed. She didn't want to hear any more of this shit-
'From the time that they arrested me,' Hoss said, 'people have suggested that I 
could have disobeyed this order. Some fool even made the suggestion that I might 
have assassinated Himmler. As you know I was not much enamoured of Himmler. But 
as Reichsfiihrer SS his orders were incontestable. His orders were in the name 
of the Fuhrer and they were sacrosanct, sacred. There was to be no
discussion, no analysis, no discourse, no deliberation.'
'You Nazis weren't really the sort to brood and muse over an order, were you?' 
Ruth said. 'You were not prone to contemplation or interpretation, were you?'
The SS training that was required of us was very vigorous,' Hoss said. 'The SS 
training was thoroughly ingrained in us. SS training was not like a university 
course, which can have very little effect on many students. What is taught in 
universities can run like water off a duck's back. SS training sticks with you 
for the rest of your life. The Reichsfuhrer SS knew extremely well exactly what 
he could demand of his men.'
'So Himmler was smart?' Ruth said. Hoss made a gurgling noise. As though he was 
constricting his throat to contain his anger.
'Himmler worked as a salesman for a firm of fertiliser manufacturers when he was 
young,' Hoss said. 'He was working in an area familiar to him.'
'Shit?' Ruth said.
'Precisely,' said Hoss. He roared with laughter.
'Were you jealous of him?' Ruth said. 'Jealous of his closeness to the Fuhrer?'
Hoss stopped laughing. 'For me the Fuhrer or his second-in-command, the 
Reichsfuhrer SS, was always in the right.'
'Did you know that Himmler, in the end, completely lost whatever grip on reality 
he may ever have possessed?' Ruth said. 'He believed that the allies would 
consider him for the position of leader of a constituted Germany.'
'Of course I know this,' Hoss said. 'The Fuhrer was furious at this betrayal, 
this disloyalty from the person he considered his most loyal follower. 



'Right at the very end of the war, Himmler ordered the mass murders of Jews to 
be stopped,' Hoss said. 'This was done on his Own initiative.'
 


'He thought he could impress the allies?' Ruth said. Hoss laughed 'He left his 
run a bit late,' Ruth said.
'Hitler stripped Himmler of all of his offices after this,' said Hoss.
'Himmler's SS training came unstuck, in the end?' Ruth said.
'Do not mock the SS training,' Hoss said. 'It was very good training. Better 
than any university.'
'It was certainly effective,' said Ruth.
'Far more effective than any university,' Hoss said. 'I observed very little 
difference between those of my colleagues who had attended university and those 
who did not. Many of my colleagues were highly educated in philosophy and 
religious studies and various areas of the sciences. The only clear difference 
between these educated colleagues and the uneducated ones was the ability of the 
educated to avail themselves of profit from their position.'
'Those educated Germans did better than you,' Ruth said. 'They ended up alive, 
rich and out of jail.'
'Are you deliberately trying to make me feel not so good?' Hoss said. 'I am used 
to this provocation. I am the target of many people. Even in Zweites Himmel's 
Lager. I do not understand why. What I did was not so wrong. I was 
nationalistic. Many countries including democratic England have a concept of 
nationalism, "My country, right or wrong." Every patriotic Englishman adheres to 
this belief
'I'm not sure you've correctly grasped the concept of patriotism, Ruth said. 'It 
could be a requirement for entry into Himmel.'
'It is not,' Hoss said. 'Patriotism is discouraged. Humanism is what is 
encouraged.'
'Then you're in trouble,' Ruth said. 'Humanism is not easily learnt.
'There are many classes in humanity in Zweites Himmel's Lager Hoss said.
'Have you been to any?' Ruth asked.
'I cannot attend these classes,' Hoss said. 'One must pass the sen'sitivity-
training class to qualify for attendance in a humanity
'It's a prerequisite?' said Ruth. 'Yes, unfortunately,' said Hoss.
'It's not that unfortunate,' Ruth said. 'If you're having trouble with 
sensitivity, you'd really be in trouble with humanity.'
Hoss let out a sigh. A sigh long enough to have expelled every ounce of air from 
his lungs, if he still had lungs. 'I need to pass these classes,' he said. 'I am 
tired of Zweites Himmel's Lager. I hear they have wonderful concerts in Himmel. 
Concerts performed by splendid musicians. We can hear faint strains of the music 
coming from Himmel, in Zweites Himmel's Lager. We hear just enough to discern 
what is being played, but not enough to hear it.'
Ruth wondered if Hoss felt she should feel sorry for him. 'Yesterday, Mario 
Lanza gave a concert in Himmel,' Hoss said.
'Mario Lanza?' Ruth said. She hadn't heard anyone mention Mario Lanza for years. 
Her mother used to love Mario Lanza. Rooshka used to sing Arrivederci Roma 
sometimes while she was doing the dishes. Ruth always knew that her mother was 
feeling happy if she heard the refrain of Arrivederci Roma or The Loveliest 
Night of the Year, coming from the kitchen.
'Mario Lanza became popular after I passed away,' Hoss said.
'After you passed away?' said Ruth. 'After you were executed, you mean. After 
you were burnt down to a fine ash. After you were completely cremated.'
Yes, yes, yes,' Hoss said. Why did she say completely cremated? Was it possible 
to be partially cremated? Probably. She couldn't see why not.
Mario Lanza is giving concerts in Himmel, is he?' Ruth said.
Yes,' said Hoss, glumly.
Ruth's spirits rose. Maybe her mother was listening to Mario Lanza 



She immediately felt foolish. Her mother was dead. Not listening to Mario Lanza 
sing If You Were Mine, despite what Hoss said. Hoss
was Probably making all of this up. She couldn't trust Hoss. How
 


could you trust a presence? Especially an ex-Nazi presence. She corrected 
herself. There was nothing ex about Hoss's Nazi affiliations They were well and 
firmly present.
'I know what you are thinking,' Hoss said. 'I can assure you that you can trust 
me. It is not in my interests to lie to you. I feel better than I have felt in 
many years. I am, finally, on the right path.' 'Where does the path lead to?' 
Ruth said. 'Even I am not sure of that,' Hoss said.
'I'm glad you're feeling better,' Ruth said to Hoss. She surprised herself by 
saying this. Hoss seemed surprised, too. 'I am surprised to hear this,' he said.
'I am glad I can surprise you,' Ruth said. 'I thought nothing could.' 'I went to 
Mass yesterday,' Hoss said. 'This is something I have not done in over eighty 
years.'
'You have Mass in Zweites Himmel's Lager?' Ruth said. 'Of course,' said Hoss. 
'So you have priests up there?' said Ruth. 'Many fine priests,' Hoss said.
Ruth decided not to point out to Hoss the discrepancy between his description of 
the priests as fine, and the fact that these priests were in hell.
'Our priests and bishops have often held important positions during the more 
physically active parts of their lives,' Hoss said.
'Do you mean when they were alive on earth, as opposed to alive after their 
death?' Ruth said. 'Yes,' he said.
'You have bishops there too?' she said.
'Yes, quite a few,' Hoss said. 'As a matter of fact one of them just graduated 
to Himmel. I attended the graduation ceremony myself.'
'You really are becoming much more social,' she said. She could feel Hoss 
nodding his head.
'I am for sure,' he said.
Ruth wondered what was changing about Hoss's life. He didn't sound as 
disgruntled as he had been when they first met. She felt irritated. She didn't 
want to be part of anything that made Hoss feel better. She caught herself. She 
couldn't believe she was taking a dead person so seriously.
'Our priests and bishops do not quite have the skills to communicate more 
directly with their brethren on earth,' Hoss said.
'Really?' Ruth said. She wasn't sure that she was interested in this. She bent 
down and re-tied her shoelace. The Planty had quite a few people in it, now. 
People walking to work. Walking their dogs. Krakow was a pretty city. She could 
see the turrets and towers of a nearby castle, the cobbled streets of the 
Planty.
'What do you mean?' she said. 'Do you mean that the priests in Himmel and 
Zweites Himmel's Lager are not getting their message across to their colleagues 
on earth?'
'Precisely,' Hoss said. 'For example in Himmel and in Zweites Himmel's Lager, 
homosexuality is not considered to be a flaw,' Hoss said.
'The churches here certainly haven't recognised that,' Ruth said. Do they have 
same-sex marriages in Himmel and Zweites Himmel's Lager?' she said.
Of course,' Hoss said. 'Although I myself do not agree with this, consider 
homosexuality to be aberrant and deviant.' Can you get into Himmel holding those 
views?' Ruth said. Hoss sounded glum. 'No you cannot,' he said. Well, you'd 
better start learning some tolerance and acceptance,' she said. 'Although it 
does seem like a lost cause.' 1 am going to get there,' Hoss said. 'I am a 
patient man." "'You think the world is going to change, don't you?' Ruth said.
'You think the world is going to go back to the old ways. The old ways When 
bigotry and prejudice were perfectly acceptable?'
 


'I think this will be so,' Hoss said.
'I wonder,' Ruth said. 'I think a few of your boys might have had homosexual 
tendencies. Quite a few of those major Nazis. They were devoted to each other. 
They really loved each other's company. They really loved each other.'  'That is 
absurd,' Hoss said, with a snort. 'Don't snort,' she said. 'I don't like the 
sound.' Hoss stopped.
Quite a few of the gay men Ruth had known had had very strict, sometimes cruel 
fathers. Ruth had often wondered whether there was a link between the strictness 
and the homosexuality, or whether the fathers had become tougher in response to 
any suspicions of homosexuality in their sons.  'Many of us had strict 
authoritarian fathers," Hoss said. 'But there is no connection with this and 
homosexuality.'
'You could be right,' Ruth said. She was becoming less unnerved at the evidence 
that Hoss could detect what she was thinking. 'A lot of you had very strict, 
rigid fathers,' Ruth said. 'Strict Catholic fathers. There was Himmler and his 
authoritarian Catholic schoolmaster father.'  'Why is it necessary to speak 
continually and incessantly of Himmler?' Hoss said.
Ruth laughed. 'I'm not fixated by Himmler,' she said. 'You are,' Hoss snorted. 
Ruth dug her heel into the ground. 'Don't snort,' she said. There was a thud. 
She thought Hoss had fallen over. She had dug harder than she meant to. She 
wondered if you could fall over once you were dead.  'Of course you can fall,' 
Hoss said, gruffly, making the sounds or someone picking themselves up.
'There was Himmler,' Ruth said again. 'And Hess and you and Hitler. You all had 
very domineering fathers.'
'That is true,' said Hoss. Ruth didn't know whether he agreed with her or was 
pretending to agree in order to avoid another dig of her heel. 'I know this 
about Hess and Himmler and the Fuhrer,' Hoss  said.
'There was also Goebbels,' Ruth said. 'He was born into a severe, tough Catholic 
working-class family. And Goering was the son of a judge. Maybe the judge was 
passing out sentences at home?'  'I do not find this conversation so 
interesting,' Hoss said.
'Poor you,' said Ruth. 'They all had, like you, much softer mothers.'
'I would appreciate it if you did not speak of my mother,' Hoss said.
'I thought you didn't like her much,' Ruth said. 'Although maybe you're having 
more contact with her now?'
'Maybe,' Hoss said.
'Martin Hermann's father was a former Prussian regimental sergeant-major,' Ruth 
said. 'You can imagine how despotic and tyrannical a former Prussian sergeant-
major could be.' Hoss was quiet. 'Bormann was head of the Party Chancellery and 
Hitler's private secretary,' Ruth said. 'Bormann loved Hitler. By the end of the 
war, Bormann was second only to Hitler, in the political power he possessed.'  
'Martin Bormann had a wife and ten children,' Hoss said.
'I know,' said Ruth. 'I wasn't really serious about the strict father theory. 
I'm sure there's nothing to it. In fact it's bigoted to consider that any one 
theory would cover a whole community.'  'Really?' said Hoss. I don't think 
you'll ever catch on,' Ruth said.
'Catch on to what?'
An understanding of bigotry and prejudice,' said Ruth. I understand more than 
you think I do,' Hoss said. Bormann was a friend of yours, wasn't he?' Ruth 
said.  'Yes,' said Hoss.
 


'You knew his wife Gerda, the daughter of that rabid Nazi party judge, Walter 
Buch?' she said.
'Yes,' said Hoss.
'Bormann was the witness to Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun,' Ruth said. 'And he 
watched Hitler commit suicide, in that bunker, in the Chancellery.'  'Bormann is 
dead now,' said Hoss.
'Of course,' Ruth said. 'He's the same age as you. Ninety-eight.'
'He lived in Argentina for years,' Hoss said.
'I thought he did,' said Ruth. 'But he's with you now, isn't he?'
'In Zweites Himmel's Lager?' said Hoss.
'Yes,' said Ruth.
'Yes, he is,' said Hoss.
'I bet he's no better than you are in the sensitivity-training class,' Ruth 
said.
'He has not yet passed this class,' said Hoss. Ruth laughed. That thought gave 
her immense pleasure.
'The two of you are going to be there for years,' she said, and laughed, again. 
She could hear Hoss shuffling. Or was it snuffling she could hear? Had she made 
him cry?  'I am not crying,' Hoss said. 'I have very rarely, in my whole life, 
cried.'
'It might be good for you,' Ruth said.
'You are strange, in many ways,' Hoss said. Ruth decided not to take this remark 
seriously.
'We're very close to the train tracks that led to Auschwitz, aren't we?' Ruth 
said. She knew that the main railway station of Krakow was close to the heart of 
the city. Not far from where she was standing-She knew that some of the 
transports had been re-routed to avoid the city centre. Hoss hadn't answered the 
question. 'We're close to the tracks that took people to your Kingdom of evil, 
aren't we?' she said.  'Kingdom of evil?' Hoss said. He laughed. 'What do you 
know about evil?' he said. For the first time his laugh sounded vicious. Ruth 
shuddered. 'You think that to blink one of your eyes five times will protect you 
from evil?' Hoss said. 'You have to be mad in order to think that five blinks 
could safeguard a person. If you could eliminate or make up for bad thoughts by 
blinking one eye, no one would be still in Zweites Himmel's Lager.' He roared 
with laughter. Ruth could feel the earth beside her, in the Planty, rumble with 
Hoss's laugh. She decided to give up her habit of blinking either eye. She 
decided she didn't need it anymore.  'Are you nervous about the fact that I am 
going to Auschwitz?' Ruth said to Hoss.
'No, not at all,' he said. 'You are, after all, going there voluntarily.' The 
question must have unnerved Hoss, because he started coughing. He coughed and 
coughed. Ruth felt sure that her question had induced his coughing fit. 'I am 
not nervous at all,' Hoss spluttered.  Ruth waited for Hoss's coughing to 
subside. He was probably right, she thought. He was probably not nervous. What 
was there for him to be nervous about? 'Why should I be nervous?' Hoss said, 
when he stopped coughing.   I  couldn't even begin the answer to that question,' 
Ruth said. 'It would take too long.' Hoss ignored her.
It was my deputy Fritzsch, who first tried gas as a method of accomplishing the 
killings,' Hoss said. 'Fritzsch used a preparation of Prussic acid called Zyklon 
B. We used this preparation in the camp 15 an insecticide. Fritzsch reported the 
success of the gas to me.'  Why are you talking about the gassings?' Ruth said 
to Hoss.
"'You are the one who repeatedly brought up the subject of Auschwitz.' Hoss 
said. 'I myself was present at the next gassing in which Zyklon B was used. Of 
course, I wore a mask to protect myself."  of course,' Ruth said.
The gassing took place in the detention cells of Block II,' Hoss
 


said. 'The cells were very crowded. When the Zyklon B was thrown in, death was 
instantaneous. There were a series of quick, muffled muted, almost stifled 
cries, and then the whole thing was over. There was not one more sound from 
these former occupants of Block II.' Ruth thought that she must remember not to 
run, early in the morning. Hoss seemed to have particularly good access to her 
at that time.
'I can get to you at any time of the day,' Hoss said. 'Or at any time of the 
night, for that matter.'
'I can, it seems, get rid of you, whenever I please,' Ruth said, and dug her 
heel into the unpaved track of the Planty. Hoss yelled. A gurgling noise came 
out of him while he was yelling. As though he might throw up any moment. 'Don't 
vomit near me,' Ruth said. Hoss appeared not to hear. She could hear him still 
gurgling. He was also whimpering.
Why was she worried about Hoss vomiting? she thought. He had already brought up 
more bile in her presence than any amount of vomit could contain. 'I hope you 
feel sick,' she said to Hoss. She felt ill.
'I do not feel sick,' Hoss said. 'Liar,' Ruth said.
'I am, without question, feeling very fine,' he said. 'I don't care how you're 
feeling,' she said. 'The experience of attending this gassing put my mind at 
ease, Hoss said. 'The mass extermination of the Jews was about to start very 
soon and, to tell you the truth, neither Eichmann nor I were, until this moment, 
confident of precisely how the killings were to be carried out. We both knew 
that the method to be used would be gas, but as to which gas and exactly how to 
administer it, and how effective it would be, we were in the dark. To my great 
relief, I could now report that we had not only the gas but we had established 
the procedure to be used.'
Ruth vomited. She removed her feet as far away from her head as she could. She 
didn't want to throw up on her running shoes. She couldn't believe the fury of 
her vomit. It was propelling itself out of her in almost ferocious blasts. She 
felt quite frightened by this internal upheaval. what was happening to her? She 
vomited and vomited until all she was bringing up was water. Even then she kept 
retching.
She felt exhausted. She couldn't believe that she was vomiting in public. 
Several people looked at her. No one stopped.
'Your digestive system is not in order,' Hoss said.
There is much more not in order than my digestive system,' she said, weakly. Her 
mouth tasted foul. She sat up. At least she could breathe more easily, now. She 
shook her head. She was shocked at what had just happened- It was as though her 
lungs and her stomach had refused to smother their reaction to what they were 
hearing. She wiped her face with hen hands.
'There was a certain procedure that had to be carried out after the gassings,' 
Hoss said.. Ruth felt that she had heard enough. She wished she felt able to 
stand up. 'The bodies, of course, had to be removed from the gas chambers,' Hoss 
said.
'I know all of this,' Ruth said. 'Why do I have to go through it, again?'
'Because you have not had enough,' Hoss said. What did he mean, she had not had 
enough? She didn't want any more of this. She got up.
'I'm going to walk back to the hotel,' she said to Hoss. She walked slowly. She 
still felt sick.
After we removed the bodies,' Hoss said, 'it was necessary to extract "the teeth 
and to cut the hair. After this the bodies were dragged to pits of the 
crematoria. This was before it was possible to install
the number of ovens required. We had to burn the bodies in pits. Was not an easy 
accomplishment to burn large numbers of bodies
 


simultaneously. It was important that the fires in the pits were stoked 
constantly. It was also necessary to drain the surplus fat off the bodies and to 
make sure that these large mountains of burning corpses were constantly turned 
over. This was in order for a draft to be able to fan the flames. You cannot of 
course burn anything vigorously without a good supply of oxygen.'
Ruth had put her hands over her ears. It hadn't stopped her from hearing one 
word of Hoss's details about the method of burning vast numbers of bodies.
'Later in the war,' Hoss said, 'we had more problems with the lack of fat the 
bodies contained, but we solved this by placing larger people among the thinner 
ones.' Ruth knew that the burning of the bodies in pits was what had happened in 
Auschwitz when the ovens in the crematoriums were overloaded. She knew that the 
Nazis had found that the best burning arrangement was to criss-cross a fatter 
person with a thin person and a child. They laid the bodies in big pits that 
could fit up to two thousand people at a time. They slanted the pits so that 
they could tip fat from the bottom over the hissing, spitting, glistening black 
bodies. When the burning was over, the bodies filled less than a third of the 
pit.
'It was much more efficient to burn people in the ovens,' Hoss said. 'The time 
it took for an average cremation was approximately twenty minutes. Crematoriums 
I and II were capable of cremating approximately two thousand bodies in a 
twenty-four hour period. We tried to cremate larger numbers than this, but it 
was not possible to do this without causing damage to our installations.' Ruth 
could hear Hoss shaking his head in frustration. 'Crematoriums III and IV, 
although not as effective as Crematoriums I and II, should have been capable of 
cremating 1,500 bodies in twenty-four hours, but to the best of my knowledge 
these figures were never able to be attained.'
'What a shame,' Ruth said.
'I had to watch hour after hour,' Hoss said. 'Hour after hour of this dreadful 
unending gruesome business. It was incessant. Day and night. I had to witness 
the most horrid and frightful sights.' Ruth sensed that these memories were less 
than pleasant for Hoss. She thought she could detect self-pity, sprinkled 
through this litany of the intolerable difficulties he had had to overcome.
'I had to watch all of this,' Hoss said. 'I had to put my eye to the peephole of 
the gas chambers and watch the entire macabre spectacle. The doctors wanted me 
to see the deaths myself.'
'To make sure that the dead were dead?' Ruth said.
'Of course not,' Hoss snapped. 'Our methods of extermination were now well 
established and proven. I had to agree to watch the whole morbid process because 
I was the one that the others looked up to. I was their superior. It would not 
have looked good for me to look away.'
'Of course,' Ruth said.
'I had to stand on my feet for hours at a time and endure the most horrendous 
stench,' Hoss said. Ruth groaned. She was never going to get back to the hotel 
if Hoss didn't speed up this story. She still didn't feel too well. But she was 
interested in the stench he was talking about.
'A worse stench than the everyday stench that came from the chimneys?' she said 
to him.
'Yes,' he said. 'Much worse. I had to watch while they opened up some mass 
graves and had to endure the terrible stench of the bodies they were pulling 
out.'
'That was when you had to redo some botched mass burials,' Ruth said.
'That is correct,' said Hoss. 'This was due to the stupidity of some of the 
other officers.'
'You can't really blame them,' Ruth said. 'Production was at its Peak. You were 
gassing and burning day and night. More Jews kept
 


arriving. The ovens couldn't keep up with the number of Jews to be burnt. So 
your people started burying the bodies after they had been gassed. The trouble 
was that they buried too many bodies per square metre of earth. The bodies 
fermented and produced a gas, and the gas pushed all of the bodies up out of the 
earth again. The earth was billowing and bubbling with bloated bodies. Erupting 
with semi-decomposed men, women and children. The earth had regurgitated them. 
Refused to accept this method of burial.' 'I know this,' Hoss said, sharply.
Ruth had felt sick when she had read about the movements of the earth that had 
brought up the dead. Pushed them to the surface as though even the earth 
couldn't stomach this slaughter. 'It must have been a shocking sight,' Ruth 
said.
'It was loathsome,' Hoss said. 'However, it was essential for me to appear 
distant and indifferent to these occurrences. Occurrences that could not fail to 
wrench the heart of any human being with feelings.'
'So, the sight of all the poor distended, and distorted dead Jews and the putrid 
stench that accompanied them really moved you, did it?' Ruth said. Hoss didn't 
answer. 'You just had to hide your emotions?' Ruth said. 'Hide the softer side 
of the sensitive Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss.'
Hoss coughed. Ruth lifted her leg and hurled her heel into the ground. She dug 
as hard as she could. She was glad to see she had recovered her strength. Hoss 
screamed. Ruth didn't move her leg. She kept digging and digging. Hoss's scream 
rose in volume. She put her hands over her ears. She felt annoyed at herself. 
Why should she try to block out Hoss's screams? She should be enjoying them. She 
took her hands away and listened. The screams were very clear. She smiled.
'I see you are feeling much better,' Hoss said, in a frail voice, a few minutes 
later.
'Much better,' Ruth said. She could feel that the colour was back
in her cheeks.
'The blood has returned to your face,' Hoss said.
'You can see me that clearly?' she said.
'Yes,' Hoss said. He still sounded weak.
Ruth felt her face. It felt warm. As though the blood had just rushed back. 
Hoss's mention of blood had reminded her of a question she had wanted to ask 
him. 'Weren't you worried about contaminating your precious soldiers when you 
took blood for them from Jewish women?' she said.
'Must we speak of this?' Hoss said. He sounded quite pitiful. Quite cowed. She 
really must have hurt him with that last kick.
'I'd like to know,' Ruth said. 'It's just idle curiosity No big deal.' 'This did 
not happen often,' Hoss said. 'A few times, maybe; when there was an emergency. 
A dire shortage of blood.'
'So in an emergency you could discard the contaminated Jewish blood theory,' 
Ruth said. 'In an emergency you decided that some Jewish blood wasn't 
contagious.' 'We tested those Jewish women whose blood we used, thoroughly,'
Hoss said. 'You made sure they were free of disease,' she said. 'But they were
still Jewish.'
Her mother had told her how the Gestapo had marched into her barracks at 
Auschwitz one morning. They had examined the women in the barracks more 
carefully than they did for the regular selections. Some of the women had seen 
this as a hopeful sign. Maybe they were being selected to go to a labour camp. 
Maybe they were needed for work, elsewhere. The women who were selected then 
underwent a series of medical tests and examinations. Those that passed were 
allowed to live. For at least another few weeks while the Germans took their 
blood for injured German soldiers.
Rooshka had told her that she had felt so weak after the blood
 


extractions that she had hardly been able to stand at Appel, the hours, long 
roll call that was required of prisoners every day. She had had to be propped up 
by another girl in her barracks. Rooshka had also been unable to work. She had 
stumbled from one rock that she had to move to the next. It was a miracle that 
she survived. Rooshka had had blood taken from her three times. After the third 
time she could hardly stand. The Kapo supervising her work had felt sorry for 
her, and not called the Gestapo when Rooshka had collapsed. Rooshka had known 
that she had been very lucky.
The irony of feeling lucky, in Auschwitz, hadn't escaped Ruth, even when she was 
little. She always wanted to cry when her mother talked about how lucky she had 
been. Ruth had asked her mother once, when she was nine or ten, why she had been 
so lucky to have nearly been killed by the Germans. Rooshka had cried, for what 
had felt like hours, to Ruth. Ruth remembered repeatedly saying 'I'm sorry' to 
Rooshka. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry,' Ruth had kept on repeating. But Rooshka hadn't 
seemed to hear. Rooshka's hearing had been blocked by her tears.
Hoss had been very quiet. Was he tired? Ruth thought. Did dead people get tired? 
Did they need as much rest as those who were living? Maybe she had injured him 
badly with the kick? Was that possible? Could you physically injure somebody who 
was no longer physically there?
'Of course you can,' Hoss said.
Ruth jumped. Where was he? What was he? Was he a ghost? A poltergeist? A dead 
man? A zombie? A departed spirit? 'I am a person, Hoss said. 'A person like you. 
Very much like you, as a matter OF fact.'
'Don't even try that line,' Ruth said.
'Which line are you referring to?' Hoss said.
'The "we are all parts of each other" routine,' Ruth said.
'We do have many overlapping parts,' Hoss said.
'All people do,' said Ruth.
'I am talking about me and you,' Hoss said.
'I am not,' she said, in a voice she hoped was threatening.
Hoss sighed. 'I do feel very much better since I have established this discourse 
with you,' he said. 'In Zweites Himmel's Lager I am still not popular. Why 
cannot people see that whatever I did, I was not alone in my actions or 
thoughts? No Nazi was alone. We were supported by the German people. I think it 
is most unjust and unsatisfactory to lay the blame on the Nazis.' His voice had 
developed a whine. 'It is an injustice,' Hoss said. 'It's too hard to go around 
railing at Germans in general,' Ruth
said. 'It's too abstract.'
'But there is so much specific incriminating evidence,' Hoss said. 'There's too 
much,' said Ruth. 'Too much for people to take in. No one wants to acknowledge 
that their auntie or uncle or grandfather or grandmother could be a killer. No 
one wants to think of their mothers or fathers profiting from the murder of 
others. Who would want to have friends or family like that? No one. People can't 
bear to think of people they know in that light. They can't bear to think of 
their fellow human beings, in that light.' She paused to catch her breath. 'No 
one wants to think that anyone was capable of all of that,' she said. 'All of 
that murder. All of that hate.' 'But they were,' said Hoss.
'I know that,' Ruth said. She felt flushed. She had been walking
round and round the perimeter of the Planty. The sun had come
out. It was the pale sun of winter. Not a bold yellow sun. Ruth felt
happy to see the sun. Life was strange, she thought. Here she was,
in Poland, in Krakow, in agreement, in accord with Rudolf Hoss.
In accord over a crucial issue. The issue of culpability. This was an
Astonishing occurrence, Ruth thought. An unbelievable occurrence.
who on earth would believe this? Ruth laughed at the expression
He had just used. She amended the sentence. Who on earth or
 


anywhere else, if there was an anywhere else, would believe this?
Was there such a place as Zweites Himmel's Lager? Ruth thought. Was Zweites 
Himmel's Lager hell? Hell was supposed to be the dwelling place of Satan. Was 
Hoss Satan? Or was he one of many Satans? Devils and wicked souls were supposed 
to dwell in hell. Condemned, Ruth thought, to eternal punishment. It was 
supposed to be a place of pain and torment. But there was redemption in Zweites 
Himmel's Lager. You could work your way out. The accumulation of wisdom and 
understanding, it seemed, could graduate inhabitants right out of Zweites 
Himmel's Lager. And into Himmel. Heaven. The dwelling place of God, the angels 
and the souls of those who have gained salvation. Heaven, a place of peace and 
beauty. If there was a heaven, she didn't feel that Hoss belonged there.
She felt tired. She had been in Poland for one week. It felt more like one year. 
One lifetime.
'Tomorrow is the anniversary of our first meeting,' Hoss said. 'What?' she said.
'We met a week ago, tomorrow,' Hoss said. 'It doesn't feel like a week,' Ruth 
said.
'Maybe it is not,' Hoss said. 'Maybe we have known each other longer than that.'
'What do you mean?' Ruth said.
'I do not have to explain everything that I say,' Hoss said. 'Well, don't link 
the two of us with anniversaries and shared interests,' Ruth said. 'I'm not 
linked to you by anything.'
'Do not be so sure of this,' Hoss said. Ruth lifted her foot to hurt him. 'I am 
not as hard-hearted as you would imagine,' Hoss said.
'It would be hard to imagine the degree of hard-heartedness that you possess,' 
Ruth said.
'That is not true,' Hoss said. 'Frequently when I was home with my family, my 
thoughts would, without any warning, turn to different incidents that had 
accrued during the day.'
'You mean when you were relaxing, at night, in Villa Hoss?' Ruth said. 'When you 
were reclining in your leather armchair surrounded by the other custom-made 
leather goods you ordered. And the myriad number of stolen items. Briefcases, 
handbags, suitcases, shoes, toys for the children. Were you sitting in the large 
armchair, that sat right underneath the chandelier, when your thoughts would 
sometimes stray to what you had done during the day?'
Hoss didn't answer.
'Were you comfortable on that plush carpeting?' Ruth said. Hoss pretended not to 
hear.
'My thoughts would roam,' he said. 'Sometimes when I thought of particular 
incidents that had occurred during an extermination, I had to leave the house 
and go outside. To stay there, inside, in the loving circle of my family while 
thoughts of my day's work were present, would become intolerable.'
'You didn't want your wife or your children to be contaminated by those 
thoughts?' Ruth said. 'Terrible thoughts of Jews bleeding from the eyes, nose, 
and mouth. Jews with their skulls crushed. No father would want his children 
exposed to that. What father wouldn't want to protect his children from gassed 
and burnt Jews?'
'I did my best to protect my wife and children,' Hoss said.
'But you couldn't,' Ruth said. 'Your wife and children, all five of those 
beautiful children, the two boys and the three girls, were breathing in the 
fumes from the dead every day. The air coming out of those chimneys went 
straight into the lungs of your wife and children. Particles and filaments and 
pinpoints of Jews wedged themselves inside your wife and children. They took 
root. Nothing could shake them out.'
'How can you say that?' said Hoss. 'Our house was surrounded by trees. Planted 
with flowers. Well away from the chimneys.'
'You couldn't get far away enough from those chimneys to avoid the pollution. 
They spread smoke and soot for miles. Jewish soot. 



 


'Sometimes the happiness of my wife, especially when she had our youngest in her 
arms, was too much for me,' Hoss said. He sounded melancholy. Almost sad. 'I 
would look at her, and think of the things I had seen during the day,' he said. 
'I would look at her and wonder exactly how long could all of this happiness 
that we have last.'  Ruth was speechless. She had thought that Hoss was about to 
pretend some sympathy for the victims. Some sensitivity at the thought of 
juxtaposing their position with his. Why had she expected that? Why had she 
expected that level of humanity?  'My wife failed to understand these gloomy 
moods that overtook me,' Hoss said. 'She always put it down to some irritation 
to do with my work.'  'She didn't understand that you were terrified that the 
cozy life you had created would all come to an end one day,' Ruth said.  'No, 
she did not,' Hoss said.
'You loved your wife, didn't you?' Ruth said.
'Yes I did,' Hoss said. 'My wife was a very good wife.'
'I'm sure Hedwig-I love that name-was a great wife,' Ruth said.
'I would prefer it if you did not call my wife by her name,' Hoss said.
'But it's a wonderful name,' Ruth said. 'Hedwig Hoss. I like the alliteration, 
too. Do you know what alliteration is?'  'Yes, of course,' Hoss said.
'My, your English is really improving,' Ruth said.
'Thank you,' said Hoss.
'Family and fidelity were very important to you, weren't they. Ruth said.
'Yes, very much so,' Hoss said. He had cheered up, again.
'I know you believed in fidelity,' Ruth said. 'I know you severely denounced any 
sexual relationships between the SS men and women prisoners.'  'Without 
question,' Hoss said. 'SS officers and their subordinates  were forbidden to 
associate with any female prisoners.'
'You didn't want the men contaminated, did you?' Ruth said.
'Of course not,' said Hoss.
'They weren't allowed to touch the Jewish women or any other prisoners, were 
they?' Ruth said.  'No,' said Hoss.
'You never know what could happen if you touch Jewish skin,' Ruth said.
That is true," said Hoss. 'We are in agreement about this.' Ruth laughed. 'What 
is it that you find amusing?' Hoss said.  'Our agreement,' said Ruth.
'I ordered my men to stay as far away as possible from all female prisoners,' 
Hoss said. 'The jobs that required closer proximity to the prisoners were 
carried out by Jewish policemen and policewomen.'  'Kapos,' Ruth said.
'That is correct,' said Hoss.
'It was smart of you to set Jews up to police other Jews,' Ruth said. 
'Especially under such inhuman conditions.  'You were furious with one of your 
female supervisors who had sexual relations with a prisoner, weren't you?' Ruth 
said.  'You know about this?' Hoss said. 'I was very angry. How could a person 
sink so low?'
And what about Rapportfuhrer Palitzsch?" Ruth said. 'He was reputed to be one of 
the cruellest of your men.'  'I accused Rapportfuhrer Palitzsch myself,' Hoss 
said. 'He was rumoured to be having sexual relations with women prisoners at 
Birkenau. I made it very clear I would not tolerate such behaviour.'  Some of 
these men were married, weren't they?' Ruth said. 'The Sex they were having with 
prisoners was not quite as quiet as what they were doing with their wives. There 
was quite a bit of brutality involved, wasn't there?'
 


'I cannot be responsible for what some of my men did to some of the prisoners,' 
Hoss said. 'I tried my best, but not all of my men were of a very good calibre. 
I had many lowly types, asocial sorts.'
'But you always set a good example, yourself,' Ruth said.
'Without question,' said Hoss.
'You and Hedwig and the five blonde-haired children.'
'Yes, yes, yes,' said Hoss.
'You're sure about this?' Ruth said.
'Of course I am sure,' Hoss said. 'Why are we discussing this?'
'Did Hedwig know about Eleonore Hodys?' Ruth said. A series of noises Ruth could 
not quite identify came from Hoss. They sounded like disfigured gulps, twisted 
exhalations and sputters. 'What did Hedwig have to say about Eleonore Hodys?' 
Ruth said. 'Or did Hedwig never know?' A few strangulated vowels and consonants 
tried to come out of Hoss. They were bits and pieces of words. Hoss sounded as 
though he was choking.
'Are you about to asphyxiate yourself?' Ruth said. She laughed. 'I didn't think 
you'd be so badly affected by the mention of her name. Many other people knew 
you were having an affair with this prisoner. They said she was Italian, but the 
name seems more Hungarian, to
me.
'This prisoner worked in my home,' Hoss said, finally. He had managed to muster 
up a touch of indignation in his voice.
'I'm glad you didn't choke to death, just then,' Ruth said. 'Can dead people 
choke to death?'
'Of course,' Hoss said. 'This prisoner worked in our house, for my wife and me.'
'I know that,' Ruth said. 'But she did more. Or rather you did more, to her. I'm 
not sure she had much of a say in the matter.'
'How dare you speak to me like this?' Hoss said.
'How dare I tell you the truth?' Ruth said. 'I think it's pretty bold of me, 
too. I was much more frightened of you, in the beginning.
You were disgusting to Eleonore Hodys,' Ruth said. 'You fucked her whenever you 
pleased. It was easy, as Hedwig liked to tend the garden, and the acts never 
took you too long.' 'How dare you!' Hoss shouted.
'Stop shouting,' Ruth said, 'These are not the good old days. If you keep 
shouting I'll kick you so hard you'll never recover.' Where had those words come 
from? Ruth thought. Those threats? Did she have more power than she knew over 
Hoss?
'You became worried about the rumours that were growing about what you were 
doing to Eleonore Hodys,' Ruth said. 'So you shipped her off to a penal company. 
The sort of penal company that ensured death for its workers within weeks. But 
she didn't die. And you started to miss her, didn't you? You didn't miss her, 
just her body parts, really.'
'I have listened to these accusations for long enough,' Hoss said. 'They're not 
accusations,' Ruth said. 'Just facts. You missed Eleonore Hodys's arms and legs 
and breasts and genitals, so you had her shipped back. And still Hedwig 
suspected nothing.' 'Mrs Hoss was above such thoughts,' Hoss said. 'Mrs Hoss was 
not above much else,' Ruth said. 'She made sure she was never short of the 
things she loved most, pure cream, cocoa, the best cuts of meat, margarine, 
macaroni. She was probably too busy eating to worry about who you were fucking.' 
'I am not listening,' Hoss said.
'I think you have to,' said Ruth. 'I have a feeling the decision to listen is 
not up to you.'
'What are you talking about?' Hoss said.
Ruth didn't answer. She didn't know why she had said that. It was a feeling that 
had suddenly inhabited her. 


The feeling that Hoss's participation in all of this was not quite as voluntary 
as it seemed. That he couldn't quite come and go as he pleased. He was locked 
in, in much the same way as she was. That thought made her feel sick.
 


'You had Eleonore Hodys put into Block II,' Ruth said. 'Not just Block II, but 
the airless dungeons of Block II. And there, in that small, stifling, blackened 
cell, you fucked her to your heart's content. You made sure, of course, 
afterwards, that you straightened every part of your crushed uniform and 
repositioned your cap. I understand why you didn't want to remove your clothes. 
You never know where these prisoners' bodies had been. You were always worried 
about rashes and other symptoms of your illicit sex appearing. You ordered the 
guards to wash Miss Hodys down before your visits.' Ruth paused. 'I'm glad 
you're not saying anything,' she said to Hoss. 'I'm glad you're not trying out 
the "my wife didn't understand me" line. That's a relief.'
'My wife and I were very happy," Hoss said in a quiet voice.
'You were not as devoted a family man as you wanted to be,' Ruth said. 'You 
risked infecting Hedwig with lice or fleas.'
'I did not,' Hoss barked. 'I always showered after those episodes.' Hoss sounded 
as though he was about to implode. 'Where did you hear that about Eleonore 
Hodys?' he said.
'It was common knowledge,' Ruth said. 'The guards used to say, "Mr Whiter than 
White is coming to do his dirty business," when they knew you were due to arrive 
in the dungeons. They also called you Mr Holier Than Thou, Mr Incorruptible. I'm 
not sure if Hedwig ever heard those terms.'
'Leave Mrs Hoss out of this.'
'Well, you left her out, didn't you? You didn't let her know how frequently you 
were turning up to get stuck into poor Eleonore.' Humphing noises came from 
Hoss. Ruth knew he was fuming. And red-faced. She could feel the volume of his 
anger. 'You contemplated leaving Eleonore Hodys there to starve to death, once 
you learned that she was pregnant,' Ruth said.
'How did I know whose child she was carrying?' Hoss spluttered.
'What a joke,' Ruth said. 'As though anyone else would have dared
touch her. And why pretend you even thought of the pregnancy as a child? "Up the 
chimney with her," you said to the guard. You ordered her gassed.'
'It was for the best,' said Hoss.
'But you were out of luck,' Ruth said. 'Or stupid. You had reported Max Grabner, 
the chief of Block II, for having an affair with a prisoner. Grabner couldn't 
believe his luck when he found out about you and Eleonore Hodys. He went 
straight to the SS judge investigating him and informed on you.'
'So that is what happened,' Hoss said.
'You mean you didn't know?' she said to Hoss. What did this mean? The fact that 
she was telling Hoss about his own life. It meant nothing. It meant that she was 
well-informed about a subject of mutual interest. She felt exhausted. She was 
probably more wrung out than Hoss.
'You have interrupted me too often with these lies,' Hoss said.
'You can't call them lies after you've admitted to them,' Ruth said. What a 
stupid thing to say, she thought. As though anything about Hoss had to be 
logical. 'They didn't punish you for the infraction, anyway,' Ruth said. 'You 
were too valuable.'
'There was no infraction,' Hoss said.
'The infraction was even discussed at the Auschwitz trial, in Frankfurt, in 
1965,' Ruth said. 'A former SS judge, Dr Wiebeck, gave evidence about the 
matter.'
'You are most irritating,' Hoss said.
'I thought you'd be more irritated with those disloyal SS judges,' Ruth said.
'I had no need for their loyalty,' Hoss said.
'Well you were dead,' Ruth said. 'No one spoke up until you were well and truly 
dead.' What a strange 


expression, she thought. Well and truly dead. Maybe there was some truth to it. 
She used to think dead was dead. But now she thought that maybe there
 


were degrees of dead. Hoss did not seem very dead to her.
'Why are you going to Auschwitz?' Hoss said. Ruth was too tired a to answer. She 
still didn't know the answer, anyway. 'My family were without doubt, able to 
live very well, in Auschwitz,' Hoss said. 'Every wish that my wife could wish 
was granted to her.'  'Except your fidelity. Or maybe she didn't care about 
that. She had so much, at Villa Hoss. What's a spot of infidelity next to a 
garden of flowers, and the endless servants and the adorable children and the 
household pets?'  'My children loved their two horses and the foal was 
particularly beloved,' Hoss said. 'Today I very deeply regret that I was not 
able to devote more time to my family.'  'It was possibly for the best, when you 
look at the results of what you did devote most of your time to,' Ruth said. 
'Possibly your children were better off away from your influence.'  'Are you 
being insolent?' Hoss said. The military tone had returned  to his voice.
'No,' Ruth said. 'Just reflective. Thoughtful. Trying to be helpful.'
'Really?' said Hoss.
'Tell me, just one last thing,' Ruth said. 'Did Hedwig know about poor Eleonore 
Hodys?' Hoss bellowed and snorted. All sorts of incomprehensible sounds came out 
of him.  'I refuse to speak any further to you!' he shouted. Ruth laughed. She 
felt lightheaded.
 'I don't care,' she said. 'I have to go, anyway.'
I  chapter thirteen
'Do you feel alright?' Ruth said to Edek. Edek was standing over the buffet in 
the smaller of the dining rooms, in the Hotel Mimoza. An entire shoal of 
sardines and a school of herring were already on Edek's plate, for breakfast. 
She had thought that he looked a little pale. She needn't have asked him if he 
was alright, she thought. She could have just checked out his breakfast 
selection. Anyone who was even slightly unwell would not have been able to 
contemplate a meal that would have depleted the nearest ocean of half of its 
inhabitants.  Edek added some pickled onions and black peppercorns from the 
pickling juice of the herring.
'I am one hundred per cent,' he said.
'Did you sleep well?' she said.
'I did sleep perfect,' he said. He looked at Ruth. 'You look shocking,' he said.
'I'm just a bit tired,' she said.
'You are doing too much of that running,' Edek said. Ruth wished she hadn't 
brought up the subject of wellbeing. 'It is not normal just to run,' Edek said. 
'To run and run and run. If you are late for something you have to run, of 
course. But just to run and run and run.' He shook his head. 'It is not good for 
you,' he said.  Ruth felt annoyed. She decided not to bother trying to bolster 
her case for the benefits of running by quoting the American Surgeon General or 
any one of a number of leading advocates for exercise, she didn't think Edek 
would be swayed by the opinion of any individual or organisation. Maybe if Golda 
Meir had been an advocate
 


for exercise, Edek might have listened. He had held Golda Meir in very high 
esteem. He had admired everything about her. But the American Surgeon General 
was not Golda Meir. His opinion would cut no ice with Edek. Cut no ice. What a 
strange phrase, she thought. Where did it come from? Who had invented it? Why 
had they been
trying to cut ice?
Edek interrupted her small reverie. 'You should listen to me,' he said. 'You 
been doing too much running.' 'Running is very good for you,' Ruth said. 'If it 
is so good for you,' Edek said, 'why do you look shocking?' 'I don't look 
shocking,' Ruth said. She patted her hair down. Maybe her hair was sticking out. 
She thought that her father was probably right. More than her hair needed 
fixing. 'Have some rollmops,' Edek said.
'I couldn't eat herring for breakfast,' Ruth said, grimacing at the thought of 
the rolled up pickled herring marinated with onions and whole black peppercorns 
entering her empty stomach.
'You would feel much better if you was a person who could eat a herring for 
breakfast,' Edek said.
'Maybe I'll mature into one,' Ruth said, with what she hoped was a touch of 
sarcasm in her voice.
Edek wasn't put off by the sarcasm. He was clearly convinced of the value of 
herring. Even on an empty stomach. 'Have just one piece,' he said to her. 'I 
couldn't, Dad,' she said.
'This bird stuff what you eat is not enough,' Edek said. 'Birds are very small. 
They sit all day in a branch. This bird stuff is enough for them. You need food 
what normal people eat.' 'Dad, give me a break,' she said. 'I'm tired.' 'That is 
what I am talking about,' he said. 'Since we been in Poland, you been always 
tired. Eat a piece of herring.' 'Maybe tomorrow, Dad,' she said.
'Okay, okay,' he said.
He wandered off to the other end of the buffet. 'Look what they got here,' he 
called out to her. Ruth walked over to him. He was pointing to a very large 
sausage. A type of salami. 'This vurst is very good,' Edek said. 'I did eat this 
sort of vurst in Melbourne when Mum was alive.'
'Mum let you eat this sort of fatty sausage?' Ruth said.
'When we did have visitors, she did let me eat some vurst,' he said.
Ruth knew well that all of Rooshka's efforts to restrict Edek's diet had
amounted to nothing. Edek ate what she wanted him to eat, in front
of her, and what he wanted to eat, when he was out of Rooshka's sight.
Edek ignored the circles of already sliced sausage, on the platter.
He picked up a serrated bread knife and sawed off a large slab of
the still-intact sausage. Ruth winced. She thought the unsliced sausage
was probably meant to be purely decorative. 'I don't like it when it
is in such thin pieces,' Edek said, looking at the circles of sliced salami.
'You've got to admire your father's digestive system,' Norman used to say to 
Ruth. 'He eats whatever he likes. He never feels ill and he stays more or less 
the same weight.' Ruth's standard reply to this had been that a bit less rather 
than a bit more of the weight that Edek maintained himself at would be better. 
It was never a serious reply. She knew that Edek wasn't very overweight. And he 
loved his food. Why was she thinking about Norman? She shook her head to shrug 
off these thoughts. Norman was part of the past. And she was dealing with as 
much of the past as she could tolerate, right now.
'That's it for me,' Edek said. Ruth looked at his plate. Every inch of space on 
the plate was occupied. Edek couldn't possibly have added anything else. The 
contents were already built up. The sardines were in a stack and so was the 
herring.
'Take something for yourself, please,' Edek said to her. His voice sounded a bit 
nasal.
 


'Have you got a cold?' she said.
 


'No, just a bit of a running nose,' Edek said. 'It is nothing.'
'Are you sure?' she said to Edek.
'I do get like this, a small cold once or twice every winter,' Edek said. 'And 
it is winter, in Poland.'
'Do you have a sore throat?' she said.
'No,' he said.
'Are you sure?' Ruth said.
'Of course I am sure,' Edek said. He looked at her. 'This is a normal small cold 
what I have,' he said. 'Please, Ruthie, have something to eat. Have an egg.'
Ruth nearly retched at the thought of an egg. 'I'll have some yoghurt,' she 
said. She thought that yoghurt might settle her stomach. Her stomach definitely 
needed settling. 'I'm going to have some yoghurt and some toast,' she said to 
Edek. Edek rolled his eyes. He added a helping of cream cheese to his plate. It 
sat, like a plank, on top of the pickled onions.
Edek took his breakfast to their table. Ruth toasted some white bread, in the 
toaster the hotel provided for guests. Toast wasn't a Polish thing. It wasn't 
very American either. Americans ate strange things for breakfast. They ate 
pancakes and sausages with maple syrup. Eggs and sausages with maple syrup. They 
ate doughnuts and muffins for breakfast, too. It was the more puritanical 
English and Australians who ate toast for breakfast.
Ruth wondered if she really did look shocking. Probably, she thought. The two 
slices of toast looked so moderate, so temperate. It made Ruth feel too sober, 
too temperate. She wanted to be less stinting, less measured. She added some jam 
to her plate.
Edek shook his head when he saw Ruth's toast. 'I'm going to go back for some 
yoghurt, later,' she said to him. Two women were sitting at a table on their 
right. Ruth had noticed them staring at Edek. They were probably astonished by 
the volume of food on Edek's plate, Ruth thought. It was pretty astonishing.
'This vurst is very good,' Edek said. He was eating large mouthfuls Of the 
sausage, loudly. Ruth tried to ignore the chewing, smacking and sucking noises 
coming from Edek. But she couldn't. She still felt queasy. She hoped he would 
stop. She would never get her toast down, if Edek kept this volume up.
Ruth felt the women's gaze shift. They were looking at her now. Ruth nodded to 
them. She thought that both women were probably Polish. They looked the same 
age. In their mid-sixties. One of the women was a solidly built woman. 
Everything about her was solid. Her arms, her neck. Her chest. She wasn't fat, 
just solid. She looked healthy. Her skin was as shiny as a polished apple. Her 
yellow-blonde hair was slicked back in a longish crewcut. She had pink cheeks 
and blue eyes. Her mouth was red, without lipstick. Her hair was a contemporary 
yellow. A white, obviously bleached, yellow. A yellow that could be seen on many 
young men and young women, in New York this year. It was not the decayed yellow 
of old women's hair. This woman exuded a health and strength and vigour. Ruth 
felt tired just looking at her.
The larger woman's friend was small. Small and dainty. She had a finely defined 
face with large eyes and high cheekbones. Her build was slender. Almost 
birdlike. Her mid-brown hair was conservatively styled and her make-up subtle 
and muted. The two women seemed very comfortable together. They ate their 
breakfasts with an ease that suggested an old familiarity. Ruth looked at them. 
They looked like an unlikely couple. The large woman smiled at Ruth. Ruth 
noticed her breasts. They were enormous breasts. Sturdy, substantial breasts. 
They stood out, like a shelf, on her chest.
Ruth wondered if the woman's big breasts had made her popular with men. For 
years in America big breasts were passe. Small breasts Were considered 
sophisticated and desirable. At least by women. Now there had been a shift. A 
change. Big breasts had reemerged. Made a comeback. Big breasts, which hadn't 
really been popular since
 


Twiggy and the 1960s, were popular, again. Surgical breast implants which had 
waned in America during the early 1990s because of concerns about silicone 
leakage, were on the rise, again. The New York Times quoted a plastic surgeon as 
saying that women wanted their implants bigger now. Saline implants, pouches of 
saltwater, were now being used by surgeons to enlarge breasts. Large breasts did 
look full of life, Ruth thought. Ruth folded her arms across her chest, then 
realised what she had done. She removed her arms. Her breasts weren't inferior. 
She didn't have to hide them.
She ate her toast. Edek was three-quarters of the way through his breakfast. He 
had stopped to blow his nose several times, during the meal. 'I think you've 
definitely got a cold,' Ruth said to him.
'I did tell you myself I got a cold,' Edek said.
'Are you sure you haven't got a sore throat?' she said.
'I am sure,' Edek said.
'Maybe we should see a doctor?' Ruth said.
'Are you crazy?' said Edek.
'At your age, colds can develop into pneumonia,' Ruth said.
'This cold has to get very much worse before it will develop even into a bad 
cold,' Edek said.
Ruth suddenly felt frightened. A fear bordering on terror had descended on her 
with no warning. She felt frightened of losing Edek. She was on the verge of 
tears.
'I don't want to lose you, Dad,' she said. Edek stopped eating.
'Everybody has to die one day,' he said.
'But I don't want you to die just yet,' Ruth said.
'Do I look like a person what is going to die?' Edek said.
'Maybe we could ask the hotel for a doctor,' Ruth said. 'We'll just get the 
doctor to check you out.'
She contemplated calling the American Embassy to see if there were any American 
doctors practising in Krakow. She decided that that was extreme. Even a bad 
Polish doctor would be able to diagnose
common cold. If it looked as though Edek's cold were more than cold, she would 
call the American Embassy. 'I don't need to go to a doctor,' Edek said. 'When I 
am in Melbourne and I do get a cold, I don't go to the doctor.' 'But you're in 
Poland, now,' Ruth said.
'I know that I am in Poland,' said Edek. 'But I got the same cold what I get in 
Melbourne.'
Ruth knew that she was being unreasonable. The common cold was called a common 
cold because it was common. Common and harmless. But she couldn't dislodge her 
fear. It was an irrational and erratic fear. It had attached itself to her and 
was gathering momentum. She could feel her legs shaking.
'Do this for me, Dad,' she said. 'It won't take us long and I'll feel better.'
'It is a waste of money,' Edek said. 'Please,' she said.
'Okay, okay,' Edek said. 'I done many stupid things in my life. This will be one 
more stupid thing.'
'Thanks, Dad,' Ruth said. She felt much better. She would ask the doctor to 
check Edek's blood pressure and listen to his lungs.
The two women at the next table had finished their breakfast. They got up to 
leave. They both nodded at Ruth and smiled at Edek. Ruth looked at the larger 
woman's bust. It was very large. Ruth wondered if a large bust like that altered 
your balance. Probably not; large-busted women looked as steady, if not 
steadier, than their smaller counterparts. For a moment, she wished she had 
bigger breasts. Big-breasted women looked naturally voluptuous, and luxurious. 
They looked more amorous, more fertile and erogenous. More hot-blooded. More 
fun. They didn't have to add a sultry expression or sensual clothing. They 
already appeared sultry and sensual and Pleasure-seeking. Ruth had to stop 
herself from composing a list of synonyms for
 


voluptuous. She should be thinking about getting Edek to a doctor not toying 
with words. Both women said good morning, in Polish  to Edek and then to Ruth.
'Good morning,' Ruth replied, in English. The larger woman turned to her. 'Good 
morning,' she said. 'My best wishes to you for  the day.'
'Thank you,' Ruth said.
'I like to speak English very much,' the larger woman said. The smaller woman 
nodded. "I like to speak English, also,' she said.  Edek stood up and bowed. He 
wished both women a good day,  in Polish.
Ruth had eaten both of her slices of toast. She contemplated having another 
piece of toast, but she couldn't just have one more slice. She could either have 
no more toast, or two more slices of toast. The number of slices of toast she 
could eat had to be even. She couldn't eat an odd number of pieces of toast. She 
knew that this didn't make sense. She had tried to wean herself off this habit 
of imbuing numbers  with importance.
It had proved to be a hard habit to drop. When she ate Tic-Tacs, she had to have 
five at a time. Why five? She had no idea. But she couldn't bring herself to 
suck one or three or six Tic-Tacs. She felt as though it could endanger her. 
Although exactly how a specific number of Tic-Tacs could provide a safety net 
was something Ruth  was very uncertain about.
She had always had numbers to be avoided and numbers to be embraced. She had, 
however, managed to cut down on some of her superstitions about numbers. She no 
longer counted stairs, or footsteps. When she had phones connected, she accepted 
any phone number that was allocated to her instead of requesting other numbers. 
And she was trying very hard no longer to divide numbers into good numbers and 
bad numbers. She was trying to see all numbers as just numbers.  She wasn't sure 
why she scoffed at people who believed in numerology. Her beliefs were much more 
random. The Tic-Tacs were a good example of how erratic her beliefs were. For 
years, she had to have them in groups of three. Then overnight, without any 
reason, as though there could be a reason for these illogical activities, she 
switched to needing five Tic-Tacs.  Ruth decided to stick to two slices of 
toast. 'It was a very good breakfast,' Edek said.
'Yes it was,' she said.
'What would you know about the breakfast?' he said. 'You did not eat anything.'
'I saw what they had,' Ruth said.
'You do not know what is a good breakfast,' Edek said.
'I'll get the name of a doctor from the front desk,' Ruth said to Edek. 'And 
I'll meet you downstairs.'
'Alright, alright,' he said.
Dr Czarny was a pleasant looking man of about forty. He could speak English. He 
looked after all the Hotel Mimoza's guests, he told Ruth.  'There is nothing 
what is wrong with me,' Edek said to Dr Czarny.
'My father's got a cold,' Ruth said. 'And I just want to make sure it doesn't 
turn into a bronchial infection or laryngitis or something worse.'  Edek looked 
embarrassed. 'My daughter is worried,' he said to the doctor. 'But there is 
nothing to worry about. I came here so she would stop to nag me.'  Edek took his 
shirt off. Dr Czarny examined him. 'Your father is in very good health,' he said 
to Ruth.
'What did I tell you?' Edek said to Ruth. 'I did tell you that there was nothing 
wrong with me.'
 


'Your father is in excellent health,' Dr Czarny said. 'He has a slight cold. 
This will go.'
'What did I tell you?' Edek almost shouted. 'I did tell you that I did have a 
cold.' He leapt off the examining couch and buttoned up his shirt.  'Could I 
have some antibiotics for him, anyway?' Ruth said. Dr Czarny looked puzzled. 
'Just in case this cold turns into a bacterial infection,' Ruth said.  'It is 
not necessary,' Dr Czarny said.
'I'll feel better if I have some antibiotics with us,' Ruth said.
'If you wish,' Dr Czarny said.
'I am not going to die,' Edek said to Ruth. 'I have got a cold. Nobody does die 
from a cold.' Edek looked exasperated. A thought came into Ruth's head. They 
were close to Auschwitz. Was she worried about losing Edek because of their 
proximity to the death camp? She thought that maybe she was. He didn't die 
there, before, she told herself. He wouldn't die there now.  Ruth regretted 
asking for the antibiotics. Who knew if Polish antibiotics were reliable? Who 
knew what went into Polish medicine? Dr Czarny handed Ruth a small phial of 
antibiotics. 'I don't think your father will need these,' he said.  'Thank you, 
anyway,' Ruth said.
'Do you take any tranquillizers or sedatives?' Dr Czarny said to Ruth. Before 
Ruth could reply, he looked at her and said, 'Prozac is very good.' Ruth was 
offended. 'Thank you,' she said. She paid the bill and she and Edek left.  'Who 
knows what goes into Polish medications,' Ruth said to Edek when they were out 
of the building.  'The same stuff what goes into any medicines,' Edek said.
'I don't think we'll use them,' Ruth said.
'I was not going to take them,' Edek said. 'I am not sick.'
'I'll buy some Vicks Vaporub,' Ruth said. 'I saw it in the hotel  shop. You can 
rub it on your chest at night.'
'I don't need this Vicks,' Edek said. 'In any case it makes such a smell. My 
whole bed will smell.'  'So what?' said Ruth.
'What has got into you?' Edek said to her. 'You did force me to go to the 
doctor. Now you want that I should smell something shocking in my bed. What has 
got into you in Poland?' Ruth shook her head. It was a good question. What had 
got into her, in Poland? 'You never was like this,' Edek said. 'You was always a 
nervous type, but not so nervous what you are now.'  'I'm sorry,' she said.
'Column down,' he said. He always pronounced calm as 'colm' or 'column'. 'Column 
down,' he said again. His pronunciation cheered her up.  'Let's go for a walk 
around Krakow,' she said to Edek.
'What for?' Edek said.
'Just to see where we are,' she said.
'You do need always to see where we are,' Edek said. 'I do know where we are. We 
are in Krakow.'  'You've never been to Krakow,' Ruth said.
'What is there to see?' said Edek. 'Streets and buildings. The same as what is 
everywhere.'
'The streets and buildings here are definitely not the same as the streets and 
buildings in Warsaw,' she said. 'And nothing like the streets and buildings in 
Lodz.'  'It is the same everywhere,' Edek said. 'Everywhere is a street and a 
building.'
'You are coming to Kazimierz, the old Jewish section of Krakow with me, aren't 
you?" Ruth said.
'I am coming because you do want to go there,' Edek said.
'Well, I want to walk in Krakow, too,' Ruth said.
'Okay, okay, everything is hunky-dunky with me,' Edek said.
 


He sounded agitated.
'It's not hunky-dunky,' Ruth said. 'It's hunky-dory.'
'It is not hunky-dory,' Edek said. 'It is hunky-dunky'
'You're confusing hunky-dory with Humpty Dumpty,' Ruth said.
'What are you talking about?' Edek said. He looked annoyed. He speeded up and 
walked ahead of Ruth.
'The Town Square is straight ahead,' she called out to him.
Krakow was a beautiful city. The most beautiful Polish city Ruth had seen. It 
was an ancient city. There were few new buildings, no skyscrapers. The tallest 
structures Ruth could see were the spires of old churches. Krakow had always 
been considered a major centre of Polish culture. The city had art galleries and 
museums and concert halls. It was also a university town. It had the centuries-
old Jagiel-lonian University and eleven other institutions of higher learning. 
Ruth felt that she could see the learning, the absorption of knowledge, the 
serious intent, in the air. She thought that all that learning had to give an 
educated aspect to the city's atmosphere. There were more students here in 
Krakow than she had seen anywhere else in Poland. And fewer elderly Poles. The 
difference in the population was striking.
This medieval city was almost as beautiful as Paris, Ruth thought. Her spirits 
lifted. She found herself feeling happy to be in Krakow. It was easier to forget 
that it was Poles who inhabited Poland, in Krakow. There was a life force in the 
streets of Krakow, which she hadn't seen in Poland. They were almost at the 
Rynek Glowny, the Main Market Square. Ruth could see Edek waiting for her at one 
of the corners of the Rynek Glowny. She caught up to him. 'Isn't this a 
beautiful square?' she said. Edek looked up. 'I suppose so,' he said.
'Dad,' she said. 'The layout was designed in 1257 and it's still intact today.'
'So it is old,' he said.
'Very old,' she said. They were standing in front of a stand selling
obwarzanki, a bread roll that resembled a twisted bagel. 'These look wonderful,' 
she said.
'Have one,' Edek said.
Ruth bought one of the poppyseed-coated obwarzanki. 'Do you want some?' she said 
to her father.
'Not for me,' Edek said. 'I did just finish breakfast.'
Ruth bit into the obwarzanki. It was incredibly delicious.
Next to the obwarzanki stand, a fruit stall sold bananas and pears.
'I think I'll buy a pear, too," she said to Edek.
'I am not hungry,' Edek said. She hadn't offered him any fruit. She had known he 
wasn't crazy about pears or bananas.
They walked around the Rynek Glowny Every second building seemed to house a 
cafe. Inviting cafes. Cafes with people talking and eating. Krakow seemed so 
civilised. 'It is still provincial,' a Polish man she knew, in New York, had 
said to her about Krakow. Robert Kostrzewa, a young architect, who worked on the 
same floor of the building that Rothwax Correspondence was in, had been 
disparaging about Krakow and the rest of Poland. 'Leave the old city, in Krakow, 
and you're in the same Poland. The same narrow-mindedness, the same sexist 
attitudes, the same old anti-Semitism. Don't be fooled by the eloquence of the 
ancient stone buildings in Krakow,' he had said to her. 'They house the same 
Poles.'
Ruth liked Robert a lot. And not just because he was anti-Polish. She found they 
had similar points of view, similar cultural understandings, similar anxieties. 
Ruth thought that they shared a European sensibility. It occurred to her, just 
then, that possibly she and Robert Kostrzewa shared a Polish sensibility. She 
grimaced. She didn't like that thought.
He had asked her out, once. But she had said no. She had said it would be too 
close to an office relationship-their offices were only two doors apart. But the 
truth was that he was too familiar to her. He felt too much like a brother. Too 
much like one of the family.
 


It was disconcerting to her, now, to see how familiar so much about Polish men 
was. The bluntness, the directness, the complaints, the resigned and depressed 
air. They were all traits she possessed.
Ruth looked around her. She had lost Edek, again. She kept walking. She was 
bound to find him, she thought. Robert Kostrzewa was the first Pole she had met 
who had brought up Polish anti-Semitism, in her presence. Most Poles, like most 
of the taxi drivers she and Edek had encountered, denied the existence of anti-
Semitism in Poland, today, or at any other time. The more intellectual Poles 
pointed out how many Jews lived in Poland before the war. They offered this as 
evidence of the Polish people's generosity towards Jews.
There was a thriving Jewish community, in Poland before the war. In 1938 there 
were sixty-four thousand, three hundred and forty-eight Jews in Krakow. Ruth had 
read that statistic taken from old census papers. Jews made up a quarter of the 
city's residents. The Jews lived mainly just outside the old city in Kazimierz 
and Stradom. It was hard to find many streets in Krakow that didn't once have a 
Jewish family living there. Jewish children, the non-orthodox ones, attended the 
local state schools as well as the Jewish primary and secondary schools. And 
there was a Jewish theatre at seven Bocheriska Street where the famous Yiddish 
actress Ida Kaminska regularly performed. Ruth wanted to visit that theatre. She 
had read that the building was still there. The Jewish theatre had functioned 
until 1939. Krakow was occupied by the German units of the Wehrmacht on 
September 6th, 1939.
Ruth found Edek peering into the window of a shop. It was a Wedel's chocolate 
shop.
'Look what I did find," Edek said to her.
'Wedel's chocolate,' she said. Edek looked happy. Ruth felt so
grateful that her father could be made happy by chocolate. It was so hard for 
most people, including herself, to feel happy.
'Look, they got those big prunes covered in chocolate what I like,' Edek said. 
The chocolate-coated prunes were still in the same blue wrappers Ruth remembered 
from her childhood.
'Do you want to buy some?' she said to Edek.
'Not now while we are walking,' he said. 'I will buy a couple when we finish to 
walk. How much longer you want to walk?'
'We've only just started,' Ruth said.
Edek looked glum. Ruth could see that he had had enough of what seemed like an 
aimless exercise to him. 'We won't walk around for too much longer,' she said. 
'Maybe we'll check out the enclosed market in the middle of the square, and then 
we'll go to Kazimierz.'
'Okey dokey,' Edek said. He seemed cheered by the thought of going to Kazimierz. 
Kazimierz was on their agenda. It was not a detour. It was part of the whole 
tour. Edek liked an agenda, a destination, a challenge. Ruth wondered if Edek 
was ticking off each of the accomplishments, or ordeals, of the trip. They had 
done Warsaw, done Lodz. Had Edek ticked them off his mental list of things to 
get through? Was Edek now waiting to have done Kazimierz and Auschwitz? Had all 
of this been intolerable for him? Ruth hoped not.
'Okay, I will buy just a couple of the chocolates now,' Edek said as though Ruth 
had insisted on the purchase.
They went into the store. Ruth was impressed by the chocolates. They really did 
look like first-class chocolates, she thought, and then wondered what 
distinguished first-class chocolates from their lesser cousins. Was it their 
lustre, their sheen, their colour, their density, their shapes? She didn't know. 
Probably all of those things.
Edek asked for a pound of the chocolate-coated prunes. The woman behind the 
counter smiled coyly at him. Lots of Polish women used coy expressions. Ruth 
didn't understand why. Was it to hide their intrinsic harshness? Edek smiled 
back at the woman. 'Wedel's
 


is a very beautiful chocolate,' he said to the woman'
'Tell her in Polish,' Ruth said. 'She'll understand it better.' 'Oy cholera,' 
Edek said, and hit himself in the head. He repeated his praise of Wedel's 
products, in Polish. The woman beamed.
Edek was eating his third chocolate by the time they entered the covered market, 
in the square. At first glance the vendors appeared to be selling the usual 
tourist trinkets and souvenirs. Carved wooden artifacts seemed to be the most 
popular item on sale. There were shelves and shelves of carved wooden figures on 
every stall. There were carved wooden peasants. Men in knee-length lederhosen 
with braces attached, and hats. Some of the carved peasants wore vests. All of 
the peasants had drooping moustaches, and they were all holding a beer mug.
There were wooden Father Christmases. Roly-poly red and white Father Christmases 
with big beards and cheerful expressions. And then there were the carvings of 
Jews. Jews wearing the long black coats and broad hats of orthodox Jews. White 
tfilhn, Jewish prayer shawls, were draped down the front of the coats. All of 
the Jews had long beards and even longer noses. Noses that in many cases 
continued down past the mouths. Enormous, hooked noses, that ended in a sharp 
point.
Ruth was shocked. She had never seen anything like this. Some of the carved Jews 
were pointing to their head. Was this supposed to signify Jews' cleverness? Or 
was that too kind an interpretation? Was it supposed to signify Jews' cunning? 
All of the ornamental Jews looked worried. All of their features sagged and bent 
in a downward spiral. Their beards hung below their waist. Their large eyes 
drooped with weighty lids. Their foreheads were furrowed. Were these Jews 
exhausted from counting their money? These carved Jews definitely
weren't happy.
Ruth wondered who was supposed to buy these Jewish mementos. No Jew would. The 
market was full of tourists. Would tourists buy
the carvings as souvenirs? Souvenirs of what? Of Krakow? The Jews were part of 
Krakow's past. A past they were glad to get rid of. Poland had got rid of its 
Jews, and had now turned them into knick-knacks, Ruth thought. Bric-a-brac. 
Fodder for a tourist industry.
Ruth was appalled. She looked to see if Edek was as bothered as she was. Edek 
was examining a packet of playing cards. Ruth looked at the stall next to where 
Edek was standing. This stall had a range of Jews cast in china as well as a 
selection of carved wooden Jews. The wooden Jews were Jewish musicians. There 
must be a big market for faux	Jews, Ruth thought.
The carved Jewish musicians were, like the orthodox Jews in the neighbouring 
stall, decked out in black. But with different outfits and different hats. The 
musicians wore shorter jackets and hats that looked more like bowler hats. These 
Jews were dark-haired as opposed to their gray-haired, more religious brethren. 
The black-haired Jews looked as miserable as their orthodox brothers. Their 
features were even more pronounced, more ridiculous, more exaggerated, more 
caricatured. Their brows were slanted and heavily underlined in black paint. 
Their eyes were ringed in thick black strokes. All of this black gave the 
musicians an air of malevolence most musicians did not possess. The musicians 
didn't look healthy, either. Their skin was painted a dark, jaundiced ochre. 
Their noses hung down to their black beards. Each musician carried a cello or a 
violin or a flute. An expression of extreme misery was carved into their faces.
Ruth was stunned. There were hundreds and hundreds of these Jews as trinkets. 
How could they have this ugliness in the middle of such a beautiful old square? 
Several vendors had tried to interest Ruth in a sale. They had picked up a 
wooden Jew or two and waved them at her. Ruth wanted to get behind the stands 
and knock every one of these faux Jews over. She felt furious.
Edek had caught up to her. She asked him what he felt about the carved wooden 
figures. He didn't seem bothered. Ruth assumed that
 


next to the pogroms and beatings and stone throwings of Polish life that Edek 
and his family had been accustomed to, these figurines seemed harmless. 'I hate 
them,' she said to Edek. A man offered Ruth and Edek a carved violinist. Ruth 
wanted to spit at the man. They walked through the rest of the market. They were 
offered more renderings of Jews. Not one vendor offered them a Father Christmas. 
Outside the market, vendors were already barbecuing kielbasa and roasting 
potatoes. They must be preparing for lunch, Ruth thought. The kielbasa smelt 
good. For years she hadn't been able to eat meat. Hadn't been able to refer to 
it as anything other than cooked flesh. Which it clearly was. The term 'cooked 
flesh' was upsetting to most people, so Ruth tried to keep it to herself. Lately 
she had been trying to eat meat again. But it hadn't been easy. Meat still 
seemed fleshy to her. She was surprised that the barbecued kielbasa smelt so
appetising.
Edek had walked ahead of her and was watching several men turn lengths of 
kielbasa over a large outdoor grill. 'Looks good, doesn't it?' she said to Edek. 
'Very good,' he said.
'Do you want one?' she said. She was sure he was going to say no. It was still 
early. Not quite time for lunch.
'Maybe just a small one,' Edek said. He ordered a kielbasa sandwich.
The kielbasa that was handed to Edek was the length of an average
garden hose. It came ensconced in a very long bread roll. Ruth thought
the sandwich must measure at least two foot. Edek had to sit down
on a bench. This was not the sort of sandwich you could eat standing
up.
A nearby stall was selling candy. Ruth walked over and looked at the candy. It 
was the same candy you saw anywhere else in the world. They had fruit jellies, 
boiled sweets, mints, and licorice allsorts. Ruth hadn't seen any licorice 
allsorts for years. Licorice allsorts were not an American thing. She wanted 
some licorice allsorts. This stall was
self-service. She picked up a bag and chose a number of the fattest most 
multiple-layered allsorts she could find. She felt excited at the prospect of 
the allsorts. She hoped they were good.
She walked back and sat beside Edek. She took out an allsort. Edek looked at the 
allsort. He was halfway through his sandwich and his mouth was ringed with the 
orange tinge of tomato sauce. 'Why do you eat such rubbish?' he said to Ruth. 
'It's better than the rubbish you eat,' was what she wanted to say. Instead she 
said nothing. She ate the allsort. It was very good. The filling was soft, not 
stiff. The licorice was still pliable. She finished the rest of the bag. She 
didn't care if she was regressing. Acting out a childhood in which she had 
turned to sweets when she was disturbed. The licorice allsorts calmed her. She 
felt the most peaceful she had felt since arriving in Poland.
Edek looked at her eating the last of the allsorts. 'They've calmed me,' Ruth 
said. This didn't deflect Edek's criticism. 'This black stuff columned you?' he 
said. 'Are you crazy?' *
'Let's walk, Dad,' she said. Edek had finished his kielbasa sandwich. He patted 
his stomach.
'Maybe it was too much for me,' he said. He looked as though he was 
uncomfortably full.
'Let's walk it off,' she said. 'I've got some Mylanta if you need it.'
'You will need the Mylanta after that black stuff,' Edek said. 'Not me.'
'Let's walk,' Ruth said.
They walked past a large sandwich board on the street, outside a travel agency. 
The sandwich board was almost in the middle of the footpath. sightseeing, in 
large red capital letters, was painted across the top of the board. Underneath 
the heading was a list, in 'large painted letters, of the tours you could take. 
A large green dot was placed in front of each destination. 'Salt Mine In 
Wieliczka,' was the first destination. This was followed by 'Concentration Camp 
in Auschwitz-Birkenau,' and, in brackets, '[On Request Czestochowa]'.
 


Underneath the option of Czestochowa was 'Raft Trip Down The Dunajec River'. The 
text on the other side of the sandwich board was identical. Ruth wondered what 
part of Czestochowa you saw if you requested the Czestochowa option, in 
brackets. Was it the densely populated Jewish section of Czestochowa that the 
Germans surrounded on a bitterly cold January night in 1940? Could you visit 
that site and think about the Germans pulling Jews out of their homes with 
shouts of Juden raws? They beat and clubbed the Jews of Czestochowa into lines, 
and assembled them in the large square.
Was it this square you could visit? The Jews, many of them battered and 
bleeding, were forced to stand in the square for hours. Was it this spectacle 
that was worth visiting? Worth advertising on a billboard? Or was it the 
synagogue, where the young girls who were pulled out of the square were taken 
and forced to undress and endure repeated sexual assaults before they were 
tortured?
Ruth felt furious. Her anger churned her stomach. She wished she hadn't eaten 
the allsorts. For the Polish, Jews were now statues and ornaments and baubles. 
The dead ones were a boom for the tourist
industry.
'Does it give you a shock to see Auschwitz advertised on a tourist
billboard?' she said to Edek.
He was very quiet. 'It is not very nice,' he said.
'Let's go to Kazimierz,' Ruth said.
'How far is it?' Edek asked.
'Not far,' she said. 'You want to walk or catch a taxi?'
'Let us walk a bit,' Edek said. 'I do not feel so good. I think the kielbasa was 
a bit too much for me.' Ruth thought it was more likely that the billboard had 
been too much for Edek, not the kielbasa-
'I don't feel great either,' Ruth said. 'I can't believe the Poles and the 
expedient way they've set up a little tourist industry out of dead Jews.'
'It is not so nice,' Edek said.
'They just hate Jews,' Ruth said. 'It's ingrained in them, this hatred. Nothing 
that they suffered at the hands of Germans changed how they felt about Jews.'
'That is the truth,' Edek said.
'It wasn't just in Kielce that Poles murdered Jews after the war,' Ruth said. in 
Radom, Poles attacked the hospital for Jewish orphans. In Lublin, two Jews who 
had been beaten by Poles were tracked to the local hospital and murdered in 
their hospital beds. This was after the war, Dad.'
Edek shook his head. 'It is something shocking,' he said.
'In 1946,' Ruth said. 'On March 19th, Chaim Hirszmann, one of only two survivors 
of the death camp at Belzec, gave evidence of what he had witnessed in the death 
camp. He was supposed to return the next day and finish his testimony. On the 
way home, he was murdered.'
'I did not know there was such a camp called Belzec,' Edek said.
'It was where the Jews of Lublin were deported to,' Ruth said. They took them to 
Belzec from the Lublin ghetto. Thirty thousand Jews were deported from Lublin. 
At one stage, when the deportations to Belzec began, which was in March 1942, at 
about the same time as the first of the Slovakian Jews arrived in Auschwitz, 
Josef Goebbels made a note about the deportation in his diary. "The procedure is 
a pretty barbaric one," he said, "and not to be described here more definitely. 
Not much will remain of the Jews."'
Edek looked pale. 'How do you know such stuff?' he said.
'I know, I guess, because I want to know,' Ruth said.
Do you have one of those Mylanta tablets?' Edek said.
Yes,' she said. 'I think I'll have one, too.' They both chewed their Mylanta
The Mylanta antacid tablets were peppermint-flavoured and green, knew that she 
and Edek would both be left 


with green tongues, contemplated offering Edek a piece of chewing gum to get rid
 


of the green. She decided against it. Having a green tongue sudden] didn't feel 
all that abnormal.
'It is shocking,' Edek said.
'What?' she said.
'How the Poles did kill Jews after the war.'
'It really is shocking,' she said. She wondered why it felt even more shocking 
than murders committed during the war. She thought it must be the realisation 
that all the murders and the killings hadn't made a dent in the anti-Semitism of 
many Poles. It hadn't moved them. That was a sickening thought. Definitely 
something to be
shocked about.
'In October 1945,' she said to Edek, 'eight Jews were killed in Boleslawiec. And 
in December 1945, eleven Jews were killed by Poles in the village of Kosow.' 
Kosow was less than six miles from where the inmates of the death camp, 
Treblinka, had so recently been
liberated.
'December, 1945?' Edek said.
'Yes,' Ruth said. 'The killings went on for longer than that. In February 1946, 
four Jewish delegates to a Jewish convention in Krakow were murdered on a train 
from Lodz.'
'It is hard to believe,' Edek said.
'Oh, there's more,' Ruth said. 'On April 21st, 1946, five Jews, five survivors 
of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, aged between thirty-five and twenty-
two, were driving towards the town of Nowy Targ, in the south of Poland. They 
were four men and one woman. The woman was the twenty-two-year-old. Their car 
was pulled over at what appeared to be a Polish checkpoint. They were ordered 
out of the car at gunpoint and shot. Their clothes were removed and they were 
left naked, on the highway. The killers were members of the former Polish Home 
Army. The Jewish community of Krakow organised a funeral for the murdered Jews 
on 24th April, in Krakow.
'This is something shocking,' Edek said.
Six days later, another seven Jews were shot on the same spot,'
Ruth said. 'Their funeral was held in Krakow, too. On May 2nd.'
'In Krakow?' Edek said.
'In Krakow,' Ruth replied.
Edek looked around him. As if to confirm that he was in Krakow. The same Krakow 
that they had been talking about. They were almost in Kazimierz. Ruth knew, from 
the map, that the Town Square was straight ahead of them.
'The pogrom what was in Kielce was in July, 1946?' Edek said.
'Yes,' Ruth said.
'Pheh!' Edek said, as though he was trying to blow the thought away. As though 
the knowledge was too much for him. 'It is enough for me,' he said, making a 
dismissive gesture with his hand.
'It's enough for anyone,' she said.
No wonder she was suspicious of Poles, Ruth thought. There were more than enough 
reasons for her suspicion. She was more suspicious of Poles than she was of 
Germans. This didn't seem like a reasonable distribution of suspicion, to her. 
She felt she should have shared out the distrust. Her response to Germans was 
varied. Yet whenever she met a Pole, she bristled.
She had met a Polish woman, a photographer, in her fifties, in Manhattan at a 
party, earlier this year. The woman had approached her, with an unusually 
aggressive approach, for a woman. 'You're very attractive,' the woman had said 
to Ruth. 'Who are you?' The woman had the short, cropped hair of many gay women. 
She was wearing a tailored trouser suit and had a manly, firm handshake. Ruth 
had assumed that she was gay. Later, she had realised the woman was not gay, 
just unusually assertive. Ruth liked the woman's forcefulness. She wished 


more women could be more forceful, more direct, more assertive.
 


Ruth had been enjoying her conversation with the woman until she found out that 
the woman was Polish. She was a Polish woman with a difficult history, she told 
Ruth. She had had a very tough childhood The family, her parents and their six 
children had had to leave their farm in Poland. They had to make their way 
towards Germany. On the run. Displaced. After the war, they were shifted from 
one Displaced Person's camp in Germany to the other. 'We were starving all the 
time,' she said. 'Moving from one camp to the next.'
Ruth's instinct had been to sympathise with the starvation and the homelessness. 
It must have been terrible shifting a family of eight from one DP camp to the 
next.
'Why did your parents have to leave their farm in Poland?' she had asked the 
woman.
'To get away from the Nazis,' the woman had replied.
'Why did they go to Germany?' Ruth asked.
'They had to go somewhere,' the woman said. 'We were all starving. We never had 
anything to eat. We were so hungry all the time.'
It was a terrible story. The story of hungry parents and children. It was hard 
not to feel overwhelmed at the thought of six hungry children searching for food 
and shelter. But something was not gelling. This woman was an intelligent, 
knowledgeable woman. A successful photographer. Yet she seemed oblivious to the 
historical flaw in her family's history. Why would a Polish farmer leave his 
farm? Farmers in Poland were better off than most other people. They still had 
food to eat, and food to sell and food that they could barter for other 
essentials. The only reason a Polish farmer would leave Poland and head for 
Germany, Ruth thought, was if he was a fascist or a collaborator.
'What year did your family leave their farm?' Ruth had asked the woman.
'I'm not sure,' she had said. 'It was late in the war. We were forced to leave.'
'And you ended up in Germany?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said the woman. 'One camp after another. We never had enough food.'
This Polish farmer and his wife could not have been running away from the 
Germans, Ruth thought. He had to be running to the Germans. You didn't run to 
Germany to get away from Germans.
'He was trying to get away from the Nazis,' the woman had said,
again.
'And he went to Germany?' Ruth said.
'It was the only place he could go to,' she said. 'He was looking for food.'
It was more than food he was looking for, Ruth thought. Her father must have 
been a fascist or an active collaborator of the Nazis. He must have been fleeing 
the approaching Soviet troops, the Red Army. Looking for an escape from the 
neighbours in the area who would have known what he had been up to. He must have 
had to flee. No normal farming activities would make it necessary to run away 
from your farm and your area. Her father must have worked as a guard or actively 
collaborated in other ways, with the occupying German army. Ruth wondered why 
this very smart woman couldn't work that out. After the war, the allies must 
have moved them from one DP camp to another. It was hard for the allies to tell 
who was a farmer and who was a former guard. Germany, at the time, had suddenly 
had a glut of apparent farmers.
Ruth hadn't wanted to speak to the woman after that. She knew that the woman 
wasn't to blame for her father's activities. But the actions and events were 
clear enough for her to have been able to comprehend her own past. Several other 
people present that evening knew of this woman's past. 'She had a terrible 
childhood,' a man there said to Ruth. 'Her family were starving and persecuted. 
They went from one camp to another.' This man had told Ruth because he knew of 
Rooshka and Edek's history. 'Her family had the
same
 


sort of experience that your family had,' he said to Ruth. 'I don't think so,' 
Ruth had said. The man had looked 'It's too complicated to go into,' Ruth had 
said.
Ruth had gone into it, several weeks later when she had bumped into a wealthy 
Jewish art collector, in SoHo. Ruth knew that this woman collected the Polish 
photographer's work. Ruth voiced her concerns about the woman's family, to the 
collector.
'She said her father was a victim of the Nazis,' Ruth said to the collector. 
'But it doesn't add up.'
'Her father and mother and the children were starving,' the collector, a woman 
with a very loud voice, had shouted at Ruth, in the street. 'They were 
starving.'
'But what were they doing fleeing Poland for Germany?' Ruth said.
'They were starving,' the collector, a woman whose family had been accumulating 
wealth in America for several generations, had shouted again. 'They were 
starving. That's all you need to know.'
The woman had shouted this at Ruth in a very accusative tone. As though Ruth was 
being impossibly cold-hearted, and tough, and unsympathetic. Ruth had felt 
stupid. And petty. She had felt silly for wanting to discern and disentangle the 
truth behind the story-Clearly for this collector, if someone was starving 
nothing else mattered. When Ruth had recovered her composure and her confidence 
she had wanted to punch the collector. But the collector was long gone.
Ruth looked at Edek. He had been very quiet. She always felt uneasy when he was 
quiet. She hoped he was alright.
'Are you alright, Dad?' she said.
'I am alright,' he said. 'Maybe I will take a bit more of that Mylanta stuff.'
'You're not feeling well?' she said.
'I feel fine,' he said. 'I did just eat too much.'
Ruth gave him two more Mylanta. Edek chewed the
tablets. Was it the food that was making Edek feel sick or the country and its 
history, Ruth wondered? It was probably Poland, she decided. Not the kielbasa he 
had eaten, or his breakfast of herring and pickles and salami. Her father had 
always had a cast-iron constitution. Kielbasa or salami had never affected him 
adversely.
'When we've looked at Kazimierz,' Ruth said, 'we'll go back to the hotel and 
have a rest.'
'I do not need a rest,' Edek said. 'Have you got a piece of chocolate or 
something?'
'I thought you weren't feeling well,' Ruth said.
"I am alright,' he said. 'But that green stuff does not taste too nice.'
The Mylanta?' she said.
'Of course,' he said. 'What other green stuff should 1 talk about?'
'You're going to wash the Mylanta away with some chocolate?' Ruth said.
'The chocolate will give me a better taste what the Mylanta,' Edek said. Ruth 
couldn't come up with a reasonable argument against following Mylanta with 
chocolate.
'You've got those chocolate-covered prunes,' she said to Edek.
'Oy, that's perfect,' he said. 'I did forget about them.' He reached into his 
pocket and pulled out the chocolates. 'These chocolates are very good 
chocolates,' he said when he had finished the rest of the bag. Ruth was 
reassured. Any man who could polish off three-quarters of a pound of chocolates 
couldn't be all that unwell.
They were in the heart of Kazimierz now. On Szeroka Street, the main street of 
the Jewish quarter. Szeroka Street was more of an elongated square than a 
street. It was a beautiful square. The buildings still had a vivacity. It was 
easy to imagine the rich, full lives that must have been lived in these 
buildings. There were small attic windows and chimneys and turrets and carved 
doorways and arched entrances.
Kazimierz was noticeably more architecturally interesting than the
 


areas surrounding it. The entire area, Ruth had read, was no bigger than three 
hundred yards by three hundred yards. A very dense centre of culture and 
religion and learning had once been packed into this small section of Krakow. 
The first of several Jewish publishing companies had been set up in 1534. Works 
of lasting scholarship and religious teachings were printed in Kazimierz, from 
the fourteenth century until the time, four centuries later, when the Jews were 
removed and dispensed with.
'Isn't this beautiful?' Ruth said to Edek.
Edek looked up. He looked around him. He nodded. 'It is very nice,' he said.
Ruth felt excited. This was a Jewish area that looked relatively intact. Not 
dilapidated and grubby. Not all of the signs of the life that was once lived 
there had been crushed out of this area. 'This is so exciting,' she said to 
Edek. 'There are no people here,' Edek said.
Ruth knew what he was referring to. He was talking about the absence of Jews. 
Telling her to quieten down. Telling her that these were only buildings, not 
people.
There were plenty of people in Kazimierz. Several tourist coaches and private 
cars were parked in the square. Kazimierz was first promoted as a tourist 
destination in the early 1970s. The Poles realised that with seven synagogues 
mostly intact, and former Jewish theatres and bathhouses and an ancient Jewish 
cemetery, Kazimierz had revenue potential. But no one came. The Poles were not 
interested. And word about Kazimierz didn't spread outside Poland. Then Steven 
Spielberg arrived. Overnight, everything changed. Kazimierz, which had been run-
down and grubby, immediately attracted private Polish entrepreneurs. They began 
to restore Kazimierz.
Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List brought crowds of tourists to 
Kazimierz. Although most of Schindler's List took place nearby, in the Plaszow 
death camp, the Podgorze ghetto and Oscar Schindler's
factory, the fact that Spielberg had filmed in Kazimierz was enough. The results 
of this exposure by Spielberg were evident. Three restaurants with Hebrew 
lettering were on one side of the square. A kosher restaurant and what was 
advertised as a Jewish bookshop were also on Szeroka Street. Kazimierz was on 
the map. In every guidebook on Poland, and in endless brochures from travel 
agents.
When Ruth saw the tourist coaches she felt flat. Why was she here? Not to be 
part of a tourist circus, that was for sure. They passed a group of tourists 
being led by a loud-voiced Polish guide. 'Steven Spielberg first came here in 
1992,' the guide was saying.
'Do you think the people in that group look Jewish?' Ruth said to Edek. Edek 
shook his head. 'They are not Jews,' he said.
'Steven Spielberg was here for thirty-six hours on his first visit,' the guide 
said. The group had stopped outside what Ruth recognised from the guidebooks was 
the Old Synagogue. 'Steven Spielberg made the decision on that visit that he 
would direct Schindler's List nowhere but Krakow,' the guide said.
'Did you meet Steven Spielberg?' one of the group asked.
'No, I didn't,' the guide said. 'But a very close friend of mine met him. 
Spielberg spent quite a few days filming in Szeroka Street. He made the decision 
to film the ghetto scenes here during his second visit to Krakow in June, 1992.' 
Nobody asked what the ghetto was, or where the real ghetto had been located.
'Let's go in and have a look at the Old Synagogue," Ruth said to Edek.
'It is very interesting what the man is saying about Steven Spielberg,' Edek 
said. Ruth felt irritated. Couldn't her father see how phony this whole interest 
in Kazimierz was?
'We didn't come to Kazimierz to listen to stories about Steven Spielberg,' she 
said.
'Okay, okay,' said Edek.
'The Old Synagogue,' Ruth said to Edek, 'was the religious and
 


administrative centre of the Jewish community of Krakow."
As soon as they entered the synagogue, Ruth felt calmer. She wondered what it 
was that houses of worship possessed that was so calming. An accumulation of 
prayer? A stockpile of godliness, goodness, goodwill? A confluence of altruism, 
benevolence, grace? Ruth knew that these things couldn't be stockpiled, couldn't 
be amassed. You couldn't collect ephemeral qualities and make them concrete. 
There was no inventory of grace or virtue or piety. There was no brotherly love 
still present, in this synagogue. Or was there? Ruth was sure she could feel 
something. Something around the cross-ribbed Gothic vaulting of the ceiling of 
the synagogue. Something between the two narrow columns that supported the 
bimah. Something in the air where the sermons were conducted.
'You know there are still seven synagogues in Kazimierz,' she said to Edek.
'That is good,' he said.
'If you can't have the Jews,' she said, 'the least you could have is their 
buildings.'
'I suppose so,' he said.
'Is this reminding you of too much?' she said to Edek. He nodded his head. 'Does 
it make you think of going to synagogue with your parents?' she said. He nodded 
his head again. He walked off to look at something.
It was hardly surprising that Edek and Rooshka had avoided synagogues, after the 
war, Ruth thought. Synagogues were too loaded, too freighted, with memories and 
questions. She caught up to Edek. He was upstairs on the first floor, in rooms 
that had been converted into a museum. He was looking at a collection of 
Passover dishes. He looked sad.
'This synagogue was rebuilt in 1507 by the architect Mateo Gucci,' Ruth said to 
Edek. 'So Jews and Gucci have always been connected. Edek looked blank. 'Jews 
and Gucci?' she said, again. Edek didn't
get it. She tried to explain the joke to him. The stereotype of rich, Gucci-clad 
Jews. But he still didn't get it. Ruth decided you had to know the Gucci label, 
to think the joke was funny.
The last room of exhibits displayed photographs and documents. Photographs and 
documents detailing the demise of the Jews. Photographs of families with their 
bags and bundles on their way to the ghetto. Documents showing the progressively 
punitive and restrictive instructions issued by Germans to the Jews of Krakow. 
The instructions and orders and punishments and restrictions and directives, 
which were written in German and Polish, were familiar to Edek. 'We did have the 
same orders, in Lodz,' he said.
'You were already in the ghetto when these orders were issued in Krakow,' she 
said. Edek looked at her quizzically. 'The Lodz ghetto and the Warsaw ghetto 
were formed before the one in Krakow.'
'You know everything,' he said.
'I wish I did,' she said.
Edek looked at a photograph of two Jews, two young boys carrying large sacks on 
their backs. They were in the middle of a trail of Jews on their way to the 
ghetto. 'We was all like that,' Edek said. He shook his head. 'Sometimes it does 
feel like it happened to somebody else,' he said. 'Not to me. Sometimes I think 
it was not me who was in the ghetto.' He shook his head, again. Ruth could see 
he had tears in his eyes. 'When I do see these photographs I remember that it 
was me. Me and Mum. I remember too much.'
Ruth felt bad. She hadn't even thought about how he would respond to the 
artifacts or the photographs. 'I am sorry I am upset,' Edek said. Ruth put her 
arm around him. 'You've got a lot to be upset about,' she said. Edek blew his 
nose. He looked embarrassed to have been crying. They left the synagogue. Ruth 
walked with her arm around Edek.
'I am okay,' he said, after a few minutes. 'I did not mean to upset you.'
 


'You haven't upset me,' she said. 'What happened to you and Mum and all the 
other Jews is what is upsetting. Not your distress,' 'I am okay, now,' Edek 
said.  The tour group with the loud guide was standing outside the kosher 
restaurant. 'Soon we will be approaching Jozefa Street,' the guide was saying. 
Ruth looked at the tourists he was leading. They were a patched together 
assortment of older Europeans. No one seemed to be under fifty. None of them 
looked Jewish. 'Steven Spielberg filmed the scene in which the Jews were 
expelled from their houses, in Jozefa Street,' the guide said. 'This was a scene 
which preceded the scenes of the imprisonment of the Jews.'  Ruth wanted to 
interrupt him. She wanted to point out that these episodes he was lecturing 
about were not scenes in a movie, they were events in people's lives. With a 
rearrangement of his words, with a shift in wording, he could refer to both 
Steven Spielberg's film and to what really did take place with Krakow's Jews.  
'The Jews went from Krakow to the ghetto over a bridge,' the guide said. 'That 
bridge can be seen in a famous scene in which the Jews are marching to the 
ghetto.'  'They weren't marching,' Ruth called out. 'They were walking. Soldiers 
march, not a whole community of people who were being forced out of their 
homes.'  Everyone in the group turned around to look at Ruth.
'Ruthie, what has got into you?' Edek said.
'Anger,' she said to Edek.
'I just wanted to make sure you realised you were talking about real people, 
real history, real suffering,' Ruth said to the guide.  'Of course, of course,' 
the guide said. The group was silent. The entire group was staring at Ruth.
'That's all I have to say,' Ruth said to the guide.
'Thank God,' said Edek.
The guide continued his talk. 'When Steven Spielberg filmed the  walk to the 
ghetto,' he said, 'he reversed the direction. He filmed the Jews going from the 
ghetto to Kazimierz.'  'He filmed the actors,' Ruth said to him, 'not the Jews. 
Steven Spielberg was filming actors.'
Edek tugged at her sleeve. 'Ruthie, please, what for are you doing this?' Edek 
said.
'Because it makes me angry,' she said.
'You cannot be angry about everything,' he said.
'I'm not,' she said.
Ruth could feel that she was red-faced. The group was looking at her again.
'It's important to be respectful to those people whose lives you are talking 
about,' she said to the guide.  'We are talking about Kazimierz and Steven 
Spielberg's film,' the guide said.
'Do not answer him,' Edek said. Ruth didn't want to agitate Edek. She didn't 
answer the guide.
'Let's go,' Ruth said to Edek.
'So Steven Spielberg reversed the direction of the Jews marching,' the guide 
said to the group.
'The Jews walking,' Ruth shouted out to the guide, as she and Edek walked off.
'What has got into you?' Edek said.
'This is not a fucking movie site,' she said.
You do not have to use such language,' said Edek. 'And in any case Steven 
Spielberg did make this film here.' Ruth glared at Edek.  'This was the biggest 
film in the history of Poland,' Ruth could "ear the guide saying. 'The set of 
the concentration camp alone cost Six hundred thousand dollars to build,' he 
said.  Brother!' Edek said. 'Six hundred thousand dollars.' About a hundred 
times more expensive than the original,' Ruth aid. Edek laughed. Steven 
Spielberg and his movie-making seemed
 


to have restored Edek's spirits.
'We are now going to follow in Steven Spielberg's footsteps,' Ruth heard the 
guide saying.
'Dream on,' Ruth shouted, in the direction of the guide.
'Why do you tell him he should dream?' Edek said.
' "Dream on" is an expression that means, in your wildest dreams,' Ruth said. 
'The guide said he was following in Steven Spielberg's footsteps.'  'He was 
doing this,' Edek said.
'"Following in someone's footsteps" is also an expression of living up to that 
person's achievements,' Ruth said.
'Now I understand,' Edek said.
Ruth thought her explanation had been as confusing as the expression that she 
was trying to explain. She was glad that Edek had understood.  'Ruthie, please,' 
Edek said. 'If we should meet some more tourists, it is not necessary to talk to 
them.' 'Okay,' she said.
The Yiddish and Hebrew words in the windows of shops and restaurants in Szeroka 
Street were not a sign that there were still Jews in the area. They were signs 
of commerce. Stops on the routes of groups looking for history, bored tourists, 
Jews searching for their roots. If you didn't know, you could think Kazimierz 
was still Jewish-Ruth and Edek entered the Remuh Synagogue. This synagogue was 
built after the Old Synagogue, and was also known as the new synagogue. The 
Remuh Synagogue, a small synagogue, was the only functioning synagogue in Krakow 
today.  An old man was sitting inside the front door of the synagogue-He looked 
very old. His clothes were shabby and he was toothless-He was wearing a 
yarmulke.  'How many synagogues we got to go to?' Edek said.
'This is the last one,' Ruth said. 'Do you think he's a Jew?' she said, looking 
at the old man. Edek asked the old man, in Yiddish, if he was Jewish. The old 
man shook his head. 'I am Jewish,' he said to Edek in Polish, 'but I don't speak 
Yiddish.'  'He looks Polish to me,' Ruth said.
'What is wrong with you?' Edek said. He bowed to the old man.
'This synagogue was used by the Germans as a storage room for rubberised sacks,' 
Ruth said. 'The sacks were used to carry corpses.'  'I am ready to go,' Edek 
said.
'Can we just look at the cemetery out the back?' Ruth said.
'Okay,' Edek said. He looked glum.
A group of Israeli schoolchildren was in the cemetery. They were teenagers. 
About thirteen or fourteen. There were more than thirty of them. They almost 
filled the small cemetery. Ruth was glad to see them. Glad to see signs of 
Jewish life.  'Shalom,' Edek said to several of the teenagers.
'Shalom,' they repeated. One of them, a tall, skinny redheaded boy, came over 
and patted Edek on the back. 'Shalom,' he said.
Ruth and Edek walked around the cemetery. Ruth felt peaceful. Why did she feel 
so peaceful in the company of the dead? It was a strange phrase. The company of 
the dead. Could the dead keep you company? She took Edek's arm. She felt bad 
about dragging him into synagogues and cemeteries.  The Nazis had destroyed this 
cemetery. They had dismantled and shattered tombstones. The cemetery was now in 
the process of being restored. Pieces of tombstones too shattered to be pieced 
together Were embedded in an internal wall. The wall contained particles of 
people's names, scraps of dates, fragments of numbers and letters, and snippets 
of symbols. It was a strangely poetic mosaic.  Ruth stopped beside a tombstone 
that read that Gitel, the daughter of Moses Auerbach of Regensburg, a 
grandmother of the famed Rabbi
 


Moses Isserles was buried here. Ruth felt she could feel Gitel. 'I feel she had 
a good life,' she said to Edek. Ruth surprised herself by saying this. She 
normally didn't reveal the more unruly and irrational of her thoughts.  'She was 
very generous to the poor,' Edek translated from the Hebrew on the tombstone.
'Do you think it's silly to imagine that you can feel someone's life?' Ruth 
asked Edek.
'Maybe,' he said. 'And maybe not. Maybe some people can see things what other 
people cannot see. You did always know things what other people did not know.'  
'Really?' said Ruth.
'You could see things,' Edek said. Ruth felt rattled. 'You could see that Mrs 
Watson next door was not happy with her husband,' Edek said. Ruth was relieved. 
It was perception Edek was talking about, not telepathy.  'You did tell Mum that 
Mr Watson was not very nice to Mrs Watson when you was six,' Edek said.
'When I was six?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek. She must have been a nosy, if precocious, child, Ruth thought.
'You did say that Mrs Watson did used to have someone else who was nicer to 
her,' Edek said.
'What?' said Ruth.
'That is what you said,' said Edek. 'And this was true. She had a first husband 
we did know nothing about.'
'She must have told me about it,' Ruth said.
Ruth remembered spending most of her Sunday afternoons, until she was ten or 
eleven, watching Mrs Watson make apple pies. Every Sunday afternoon Mrs Watson 
baked four apple pies to take to the Methodist church that night. The church, 
around the corner, fed the poor every Sunday night.  Ruth used to love to watch 
the pastry being rolled, the apples being peeled and cored. She never tired of 
watching Mrs Watson pinch the sides of the filled pastry together, and then make 
decorative marks with a fork around the rim of the pie.  'Mrs Watson did say she 
did never tell anybody about her first husband,' Edek said. 'Not even her son 
did know.'
'She must have told me,' Ruth said.
It was possible to tell a lot about a person without being told things, 
specifically, anyway, Ruth thought. She remembered Mrs Watson's wistful, faraway 
expression. Ruth had known that Mrs Watson was thinking about someone else. 
Someone she had loved. Someone who was no longer alive. Ruth had had a lot of 
experience in identifying that sort of longing. She had been exposed to so much 
wishful, wistful thinking.  'Mrs Watson was married to someone who died,' Ruth 
said.
'You did tell Mum this,' Edek said. 'Mum did ask Mrs Watson. Poor Mrs Watson did 
cry for nearly a whole day after Mum did ask her that question. She said she 
never did tell anyone in her whole life about this dead husband. Not her son, 
not her husband. She didn't want her husband to think he was not the first man. 
In those days that sort of thing was important. Do you understand?'  'I 
understand,' Ruth said. She didn't want Edek to expand on the importance of 
virginity in marriage, in those days.
'Mrs Watson's first husband died in the war,' Ruth said.
'That is exactly what she did tell Mum.'
'She must have told me, too,' Ruth said.
Edek looked at her, in a bothered way. 'You did always know what people was 
thinking,' he said. He shook his head. 'But this about Mrs Watson's dead husband 
is not something it is easy to know from a person's thinking,' he said.  'Mrs 
Watson must have told me,' Ruth said.
'She must have told you,' Edek said. 'My sister Fela was like this.
 


She did know what people was thinking.' Edek walked, in front of Ruth, still 
shaking his head.
Ruth was bothered. She couldn't remember Mrs Watson telling her. She reassured 
herself. You could deduce a lot about someone without a word being spoken. 
Demeanour and movements and gestures and habits and expressions were very 
revealing. There was no need to feel bothered. Edek's sister Fela must have 
observed people carefully, too. Ruth was cheered by that thought. Cheered by 
that alliance.
Outside the entrance to the Jordan Jewish Bookshop and the Noah's Ark Cafe, a 
young woman approached Edek and Ruth.
'Would you like a guided tour of the Schindler's factory area?' the young woman 
said. 'No thanks,' said Ruth. 'Why not?' said Edek.
'You really want to see Schindler's factory?' Ruth said. 'Why not?' Edek said. 
'It is something interesting.' 'Do you know much about the factory and its 
history?' Ruth asked the young woman.
'Jewish studies is one of my subjects at the University of Krakow,' the young 
woman said. She put out her hand. 'My name is Helena.' Ruth and Edek shook hands 
with Helena. 'Are you Jewish?' Ruth asked her.
'No,' she said. 'But I am very sympathetic to their history.' 'What do your 
parents think of you studying Jewish Studies?' Ruth said.
'They are not very happy with this,' Helena said. 'But they have become less 
unhappy. They can see that I can support myself during my studies with money 
that I earn as a guide.'
'So you get regular work taking these tours?' Ruth said.
'Yes, very much work,' said Helena. 'There are many guides like me. The bookshop 
provides its own guides. But I am cheaper.'
'Okay, we'll do the tour,' Ruth said. 'But first I need to have a cup of tea. 
Can we take ten minutes to go into the bookstore and the cafe?'
'Of course,' Helena said. 'I will wait here.'
In the Noah's Ark Cafe, an eighteen-inch-high carved wooden figure of an 
orthodox Jew playing a cello stood on top of several of the tables. Three 
yarmulkes, black ones with gold trimming, were perched on top of the piano. 
There was Hebrew writing on the walls and a plaintive Yiddish song was playing 
as background music. None of the customers in the cafe looked Jewish.
Ruth felt sick. She was sick of Jews being reduced to caricatures and turned 
into artifacts. Edek sat down at one of the tables. He started to hum along to 
the Yiddish song. It was a lullaby. A lullaby about a mother singing her child 
to sleep. Sleep my small child, sleep, the mother sang.
The menu of the Noah's Ark Cafe had 'Jewish cheesecake' as well as an assortment 
of other food described as 'Jewish'.
'I think I will have a cheesecake,' Edek said. 'And a cappuccino.'
'I'm not sure they do a cappuccino in a mock-Jewish cafe in Poland,' Ruth said. 
The waitress came up to them. There was no cappuccino. Edek settled for a cup of 
tea. 'Is this cafe owned by Jews?' Ruth said to the waitress.
'No,' the waitress said.
'Why do you ask such questions?' Edek said to Ruth.
'Because I want to know,' she said.
'It is not always necessary to know everything,' he said. The cheesecake 
arrived. It was small and flat.
It's not even a Jewish cheesecake,' Ruth said. Edek tried the cheesecake.
It is very nice, as a matter of fact,' he said.
 


Ruth felt furious. What were these Poles doing mimicking a Jewish life they had 
been so happy to see disappear? They were making money, that was what they were 
doing. Edek finished his cheesecake. Mattel mottel, one of his favourite Yiddish 
songs, was now playing in the background. Edek started humming again. He turned 
in his seat and looked around him at the rest of the cafe. 'It is very nice,' he 
said.
'It's created by Poles,' Ruth said. Edek shrugged his shoulders. The Jordan 
Jewish Bookshop and travel agency were also not owned by Jews. There were books, 
artifacts and pieces of jewellery for sale. Silver Stars of David, and Hebrew 
letters on silver chains. There were candle holders and Passover dishes. A small 
sign said that you could buy books and souvenirs of Jewish culture, and maps, 
guides, and postcards, and cassettes of Jewish music.
Another sign offered three tours. Each tour was printed in bold capitals: 
sightseeing of Jewish Kazimierz, retracing Schindler's list and trip to 
auschwitz-birkenau. The store looked a bit disordered. A bit untidy. As though 
the owners hadn't quite known how to display the merchandise. Surely Jews 
wouldn't shop here, Ruth thought. She spotted a book on Auschwitz on one of the 
upper shelves. It contained reproductions of all of the documents left behind by 
the Germans. Ruth had never seen the book before. It was a large thick book. She 
asked to look at it. She flipped through the pages. It was a very interesting 
book. Ruth felt torn. She didn't want to contribute to this business, but she 
wanted the book. 'I'll have it, she said to the man behind the counter.
Edek was waiting outside with Helena, the guide. 'The person who owns the Jordan 
Jewish Bookshop isn't Jewish, is he?' Ruth asked Helena. Edek glared at Ruth. 
She ignored him-'No,' Helena said. 'But he is a very good man. Very sympathetic 
to Jews.'
'See,' said Edek.
'See what?' Ruth said.
'Forget about it,' Edek said. 'We are going to walk to the Schindler's factory.'
Ruth was surprised that Edek had agreed to walk. She had thought he would want 
to get this tour over as quickly as possible. 'Good,' she said.
Edek and Helena walked ahead of her. Ruth could see that Edek liked Helena. He 
was smiling and chatting to her. He was telling her about his life in Australia. 
He was telling her about his job as manager of the shipping department of the 
sporting goods store, and his subsequent position in the health food store. He 
explained at length how important it was that the cleanliness of the store was 
maintained in these health food places. Helena looked riveted.
Ten minutes later, they were still in the square. Edek and Helena had stopped 
walking and were deep in conversation. Ruth felt she had waited long enough. 
'Can we move on?' she said.
'Of course,' Helena said.
'We was just going to start walking again,' Edek said. 'Helena is a very nice 
girl." Helena blushed.
They walked for a few minutes. They stopped outside a building on Szeroka 
Street.
'Here at number six was housed from the sixteenth century the community 
bathhouse and the mikve.'
'See she knows what is a mikve,' Edek said to Ruth. Helena nodded. A ritual bath 
for women before certain occasions,' she said.
'Yes, yes, that is a mikve,' Edek said. Helena looked very pleased.
Helena was a sweet girl, really, Ruth thought. She couldn't be more than twenty 
or twenty-one.
This bathhouse was called the big bathhouse,' Helena said. 'This was in order to 
distinguish it from the small bathhouse which was near Nowy Square.'
Very interesting,' Edek said. Helena was clearly finding Edek
 


interesting. More interesting than Ruth. Ruth noticed that Helena was addressing 
all of her remarks to Edek.
This building was renovated and modernised between 1974 and 1976,' Helena said 
to Edek. 'It is now occupied by the Krakow branch of the Historical Monuments 
Restoration Workshop.' Edek nodded his head. They set off again. Ruth looked at 
her watch. It was two p.m. She hoped that they would get to Schindler's factory 
before nightfall.
Helena stopped outside another building. 'Here on Bocheriska Street was the 
Jewish Theatre of Krakow from 1926 to 1939," she said.
'A very nice building,' Edek said. Ruth was astonished. Since when had Edek been 
interested in buildings? He had never expressed any interest in any building. 
Ruth looked at Edek. He was smiling at Helena. He looked so happy. He had always 
liked a pretty girl or an attractive woman. And they had liked Edek. It seemed 
that they still did. Helena was beaming at Edek.
'Ida Kamihska, the famous Jewish actress, played regularly in this theatre,' 
Helena said to Edek.
'See, she knows Ida Kaminska,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Since 1945 this theatre has 
been occupied by the amateur theatre of the railway men,' Helena said.
'They do probably a very good job,' Edek said. Ruth couldn't believe Edek's 
pronouncement. He knew nothing about theatre and less about railway men. Helena 
seemed pleased.
'Can we get a move on?' Ruth said. 'I'd like to get to Schindler's factory.'
'Certainly,' Helena said. She and Edek began to walk faster. Ruth followed them.
Edek looked happier than he had for days, Ruth thought. Ruth was glad that they 
had hired Helena as a guide. She knew that her father loved her, but too much 
time solely in her company had
probably depressed him, flattened his spirits. Helena's company was good for 
him. Ruth thought that some of the places she had chosen to visit with Edek had 
probably dampened his spirits, too. Few people would find ghettos and cemeteries 
uplifting.
They were well away from Kazimierz now. This part of Krakow was as run-down and 
dilapidated as any part of Lodz They passed an old woman, sitting at a table in 
the middle of a small square. The old woman had a dirty red and black cotton 
scarf tied around her head. An odd assortment of plastic bags and pieces of 
cardboard were on the table. In the middle of the table, on top of two sheets of 
white paper, was an enormous, pink, slumped, plucked turkey.
The turkey had no feet. Its legs were sticking out, rigidly, in front of it, as 
though rigor mortis had already set in. But the bird looked too fresh, and maybe 
rigor mortis didn't set in if you had already been plucked and decapitated. Ruth 
made a note to herself to look up rigor mortis and how it occurs, in one of her 
many medical encyclopedias. A bucket with scraps of plastic was under the table. 
Was this woman hoping to sell the turkey whole? Or in pieces? Ruth couldn't see 
a knife. Whom was she hoping to sell this piece of poultry to? Ruth looked 
around the square. There didn't seem to be any customers.
At the other side of the square there were two more stalls. Ruth had walked past 
them. At each of these stalls, a few screwdrivers, nails, hammers, and other 
bits and pieces Ruth didn't recognise had been set up on folding tables. Ruth 
worried about who was going to buy the turkey. The woman must know what she was 
doing, Ruth decided. She wouldn't have just set up a table anywhere, in the hope 
of selling a dead turkey. Ruth smiled at the woman. The woman glared at her.
They arrived at Schindler's factory. Ruth recognised the curved gates from the 
movie.
'Look, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'The factory of Oscar Schindler.'
 


'Here where we are standing at four Lipowa Street,' Helena said, 'was the 
factory of Oscar Schindler. Because of Oscar Schindler's contacts with the 
Wehrmacht he managed to build a small factory of forty-five employees into a 
prosperous factory that employed seven hundred and fifty Jews from the ghetto, 
which was very near to this factory.' Ruth and Edek nodded. It was strange to 
look at this building, in this quiet street, and think of the people who must 
have walked in and out of this gate. Jews, Gestapo, Poles, Germans. 'Oscar 
Schindler saved altogether one thousand two hundred Jews,' Helena said.  'I do 
know two Jews what he did save,' Edek said to Helena. 'Two brothers from 
Melbourne.' Ruth knew the two men Edek was talking about. Both brothers were 
musicians.  'Steven Spielberg did win seven Oscars for this film, Schindler's 
List,' Helena said. Ruth groaned. 'Steven Spielberg did film Schindler's List in 
thirty-five locations in Krakow,' Helena said. 'Really?' said Edek.  Ruth tried 
to work out how to derail the Steven Spielberg speech tactfully. She didn't want 
to offend Helena. She couldn't think of how to do it.  'Do you know Steven 
Spielberg?' Helena said to Ruth. Ruth laughed.
'No,' she said. 'No one ordinary knows Steven Spielberg,' she said. 'And I don't 
know if he knows anybody ordinary.' 'Really?' Helena said.  'Of course,' said 
Edek, with authority. Ruth saw that Edek was eager to contribute to this 
conversation.
'Only celebrities know Steven Spielberg,' Ruth said. 'That is the truth,' Edek 
said. 'How would a person what is a normal person meet such a person like Mr 
Spielberg who is not a person what meets normal persons?'  Edek was repeating 
himself in his rush to be an authority on the
subject and impress Helena, Ruth thought. 'President Clinton knows Steven 
Spielberg,' Ruth said to Helena. 'President Clinton and Mrs Clinton stayed with 
Steven Spielberg and his wife, at their beach house, in the summer,' Ruth said.  
'My daughter does know everything,' Edek said.
'It was on the front page of every New York newspaper,' Ruth  said.
'So the president of America was a guest at Steven Spielberg's house?' Helena 
said. Ruth wondered if this new piece of information would be tacked on to all 
the future Schindler's factory tours.  'Yes,' she said to Helena. Helena looked 
very pleased to be the recipient of this fact. Edek looked very pleased to have 
pleased Helena.  'I know someone who knows Steven Spielberg's mother,' Ruth 
said. She stepped back in surprise at what she had just said. She couldn't 
believe what she had just said. Why had she said that? She had obviously been 
carried away. Buoyed by the success of the Clinton news item. Edek and Helena 
both moved towards her.  'You do know somebody what knows the mother of Steven 
Spielberg?' Edek said. He looked wildly impressed.
'You know someone who knows Steven Spielberg's mother?'
Helena said.
Ruth felt foolish. She couldn't believe the turn the conversation had taken. 
Still, it was her fault. She had started it.
'I think we should catch a taxi back to the hotel,' Ruth said. Edek looked 
disappointed. 'I'm tired,' Ruth said.
'My daughter does need a rest,' Edek said.
'This former Schindler factory is now occupied by a company that manufactures 
electronic components,' Helena said. 'I will go inside and order a taxi for you. 
They know me, here.'  Ruth and Edek waited outside. 'She is a very nice girl,' 
Edek said to Ruth.
'She is a very nice girl,' Ruth said.
 


Ruth was tired. She felt a bit sick. The taxi Helena had arranged for them stank 
of cigarettes. She should have something to eat, she decided.  'Do you want some 
lunch?' Ruth said.
'No thanks,' Edek said. 'I will wait until dinner.'
'I've booked a Jewish dinner at the Samson Restaurant,' Ruth said. 'The dinner 
comes with a Jewish cabaret.'  'This does sound interesting,' Edek said. 'A 
cabaret.'
'Will I order you a small sandwich at the hotel?' Ruth said.
'I can order a sandwich by myself if I do get a bit hungry,' Edek said.
'Okay,' she said.
'Would you be interested to go to a visit to the Auschwitz Museum?' the cab 
driver said. 'I will do a very good price. Very cheap.' Ruth was stunned. How 
many people were flogging trips to Auschwitz, in this city? And how did they 
know whom to offer the trips to? The takers, in this market place, the potential 
clients, must be clearly marked, Ruth thought.  'We do not want to go there in 
this car,' Edek hissed to Ruth. In Polish, Edek said to the driver, 'Thank you 
very much for your offer. We have already made prior arrangements.' Ruth was 
irritated by Edek's excessive politeness to this tobacco-stained driver.  'It 
will be better a Mercedes to get for such a long trip,' Edek said to Ruth.  'It 
is the Auschwitz death camp,' Ruth said slowly to the driver. 'Not the Auschwitz 
Museum.'  'It is not necessary to say this,' Edek said to Ruth.
'I've already booked a Mercedes,' she said to Edek.
'Good,' he said. 'Please do not say anything more to this driver.
'Okay,' she said. She didn't want to spoil Edek's good mood.
'Only young Germans do visit Auschwitz,' the taxi driver said'
'He speaks English,' Edek said to Ruth.
'Old Germans, never,' the driver said. 'Who knows, maybe they are Wehrmacht*
'Do a lot of young Germans go?' Ruth said. 'Quite a few young Germans visit the 
Auschwitz Museum,' the  driver said.
'The death camp,' said Ruth.
'Ruthie,' Edek said.
'Sorry, Dad,' she said. She was glad that young Germans were visiting Auschwitz. 
It was a good sign. It was too late for old Germans anyway. They had too much at 
stake, to repent now. They had to justify so much. They would unravel if they 
unpicked a few of the historical myths they had stitched together.  'Are you 
going to have a rest?' Ruth asked Edek when they got back  in the hotel. 'I do 
not need a rest,' he said. 'I will read a bit. I did just start  today a new 
book.'
'What's the new book called?' Ruth said.
'Thrusts from Above,' Edek said.
Thrusts from Above? What on earth was her father reading? "Thrusts from Above? 
she said.  'It is a very good book,' Edek said. 'It is about a man who did used 
to be a pilot. A very good pilot.'  Don't tell me anymore,' Ruth said. 'That's 
enough.'
'That's enough?' Edek said. 'I did tell you nothing. It is a very  interesting 
story.'
I've got some work to do,' Ruth said. 'How about I meet you downstairs in the 
lounge, in a couple of hours?'  'Okey dokey,' Edek said.
Don't forget to order something to eat if you're hungry,' Ruth said.
 


'I am not hungry,' Edek said. 'But I think I will sit in the lunge and have a 
drink of soda water.'
'Good idea," Ruth said. She walked off smiling.
Ruth sat down on the bed, in her room. It was a nice room. It was large and 
airy. Filled with light. She had her own balcony which looked out on to a small, 
cobbled street. Edek's room was even bigger than hers. He had been very pleased 
with his room. She felt she should check in with Max. To make sure things were 
under control. Under control. Could anything ever really be under control? In 
order? Probably not. She didn't think she was destined for an orderly life. A 
life under control. All the order she had tried to put in place seemed to have 
frayed, or split at the seams. Why was she using sewing metaphors? She had no 
idea. She was tired.
She should call Max, she thought. She put her feet up on the bed. Why was she so 
tired? Why was she so much more tired than Edek? She was so much younger. She 
was probably going to be a washout of an old woman, if she lived that long. She 
always added the coda, if she lived that long. As though to omit it would tempt 
fate. Incur wrath. Whose wrath would she be incurring? She had never been too 
clear on that.
Ruth dialled Max's home number.
'Hi, great to hear your voice,' Max said. Max sounded very chirpy-Too chirpy for 
Ruth. 'Hi Max,' she said.
'Let me ring you back,' Max said. 'You're in Krakow?' 'Yes,' Ruth said. She 
began to tell Max not to bother, but Max had already hung up. Why did Max sound 
so bright? It was late at night, in New York. Maybe any New Yorker would sound 
excessively bright, in Poland. The phone rang. It was Max. 'You sound 
exhausted,' Max said.
'You could tell that from a ten-second conversation?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Max.
'Well, the trip hasn't been a picnic,' she said.
'You didn't expect it to be, did you?' Max said.
'I don't know what I expected,' said Ruth.
'The Observer rang,' Max said. 'They asked if we wanted to increase the size of 
our ad. They've got a special on. For two weeks we can double the size of our ad 
for not much extra.'
'We don't need a bigger ad,' Ruth said.
'Can't we try it?' Max said. 'It won't cost much.'
'We don't want to look like a multinational corporation,' said
Ruth.
'Three inches by three inches is hardly multinational,' Max said. 'There are 
some things that are more effective small,' Ruth said. 'You're not thinking 
about men, are you?' Max said, and laughed.
'No, not at all,' Ruth said. She hardly thought about men. Her brain already 
seemed too crowded without adding thoughts of men. Too many men. Was that what 
the gypsy woman had said? What a strange thing to say to her. 'You've got sex on 
the brain, Max,' Ruth said. 'I've noticed it, ever since you took up with the 
married man.'
Five minutes and thirty seconds it took you to mention him,' Max said. 'I had a 
bet with Bern. I said it would take you less than five minutes. I owe Bern two 
dollars.'
Let's get through the rest of the business,' Ruth said. A client asked if we 
could do a thank-you-for-your-introduction-to-an-agent letter,' Max said. 'He's 
an actor, and he said he wants a really special letter. The person he's writing 
to introduced him to one of New York's biggest theatrical agents.' Can't you do 
it, Max?' Ruth said. 'I've tried,' Max said. 'I just can't seem to get it 
right.'
I
 


'Did the agent take the actor on?' Ruth said.
'The actor doesn't know yet,' said Max.
'Okay, I'll do it,' Ruth said. 'Fax me the details.'
'He needs it this week,' Max said.
'I'll do it in the next couple of days,' Ruth said.
'Thanks,' Max said.
'What else is new?' Ruth said.
'John Sharp called,' Max said. 'He insisted that he had to talk to you 
personally.'
'Did you give him my number?' Ruth said. 'No,' Max said.
Ruth was relieved. John Sharp was immensely wealthy and, like many of the 
immensely wealthy, expected attention the moment he requested it. Ruth wasn't up 
to getting a call from John Sharp.  'I know he's a big client,' Max said. 'But 
he makes me mad. He speaks to me like I'm a servant. He's just a tall, slobby, 
unattractive, overweight man who happens to be very rich.'  'It's as though I'm 
a servant, not like I'm a servant,' Ruth said. 'I knew you'd pick up on that,' 
said Max. 'Anyway, I can't stand John Sharp. I hope he chokes on a big tin of 
Beluga caviar.'  Ruth laughed. 'You have to be careful what you say about other 
people,' she said. 'It could have repercussions. Come back at you in some form 
of karma.'  'What's happened to you, Ruth?' Max said. 'Something's changed. 
You're sounding mystical. You need to get back to New York.' 'You're right,' 
Ruth said. 'I do.'  Edek was sitting in an armchair in the lounge of the Mimoza. 
A large, half-eaten platter of cheeses, smoked and pickled fish, pate and cold 
meats was on a coffee table in front of him. The coffee table was crowded. 
Around the platter were glasses, napkins and three  almost empty bowls of nuts. 
On either side of Edek, also in armchairs, were the two women Ruth and Edek had 
exchanged greetings with, at breakfast. Edek and the two women were laughing 
raucously. Edek saw Ruth. He stood up and waved to her. The women stood up, too.  
Edek introduced Ruth. 'This is my daughter Ruthie,' Edek said. 'And Ruthie, this 
is Walentyna and Zofia.' Both women rushed to shake Ruth's hand. Zofia, the 
larger of the women, shook Ruth's hand first. Her handshake was as firm as her 
sturdy appearance suggested. She gripped Ruth's hand and shook it until Ruth's 
knuckles hurt. Walentyna, the dainty one, had a demure handshake.  Ruth looked 
at what was left of the food on the coffee table. Edek and the women had clearly 
been having a good time. 'Sit down,' Edek said. He pulled over a chair for Ruth.  
'Please have something to eat,' Zofia said.
'My daughter does not eat,' Edek said.
'You don't eat?' Zofia said. 'I read, in America, that women don't eat.'
'They like to be slim, in America,' Walentyna said.
'Too slim is not good for a woman,' Zofia said. She looked at Ruth. 'You know 
what I mean?' she said. Ruth had no idea what Zofia meant. She nodded her head. 
She didn't want to find out. Zofia's strength and vigour intimidated her. She 
felt flimsy next to Zofia. How must Walentyna feel? Walentyna was a fraction of 
Zofia's size.  'I do eat,' Ruth said. 'I eat plenty.' She patted her hips to 
emphasize that she was not slightly built, and not starving herself.  'She used 
to be a fatty,' Edek said.
'She is not fat at all,' Walentyna said.
'She is not fat,' said Zofia. 'She is thin.'
'I'm not thin,' Ruth said.
'You are thin,' Zofia said. 'Have some liverwurst.'
 


'It is a very good liverwurst,' Edek said.
Ruth sat down. She felt dazed. How had this conversation begun? And how had she 
been sucked into its vortex so quickly? Here she was patting her hips, and 
arguing about whether she was thin or not. Ruth looked at Edek. He hadn't used 
the term 'fatty' for years.  'Your father has been talking about you,' 
Walentyna, the smaller woman, said. A sense of dread filled Ruth. What else had 
her father been saving?  'He said you are rich,' Zofia said. Ruth was 
speechless. Of course, she should have guessed. 'I'm not rich,' she said.  'It's 
good to be rich,' Zofia said. This came out as a forceful statement.
'You should not be ashamed to be rich,' Walentyna said. 'I'm not ashamed,' Ruth 
said.
'Of course she is not ashamed,' Zofia said. 'Nobody is ashamed to be rich.'
'My daughter is,' said Edek.
What had she walked into? Ruth wondered. She wished she hadn't joined this 
little gathering. Why was Edek aligning himself against her, with these two 
women?  'You want a beer?' Zofia said to Ruth. 'She will have a cup of tea with 
lemon,' Edek said. 'Ladies, let me order you another drink,' Edek said to the 
two women in Polish.  'We can speak English,' Zofia said. Ruth wished they'd 
speak Polish. She wouldn't be expected to join in.
'Of course,' Edek said. 'My daughter does not speak too good a Polish.'
'I will have a beer,' Walentyna said. 'I will have a schnapps,' said Zofia.
Walentyna looked disturbed. 'I will have a schnapps, too, not a beer,' she said. 
Zofia turned to Walentyna.
'You do not drink schnapps,' she said. 'I would like a schnapps now please,' 
Walentyna said. 'Of course,' Edek said. He called over the waiter and ordered 
the drinks.  'I'll have chamomile tea,' Ruth said to Edek. 'Bring some more 
liverwurst, too,' Edek said to the waiter. Ruth wondered whose account this get-
together was being billed  to.
'Put it on my bill please,' Edek said to the waiter.
'Your father tells us that this trip was planned by you,' Zofia said.
'Yes, it was my idea,' Ruth said. 'Possibly not my best idea.'
'Why?' said Walentyna. 'Your father says it is very interesting.'
Zofia interrupted Walentyna. 'He says he is very happy to have this experience,' 
Zofia said to Ruth.
Walentyna looked hurt. 'I was going to tell this young woman how happy her 
father is with her,' she said to Ruth.
'So I did it for you?' Zofia said. Walentyna looked crushed now. Ruth wondered 
why the women were travelling together. They looked like such an unlikely and 
incompatible couple.  'Have some more cheese, Edek,' Zofia said. She patted him 
on the arm. 'A grown man needs to eat.' Few people, Ruth was sure, had felt the 
need to encourage Edek to eat. 'My father has a very good appetite,' Ruth said 
to Zofia.  Zofia looked at Walentyna and rolled her eyes. 'I think we can see 
this,' she said. Walentyna smiled coyly. Ruth was startled. It was not Edek's 
appetite for food Zofia was referring to.  Ruth looked at Zofia. Zofia was 
wearing a skin-tight short black skirt and a low-cut white T-shirt. Her legs 
were bare in winter. They Were sturdy, firm legs, as firm as Zofia's handshake. 
Walentyna was dressed in a loose beige cotton blouse and a brown pleated skirt. 
* he skirt was entirely the wrong length and had too many pleats for such a 
slight body. Walentyna looked enveloped in pleats.
 


Both women looked about sixty. Zofia saw Ruth looking at Walentyna's skirt. 
'This is a beautiful skirt Walentyna has, no?" Zofia said.
'It's beautiful,' Ruth said.
'I chose the skirt and the blouse for her,' Zofia said. Ruth couldn't believe 
that Zofia had chosen Walentyna's clothes. Everything Zofia had on was designed 
to display exactly what she was made of. The outfit Zofia had chosen for 
Walentyna covered Walentyna more thoroughly than a blanket.
'Have you two been friends for a long time?' Ruth said.
'Fifty-six years,' said Walentyna.
'Since we were children,' Zofia said.
Zofia and Walentyna's roles were too established, Ruth thought, for any 
modification. She felt sorry for Walentyna. Walentyna was smiling. 'We are very 
lucky to have each other,' she said. 'When my husband died, it would not have 
been easy to manage without Zofia.'
'When my husband died, Walentyna was very good to me,' Zofia said.
'It is good to have friends,' Edek said. Zofia leaned over and slapped Edek on 
the knee. 'It's very good to have a friend,' she said.
The drinks arrived. Ruth tried to catch Edek's eye. She wanted to signal to him 
that she would like to leave, soon. She couldn't get Edek to look at her. Edek 
was trying to balance a large slice of liver-wurst on a small piece of rye 
bread.
'Do you like to swim?' Zofia said to Ruth. Ruth nodded. 'I like to swim every 
day,' Zofia said. 'I go in the water every morning. In summer and in winter, I 
swim in the sea. It is very good for the skin and the stomach to swim.' She 
slapped her legs and arms. 'I feel very good after I swim,' she said.
'She swims in winter,' Walentyna said.
'I love to swim in winter,' Zofia said, her voice growing even louder
than its naturally loud state. 'I have a cold shower every morning before I go 
in the sea.'
'You live near the sea?' Edek said. 'We live in Sopot,' said Walentyna. 'I've 
been to Sopot,' Ruth said. 'My daughter knows everything,' said Edek. 'You have 
been to Sopot?' Zofia said.
'Yes,' Ruth said. 'I've walked along that wide boardwalk with the seats on 
either side, the one that goes out to sea.'
'That is where I swim,' Zofia shouted, 'I jump into the water from this place. 
Did you see the steps into the water?' 'Yes,' said Ruth.
'That is where I jump.' Zofia stood up and imitated herself jumping into the 
water. Zofia's bust was inches from Edek's head. 'Woosh,' she said, as she 
pretended to jump.
'She must be good at swimming,' Edek said with admiration in his voice to Ruth.
'Have some more fish,' Zofia said to Edek, scooping some smoked fish up with a 
fork and putting it on Edek's plate. 'Thank you,' Edek said. 'Did you like 
Sopot?' Walentyna asked Ruth. 'Yes, I did,' Ruth said.
'You went to Sopot for a holiday?' said Zofia. 'No, I was in Gdansk,' Ruth said. 
'I went to Gdansk because I wanted to go to Stuthof, the concentration camp 
where mother was transported to after Auschwitz. Stuthof, like Sopot, is close 
to Gdansk.' Both women looked very solemn. 'I went to Sopot to try and recover 
from the day in Stuthof,' Ruth said. Walentyna looked tearful. She looked away 
from Ruth. Zofia took Edek's hand.
'I am very sorry about this,' Zofia said to Edek. 'The things that happened to 
the Jews of Poland should never be forgotten.' Ruth looked at Zofia. Zofia's 
face was red, she looked distressed.
 


There was an uncomfortable silence. Ruth wondered how she could suggest that she 
and Edek had to leave. Zofia was still holding Edek's hand. 'I think I'll have a 
piece of pickled cucumber,' Ruth said. She reached across to the platter. 
Zofia's arm was in the way. Zofia removed her hand from Edek's hand. Ruth chose 
a large piece of pickled cucumber.  'You are a good daughter, Ruthie,' Zofia 
said. Walentyna nodded. Ruth wished Zofia wouldn't call her Ruthie. It was 
disconcerting. Ruthie was too familiar a name to be used by a stranger. Why had 
Edek introduced her as Ruthie?  'I can see you are a good daughter,' Zofia said, 
again. 'Ruthie's mother did know Ruthie was a good daughter,' Edek said. 'Her 
mother is not here with us.'  'She is in Australia?' Walentyna said. Both women 
angled their heads anxiously, towards Edek.
'He means she is no longer alive,' Ruth said. 'My mother died fourteen years 
ago.'
'Nearly fifteen,' Edek said. 'She was a young woman?' Zofia said. 'Sixty,' said 
Ruth.
'Like me,' said Zofia. 'It is terrible.' Walentyna nodded in agreement.
'We loved her very much,' Ruth said. 'I loved my husband like this,' Zofia said. 
'I loved my husband also,' Walentyna said. The lounge was filled with smoke. The 
smoke was stinging Ruth's eyes. The smoke didn't seem to affect anyone else in 
the room. This lounge was not filled with allergic-to-smoke New Yorkers. One of 
Ruth's eyes was watering. She waved the smoke away.  'What time are we going to 
this cabaret?' Edek said to Ruth.
'Seven o'clock,' Ruth said.
Edek looked at his watch. 'We still got a bit of time,' he said.
'You are going to a cabaret?' Zofia said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'My daughter did book tickets.' Ruth hoped neither of the 
women would ask to join them.
'We're having dinner there, too,' she said. Although looking at the fish and 
meat and cheese her father had eaten, Ruth couldn't see how he could possibly 
eat dinner.  'Is it a buffet, the dinner?' Edek said. Ruth smiled to herself. 
Edek was still interested in dinner. She really shouldn't underestimate his 
appetite.  'I don't think it's a buffet,' Ruth said.
'Do you like a buffet?' Edek said to the women. They both nodded. 'I do like a 
buffet very much,' Edek said.
Ruth felt agitated. How could she suggest to Edek that they leave? She didn't 
want to offend Zofia or Walentyna. She realised with a surprise that she liked 
these women. There was a straightforwardness about Zofia and Walentyna. It was 
hard to be straightforward in New York. There was a hidden agenda in most 
people's interactions. Zofia and Walentyna, Ruth thought, were definitely not 
trying to disguise themselves.  'When I was in Las Vegas, I did eat at a 
different buffet every night,' Edek said. Ruth looked at him. If Edek started 
talking about the buffets in Las Vegas, they would never leave the lounge of the 
Hotel Mimoza.  'You have been in Las Vegas?' said Walentyna.
'He just said he was in Las Vegas,' Zofia said.
'For five dollars a person you can eat as much food what you like,' Edek said.
'Five dollars,' Zofia and Walentyna said simultaneously.
'You can go to a buffet twenty-four hours a day in Las Vegas,' Edek said. 'You 
can eat a steak or a schnitzel or a spaghetti and there are plenty of cakes.'  
'I like a schnitzel very much,' Zofia said.
 


The also,' said Walentyna.
Edek talked to the two women about the varieties of buffets avail-able and the 
quantities to be consumed at the buffets until Ruth thought Zofia, if not 
Walentyna, was ready to move to Las Vegas. Edek was red-faced with the memories 
of what he had eaten in Las Vegas. He told Zofia and Walentyna about the 
Carnival World Buffet, the Orleans Buffet, the Boulder Station Buffet, the 
Fiesta Buffet, the Rio Suites Buffet. Ruth's head was spinning. Why were they 
talking about the Carnival World Buffet, or the Fiesta Buffet in Las Vegas? They 
were in Krakow, a million miles from Las Vegas.  'Do you visit Las Vegas?' 
Walentyna said to Ruth.
'No,' Ruth said.
'I did want her to come to Las Vegas,' Edek said. Ruth stopped him before he 
could begin another Las Vegas story.  'We have to go, Dad,' she said.
'Can I buy you ladies another drink before we go?" Edek said. Ruth groaned.
'One more schnapps would be very nice,' said Zofia.
'For me also,' said Walentyna.
Edek went off to find the drink waiter.
'Your father is a very nice man,' Walentyna said to Ruth.
'A man like that would crush you,' Zofia said to Walentyna. 'One minute on top 
of you and he would break your bones.' Ruth was stunned. She couldn't believe 
the swift turn the conversation had taken.  'My husband was a big man,' 
Walentyna said in Polish to Zofia.
'Not big like our Edek,' Zofia answered in Polish. Ruth looked at the two women. 
They both ignored her. They continued to speak in Polish. 'Edek is a man I could 
really get my legs around,' Zofia said. Ruth was astonished. Did Zofia really 
say that? she thought. Maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe Zofia had said that 
Edek was a man you could get your mind around. Maybe in Polish, what Zofia  had 
said translated colloquially as Edek was a man she liked. No, noga was leg in 
Polish. Nogi was the plural of leg, legs. Moje nogi was what Zofia had said. My 
legs. Ruth realised her mouth was hanging open in astonishment. She closed her 
mouth. Neither of the women took any notice of her. 'Edek is a man I could 
really get my legs around,' Zofia repeated. There was no getting around that, 
Ruth thought. She laughed at her own pun, it was definitely Zofia's legs, Zofia 
was thinking of getting around Edek.  'I think he also likes me,' Walentyna said 
to Zofia.
Ruth was speechless. Ruth didn't want to hear any more. 'Your English is very 
good,' she said loudly to both women.  'We have both of us worked for an export 
company, in Sopot,' Walentyna said. 'It was necessary to speak English.'  'What 
did they export?' Ruth said. She wanted to talk about anything other than one of 
these women winding their legs around her father.  'They did export jams,' Zofia 
said.
'Yes, jams,' said Walentyna.
'My father loves jam,' Ruth said. She immediately wanted to kick herself. Why 
had she brought her father back into the conversation?  'So do I,' said Zofia.
'So do I,' said Walentyna.
Edek came back to the table. 'So do I,' said Ruth with relief. Edek sat down.
'We have to go, Dad,' Ruth said.
'Okay, okay,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Ladies, it has been a pleasure for me to be 
with you,' he said to Zofia and Walentyna.  'It has been a big pleasure for us 
too,' Walentyna said.
'This was, for me a very nice afternoon,' Edek said to her. Walentyna seemed to 
grow in stature. She sat up very straight.  'Do you like cheesecake?' Walentyna 
said to Edek. Ruth grimaced. How long was it going to take Edek to extricate 
himself? Ruth
 


tried to hurry Edek up with her expression. But Edek was looking at Walentyna. 
'I make a very good cheesecake,' Walentyna said.  'Walentyna makes a quite good 
cheesecake,' Zofia said. While Zofia was saying this, she was shaking her head 
and making a face at Edek. The shake made it clear that Walentyna's cheesecake 
was not that good. Walentyna didn't notice. She hadn't taken her eyes off Edek.  
'We have to go,' Ruth said. Edek stood up. Both of the women stood up.
'Enjoy the cabaret,' Zofia said wistfully.
'Yes, please enjoy the cabaret,' Walentyna added. For a moment Edek looked as 
though he was going to ask Ruth if the women could join them. Ruth shot him a 
look that said no.  'They are very nice women,' Edek said to Ruth in the taxi on 
the way to the cabaret.
'They are very nice,' she said. She was holding her head.
'What is wrong with you?' Edek said.
'I've got a headache,' she said.
Ruth and Edek were shown to a table near the performance area, at the Samson 
Restaurant. Ruth sat down. She was glad that she and Edek would have a good view 
of the cabaret. The restaurant was crowded. Ruth looked around at the other 
guests. There was not one Jew among the people who had come to the Samson 
Restaurant to eat Jewish food and see the Jewish cabaret. Most of the audience 
looked like tourists. Tourists from Germany, Spain, France, and a smattering of 
Poles.  There were two Samson Restaurants in Szeroka Street in the heart of 
Kazimierz. They were next door to each other. The Polish owners had had a court 
battle for the name. Ruth and Edek were in the original Samson Restaurant. 
Samson number two was in the process  of changing its name. Why would anyone 
open a restaurant and call it by the same name as the restaurant next door? Ruth 
thought. It seemed so stupid. Both Samsons offered Jewish dinners and cabarets. 
And Yiddish music. The decor at this Samson Restaurant was made up of the usual 
Jewish artifacts, aided and abetted by several paintings of orthodox Jews 
praying.  Ruth looked at the menu. She was hungry. There was carp, Sephardic 
style, fish in Jewish jelly, chicken soup, Passover cheese, and a strange 
assortment of other dishes. A waiter brought two bread rolls and a very pale 
piece of matzoh in a basket to the table. The matzoh didn't look right, it was 
too thick and too pale. Ruth looked around her. Every table had a basket of 
bread rolls and matzoh.  'Are you hungry?' she said to Edek.
'No,' he said, 'I am not so hungry today.' She restrained herself from pointing 
out that he had hardly stopped eating all day.  'I'll have some chicken soup,' 
she said, 'and some carp.'
'Mum did make a beautiful carp,' Edek said.
'She was a great cook,' Ruth said. Edek looked sad. 'Do you want a bowl of 
chicken soup?' Ruth said.
'Okay,' he said.
'I'm going to order the Passover cheese,' she said. 'Have you ever heard of 
Passover cheese?'
'Never,' Edek said.
The waiter returned. 'Can you tell me what Passover cheese is?' Ruth said.
'It is Jewish cheese, madam,' he said.
'But what is it?' she said.
'It is what Jewish people eat,' he said.
'Well I'm Jewish, so I'll have some,' Ruth said. She ordered two bowls of 
chicken soup and one serving of carp.
'I will have a bit of fish too,' Edek said.
'Make that two carp,' Ruth said. The waiter nodded.
 


'Is this place owned by Jews?' Ruth said to the waiter.
'No, madam,' the waiter said.
'Ruthie,' Edek said.
'I just want to ask one more question,' she said to Edek. 'Are the musicians 
Jewish?' she said to the waiter.
'No, madam,' the waiter said.
'I'm sorry, Dad,' Ruth said. 'I thought this might really be a Jewish cabaret.'
She wanted to cry. What was she doing here? How could she have been naive enough 
to think that there was anything Jewish left in Poland? There were no Jews 
singing Yiddish songs anywhere, anymore. Why couldn't she get that into her 
head? Edek could see her distress. He patted her on the head.
'Don't worry,' Edek said, 'it is always nice to see a show.' Some klezmer music 
started up. Edek tapped his ringers in time to the music. Ruth was pleased that 
he was in good spirits. It would have been a miserable evening if they both felt 
as bad as she felt. The restaurant was full. Ruth couldn't see one empty table. 
It hadn't been easy to get a booking to the cabaret. They did two shows a night 
at the Samson Restaurant and both shows were heavily booked. Ruth and Edek were 
at the early session.
The food arrived. All at once. The soup, the fish, and the cheese. The waiter 
juggled to fit everything on the table.
'I guess they've got to get us fed and out of here before the next session 
begins,' Ruth said to Edek.
Edek took a mouthful of his soup. 'Not bad soup,' he said. Ruth had some.
'You're right,' Ruth said. 'It's not bad.' She felt better eating the soup. She 
looked at Edek. He had already finished his soup. He must have been hungry, she 
thought. Someone had turned up the volume of the klezmer music. It was now very 
loud. It was impossible to speak above this music. Maybe that was the point, 
Ruth
thought. If the customers couldn't talk, they would finish their meals faster.
'The fish is shocking,' Edek suddenly shouted. 'Do not eat it.' He had pushed 
his fish away. Ruth tried a mouthful. It was disgusting. The carp was flat and 
tepid. It tasted of mud. Some limp strands of white cabbage floated next to the 
fish.
'What is Jewish about this?' she shouted to Edek.
'Nothing,' he shouted back.
Ruth pushed the fish dish away, 'Let's try the Passover cheese,' she shouted.
Four perfectly round scoops of what was supposed to be Passover cheese were 
sitting in the middle of the plate, ungarnished and unaccompanied. Ruth prodded 
one of the scoops with her fork. She had never seen a dish like this before. 
Raisins and lemon peel had been mixed into a blend of cream cheese and cottage 
cheese. A wedge of orange had been pushed into the centre of each scoop. No 
Passover she had ever been to had had this cheese.
'What is this?' Edek shouted to Ruth.
'Passover cheese,' she shouted back. Edek started laughing.
'It is very funny,' he shouted.
Ruth wished she could see the humour in the food, in the restaurant, in the 
evening.
She was hungry. She ate one scoop of the cheese. It wasn't too bad. 'It's not 
too bad,' she shouted to Edek.
Suddenly the lights dimmed. Someone came out and lit the candles of a menorah, 
the Jewish Sabbath candle holder, that was sitting on a sideboard near the 
performance area. The audience grew hushed. From a side door four men and a 
woman, all playing instruments, ran on to the small stage area at the front of 
the restaurant. They were dressed as Jews. In black hats, black jackets and 
beards. Ruth was appalled.
'They look like Ukrainians to me,' Ruth said to Edek. Edek raised
 


his eyebrows and nodded. He knew, too, that these performers weren't Jews. He 
didn't seem bothered. Ruth noticed that the largest musician was wearing a false 
nose. A large, hooked plastic nose. She felt furious.
'He's wearing a false nose,' she said to Edek.
'Shsh,' Edek said.
'Why should he wear a false nose in order to imitate a Jew?' Ruth said.
'Jews have big noses,' Edek said. 'Can't you see how wrong it is?' Ruth said. 
'Shsh,' said Edek. 'People will hear you.' The musicians played loudly and 
boisterously. Ruth recognised none of the songs.
'Do you know any of these songs, Dad?' she said.
'No,' he said. There was no subtlety in the music. It was workmanlike. 
Uninspired. The piano-accordionist pounded the keys of the accordion. The 
guitarist's playing was basic, the clarinettist and violinist had no tenderness, 
and the drummer smashed away at the drums. The audience was enjoying the show. 
They clapped enthusiastically at the end of each number. Now and then the 
musicians acted out a joke. It was always lewd. The audience roared at each 
crude skit.
Finally the band broke into a Jewish number, Havah Nagilah, the joyful music 
Jews dance to in a circle at weddings and other celebrations. The Ukrainians, 
dressed as Jews, played Havah Nagilah at a funereal pace. Havah Nagilah, Ruth 
decided, was this band's attempt at a token moment of Jewish sadness. The 
audience understood. It remained quiet.
Ruth felt hysterical. 'They have no idea what they're playing,' she said to 
Edek. How dare they turn being Jewish into a profit-based circus. Her head hurt. 
She wanted to go home. She wasn't sure where her home was. Was it in New York? 
In Australia? In the cemetery
in Lodi? She contemplated standing up and shouting. She wanted to grab the 
menorah, remove the yarmulkes, and punch the musicians. Edek was tapping his 
feet in time to the music. 'It is not a bad show,' he said.
 


chapter fourteen
Ruth woke up disoriented. She had dreamt about legs. Zofia's legs. Stable, 
durable, hardy legs. Well-constructed legs. Legs with shiny skin and smooth 
calves. The legs had been walking along a beach next to another pair of legs. 
Legs that belonged to Edek, Ruth realised, when she got a closer look at the 
slight, white, threaded with fine blue veins legs, with their oddly delicate 
ankles. In the dream, she had been trying to catch up to the legs. But her own 
legs ached. She couldn't make them move fast. They were sluggish and slow. Ruth 
was sure there was plenty of material, in that dream, for an analyst to delve 
into. It seemed to contain quite a few murky propositions and suppositions.
She tried to shake the dream out of her head. She decided to call John Sharp. 
John Sharp was a client who usually aggravated her enough to erase most other 
things out of her head. John Sharp was a man with inherited wealth. He was a 
billionaire. Not a millionaire. A billionaire. His late mother had made most of 
the money. John Sharp was in his mid-fifties. He didn't look sharp. He had the 
air of a man who was still in his pyjamas. Everything about him drooped. His 
eyes, his mouth, his shoulders. What didn't droop, sagged. His arms and his 
stomach hung with weightiness. His brain seemed to have sunk to half-mast. John 
Sharp was also very tall. There was a long way for all those parts of him to 
droop.
He was indifferent to most conversations. He perked up when he was flattered or 
when he needed to summon a wine waiter. He seemed to have no curiosity. Ruth 
tried to avoid socialising with the Sharps.
When she acquiesced, it was for the same reason that most of their other guests 
met with them. Money. Business.
The first time Ruth had gone to dinner at the Sharp estate, in the Hamptons, her 
inadequate sense of direction had led her into the kitchen when the meal was 
announced. In the kitchen Ruth encountered four black women dressed in starched 
white kitchen uniforms. Ruth had been shocked. It had seemed like a scene from 
another century. 'Hello,' she had squeaked, to the four women. They all nodded 
at her dutifully, like well-taught children, in habitually rehearsed roles.
The dinner at the Sharps' had been an intimate dinner for close friends. Nine 
close friends, and Ruth, ate with John and Sandra Sharp that night. The 
supposedly intimate dinner had been as estranged and detached and formal as any 
gathering between strangers. The Sharps' daughter had appeared, briefly. A plain 
girl, in her twenties, she had barely acknowledged any of the guests. She was 
accompanied by an excessively handsome boyfriend. A boy who had aspirations to 
enter politics, one of the other guests had told Ruth. The couple seemed 
mismatched to Ruth. In temperament and looks. The boy was trying too hard to be 
enthusiastic. And the daughter was barely there.
'We don't know anything about him, she is very secretive,' Sandra Sharp had said 
to one of the guests. Ruth had thought that that must be a difficult position 
for Sandra Sharp to be in. You didn't have to be a genius to work out that a 
young man interested in going into politics needed a lot of financial backing. 
'He is a very good boy,' the guest who had only just met the boyfriend, said. 
Ruth had looked at Sandra Sharp to see if the reply had bothered her. Sandra 
Sharp hadn't looked disturbed.
Why were the wealthy so switched off? Ruth wondered. Were they semi-conscious in 
order to be unaware of their enormous wealth? Unaware of the discrepancy between 
themselves and others? Ruth
 


had expected the very wealthy to be more interesting. She had never met a 
fascinating rich man. The rich couldn't relate to most people. They toyed with 
people in other financial brackets. Used them as amusement or decoration. Quite 
blatantly. The rich didn't have to look after other people's feelings. That area 
was covered by money, too. Invitations to go salmon fishing in Alaska. Horse 
riding in Wyoming, tickets to the opera. Gifts at Christmas. John Sharp had 
asked Ruth on one of his salmon fishing excursions to Alaska. She had declined. 
'I get sea-sick,' she had said.
Like her, most people assumed that the rich were interesting. As though wealth 
provided you with intelligence and sensitivity and humour. Ruth thought wealth 
did the opposite. Stripped you of valuable assets. John Sharp had said the same 
things to her on each of the three social occasions at the Sharps' that Ruth had 
attended. 'I don't wear a tie on the weekend,' was his opening greeting. 'I 
don't wear a jacket at dinner,' came later. He needed remedial social repartee, 
Ruth thought. He had clearly never had to work to be attractive. Everyone was 
attracted by his money.
Ruth got out of bed. She wondered why she had suddenly become fixated with John 
Sharp. She only had to make one call to him. But even one call was hard work. 
John Sharp had no sense of humour. She had never seen him or his wife laugh. The 
very rich didn't laugh. They tittered or smiled benignly. As though a hearty 
laugh was out of bounds. Ruth wondered whether the Sharps laughed when they were 
alone. Probably not.
The first time Ruth had dined with them she had been struck by how frequently 
Sandra Sharp punctuated her conversation with, 'I'm so relaxed out here in the 
country.' When Sandra had talked admiringly about a local caterer she had said, 
'She's so relaxed'. All of Sandra Sharp's ambitions and aspirations seemed to be 
directed towards relaxation. What sort of a strain did that degree of wealth 
impose on people? A strain that made relaxation out of reach?
Both alarm clocks in Ruth's room started ringing. Ruth thought she had set them 
to go off two minutes apart. She and Edek were going to Auschwitz today. She 
hadn't wanted to sleep in. Going to Auschwitz. The sentence had a strange ring 
to it. An ominous lilt. She switched both alarm clocks off. The wake-up call she 
had ordered, arrived. 'Cancel my second call, please,' she said to the operator. 
She got out of bed. A fax from Max was on the floor, under the door. The hotel 
didn't bother to fold the faxes. Ruth could see Max's distinctive handwriting 
from where she was standing.
She walked over and picked up the fax. 'John Sharp wants three hundred and 
twenty-seven individual letters to accompany invitations to his daughter's 
wedding,' the fax said. Oh, shit, Ruth thought. Three hundred and twenty-seven 
different letters was going to be an organisational nightmare. She would have to 
say no, she decided.
She sat back down on the bed and called John Sharp. 'I'm reluctant to do three 
hundred and twenty-seven letters,' she said to him. 'It's difficult to 
personalise them. I need several details about each of the recipients. And that 
would be very complicated to organise. Much more difficult than multiple 
business letters.' John Sharp was silent.
'You can charge whatever you like,' he said, after a minute. Ruth knew that this 
job was worth tens of thousands of dollars. But she was tired. She couldn't 
imagine what she could say on John or Sandra Sharp's behalf, to any of their 
guests. 'We want the guests to know how meaningful it is to us that they, in 
particular, can share this important family occasion with us,' John Sharp said 
to Ruth.
It would probably be good for her to take on the job, Ruth decided. It would 
give her something to immerse herself in when she got back from Poland. 'I'll 
have to send one of my assistants up to take notes from you or Sandra,' she said 
to John Sharp.
'Can't you do it?' John Sharp said.
'No,' she said. 'But my assistant, Bern, is very good.'
'Okay,' John Sharp said. 'My wife will provide him the details.'
 


'Provide him with the details,' Ruth said, before she could stop herself.
'Sorry,' she said to John Sharp. He didn't seem to mind. Maybe he failed to 
notice rudeness. Maybe he had been exposed to so little of it he failed to 
identify or recognise a rude response.
'Your letters are extremely successful for us,' he said to Ruth. 'You will write 
the letters yourself?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Bern will give me the information and I'll write the letters. 
The questions Bern asks will be my questions.' 'Good,' said John Sharp.
'Bern is a very nice young African-American,' Ruth said to John Sharp. She 
paused. It was always surprising to Ruth how many Americans didn't want anyone 
black in their house. Unless the black person was in the kitchen or holding a 
drink tray. 'His mother works for me, too,' she said to John Sharp. 'Good,' John 
Sharp said.
Ruth was relieved. She hated racists. She tried to eliminate them from her 
client list. Although, she reminded herself, her attitude to Poles was 
perilously close to what she railed against in others. She had reason to dislike 
Poles, she decided. She knew that was a dangerous proposition. The proposition 
that hatred was justified.
'Would you also be able to do a story of how they first met? We'd like to 
describe their first meeting in a booklet we'd like to give to the guests,' John 
Sharp said.
'Whose meeting?' Ruth said. John Sharp seemed annoyed. Of course, Ruth realised, 
he was talking about the bridal couple-to-be. She mustn't have had her mind on 
the job. She must have been counting the dollars, not thinking about the 
subject. 'My daughter and her fiance,' John Sharp said. 'Of course,' said Ruth.
'We'd like to have the story of their meeting in a small book with about a dozen 
photographs.'
A book on how the bride and bridegroom met? This must be the ultimate in wedding 
accoutrement, Ruth thought. She must suggest it to her bridal-wear designer 
client Graham Long. He was always trying to come up with new ideas for weddings 
for his clients.
This request from John Sharp was definitely not something she wanted to do.
'You could get a ghost writer from any good publisher,' Ruth said to him.
'Sandra and I would like you to do it,' John Sharp said.
'I'll think about it,' Ruth said. She contemplated asking John Sharp if the 
fiance in question was the boyfriend she had met last year. The one whose good 
looks and keen personality and interest in politics had bothered her. She 
decided it was too personal a question.
'Are all of the guests getting letters with their invitations?' Ruth said.
'No,' John Sharp said. 'There are thirteen hundred and forty-two guests.'
'Thank God they're not all getting letters,' Ruth said.
Ruth turned on the shower. The water came through in a strong spray. Thank God 
this shower had good water pressure, Ruth thought. She turned up the hot water. 
She felt like a very hot shower. She took off her nightie and stepped in. She 
soaped her body, and savoured the heat and the steam. She washed herself. She 
washed and washed. She soaped and lathered and scrubbed. Why was she washing 
herself so vigorously? she wondered. By the time she got out of the shower her 
skin was pale and wrinkled.
When Ruth arrived downstairs for breakfast, Edek was already there. He looked 
good. Rested and chipper. He was eating a large bowl of cornflakes.
'You're eating cornflakes in Poland,' Ruth said. Cornflakes were
 


such an Australian breakfast. 'Are you homesick?' Ruth said. Edek laughed. 'To 
tell you the truth I did miss a bit my cornflakes,' he said. He looked at Ruth. 
'You look much better this morning, Ruthie,' he said. Ruth got herself a bowl of 
stewed fruit. She sprinkled a few cornflakes on top of the fruit. She was glad 
Edek thought that she looked better. She knew she had been looking pretty wrung 
out.
Suddenly in a flurry of perfumed air, air scented with what seemed to be a blend 
of soap and perfume and body lotions, Walentyna and Zofia appeared. Ruth hadn't 
noticed them arrive. The two women looked flushed. As though they had been 
rushing. 'Good morning, good morning,' Zofia called out. Edek stood up. He went 
to shake hands with Walentyna, who looked very pretty this morning, in a close-
fitting, plain black dress.
Zofia elbowed Walentyna out of the way. She thrust her bust forward and pushed 
herself towards Edek. 'It is very nice to see you this morning, Edek,' she said. 
She leaned forward and gave Edek a hug. 'Walentyna and I did enjoy very much our 
afternoon with you.' 'I did enjoy it very much myself,' Edek said. 'Was the 
cabaret last night good?' Zofia asked. 'It was not bad,' Edek said.
'Did you like the cabaret?' Walentyna said to Ruth. 'I thought it was terrible,' 
Ruth said. Both of the women looked at Ruth perplexed.
'There were some not so good points to it,' Edek said. Ruth was glad for Edek's 
solidarity. She hadn't wanted to appear a killjoy to Zofia and Walentyna.
Zofia asked if she and Walentyna could join them for breakfast. Edek was about 
to say yes, when he noticed Ruth's disagreeable expression. He paused. Ruth used 
this window of opportunity to reply to Zofia's question. 'Normally we would love 
to have you join us,' Ruth said. 'But we are going to Auschwitz today, so I 
think it would be better for us to have a quiet breakfast.' Zofia looked solemn,
but her disappointment showed through her solemnity.
'My daughter is right,' Edek said.
'Of course your daughter is right,' Walentyna said.
'Of course,' Zofia said. She turned to Edek. 'You will need a little comfort 
after such a terrible experience,' she said to him.
'The thing what was most terrible did already happen,' Edek said.
'Of course,' Walentyna said.
'You will need to be cheered up when you get back,' Zofia said to Edek in 
Polish. Ruth felt irritated. Zofia was so pushy. 'What time will you be back?" 
Zofia said to Edek.
'We don't know,' Ruth said. 'We don't know how long we'll spend there.'
Zofia looked at Edek. 'Walentyna and I will be waiting for you when you get 
back.'
'It is not necessary,' Edek said. Thank God, Edek was deflecting them, Ruth 
thought. The prospect of dealing with Zofia and Walentyna immediately after 
Auschwitz, seemed exhausting. She felt relieved that at least Zofia and 
Walentyna weren't joining them for breakfast. She really wanted to have a quiet 
breakfast. It was going to be a big day.
Zofia patted Edek on the back. 'Take care,' she said. 'Walentyna and I will be 
here whatever time you will be back.'
'We will be here,' Walentyna said, quietly.
'Thank you,' Edek said.
Ruth felt sorry for Walentyna. She was so overshadowed by Zofia and Zofia's 
bust.
'They are nice women,' Edek said after Zofia and Walentyna had left.
'They're okay,' she said. Edek looked deflated. She felt mean. There had been no 
need to puncture such a small, harmless piece of pleasure. 'No, they are very 
nice,' she said to Edek. 'I think little Walentyna gets bossed around a bit by 
Zofia.'
 


'I don't think so,' Edek said. 'Walentyna is such a quiet type. Zofia is not so 
quiet.' Ruth looked across the room. The two women were talking animatedly. 
Maybe Edek was right. Maybe there was no need to feel sorry for Walentyna.
Ruth was hungry. She ate all of her stewed fruit and went back for more. Edek 
had followed the cornflakes with pickled herring, scrambled eggs, and fried 
bratwurst and onions. He was finishing off his breakfast with a piece of bread 
and jam.
'Are you nervous about going to Auschwitz, Dad?' she said. 'No,' he said. 'Why 
should I be nervous? Nothing is going to happen to me there, now.' He finished 
the bread and jam and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He pushed his plate and 
several pieces of cutlery away, in a decisive gesture that signalled that he was 
finished with the meal. 'That is it,' he said.
Ruth had seen this movement many times. It was an announcement that he was 
having nothing more to eat. Ruth thought it was more of an announcement to 
himself than to anyone else. He always said 'that is it' as he pushed his eating 
implements away. The speed and decisiveness of the push, Ruth thought, was an 
affirmation that Edek had had enough. That he was someone who could curtail his 
eating. That he was not a pig. 'That is it,' Edek said, again.
The Mercedes that was waiting for them was a medium-sized Mercedes. 'This is not 
such a big one what the other one,' Edek said. 'That's true,' Ruth said. She 
felt she was becoming a connoisseur of Mercedes.
'Do you want to sit in front with the driver?' Ruth said. 'No,' Edek said. 'This 
time I will sit with you.' They got into the car. There was something soothing 
about the plush comfort of a Mercedes, Ruth thought.
'You are going to the Auschwitz Museum?' the driver said. 'No,' Ruth said. The 
driver turned around. 'We are going to the Auschwitz death camp,' she said to 
him. 'Could you remember that
The driver nodded. Edek looked uncomfortable. 'What is it such a big deal what 
he calls the camp?' he said. 'It is still the same what happened there.' Ruth 
didn't answer. She wished she wasn't so bothered by what anybody called it. It 
seemed so petty next to anything else connected with the camp.
'I've brought some water with me in case we get thirsty,' she said to Edek. She 
showed him the water she had packed in a bag, together with some bananas and 
pears. Edek looked at the bananas and pears.
'What for did you bring so much fruit?' he said.
'It's only four pears and four bananas,' she said.
'You are not going to be hungry in Auschwitz,' Edek said. 'You do not eat in the 
hotel where there is such a good buffet. You think that you are going to eat in 
Auschwitz?' He shook his head.
'I brought some chocolate for you, too,' she said. She took out a block of 
Wedel's semi-bitter dark chocolate.
'Thank you,' Edek said. He still looked bewildered.
Ruth understood her father's bewilderment. After all, they weren't setting out 
for a picnic. She had realised when she started to pack the pears and bananas 
and chocolate, that she associated Auschwitz with starvation, and it was hard to 
separate that association from the present. She didn't tell Edek about the dried 
apricots and dates in her backpack. She had felt as though she were packing for 
a trek through the Himalayas, or somewhere equally difficult to get out of in an 
emergency. It was a strange thought for her to have, as the Himalayas were as 
far removed from anything in her life as it was possible to be. She knew that 
they were mountains. Mountains in Kashmir, Tibet and Nepal. But that scrap of 
knowledge was the only thing she knew about the Himalayas.
I've hired a guide to take us through Auschwitz and Birkenau,' Ruth said to 
Edek.
'You did hire a guide?' Edek said. 'What for?' he said. 'We don't need a guide.' 
He looked offended. As though Ruth had invited
 


someone who would intrude on what was his terrain. Ruth understood his concern. 
She had hesitated before hiring the guide, but the thought of her and Edek 
wandering around Auschwitz trying to identify what could never be identified had 
frightened her. Somehow a guide had made Auschwitz seem traversable. 'I could 
walk there with my eyes shut,' said Edek. 'I know,' she said.
'Especially Birkenau where I was most of the time." 'If you don't like the 
guide, I'll tell him to leave,' Ruth said. 'Okay,' Edek said. 'Maybe about the 
main camp at Auschwitz we will learn something from this guide.'
Ruth wondered if her mother had talked to Edek about Auschwitz. Ruth had assumed 
that Rooshka had, but every time Ruth mentioned something about this time in 
Rooshka's life, Edek didn't appear to know. Maybe when Edek and Rooshka found 
each other again, after the war, what had happened to each of them was the last 
thing they wanted to talk about.
'Mum was in Auschwitz,' Edek said. 'And I was in Birkenau.' 'I know,' Ruth said.
'They was two miles apart,' Edek said. 'And there was not much news between the 
camps. I could find out nothing about Mum. I did not know if she was dead or 
alive.' He shook his head. He looked miserable. Ruth felt worried. Maybe she 
shouldn't have brought him here. Maybe this whole trip had been a mistake.
'Are you alright?' she said. "
'I am alright,' he said. 'We don't have to go,' she said. 'We are on our way, 
already,' Edek said.
It was a forty-minute drive to Auschwitz from Krakow. Ruth looked at her watch. 
They must be halfway there. They had passed two road signs to Auschwitz. Both 
signs said, 'Auschwitz Museum'. They passed another one. 'Auschwitz Museum, 30 
kilometres,' it said.
'Death camp' was clearly a term to be avoided in Poland. They drove in silence. 
Ruth wondered what Edek was thinking about. She didn't want to ask. She was glad 
that he was able to be quiet. Auschwitz was a place you didn't want to be 
catapulted into, in the middle of conducting a series of jocular conversations. 
Catapulted out into. That's what they all had been. All the Jews. Soon she and 
Edek would be there. Quietly, of their own accord.
Ruth felt hungry. She got out a banana, and ate it. It was a sweet, ripe banana. 
It tasted good. She had brought a separate bag for the banana peel. Edek looked 
at her. 'The whole time we been in Poland you don't eat. You eat compote and 
bird stuff,' he said. 'Now, on the way to Auschwitz, you are eating. Sometimes I 
think you are crazy.'
'Maybe,' she said. Edek was smiling. Ruth knew he didn't mean crazy, crazy. 
Lunatic crazy. Just crazy beyond what seemed the norm to him. She ate another 
banana.
'We are arriving at the Auschwitz Museum,' the driver said.
'The Auschwitz death camp,' Ruth said.
'Yes,' the driver said. He turned off the road. 'I will wait in the car park for 
you,' he said.
All Ruth could see from the car was car park. A large, already-crowded car park. 
There were coaches and vans and cars and taxis parked in the car park. It was 
not what Ruth had expected to arrive at. It looked more like a car park for 
Disneyland or another theme park. Groups of drivers were standing together, 
smoking. Busloads of tourists were alighting from streamlined coaches. It was a 
disturbing sight. 'I described us to the guide,' she said to Edek.
They got out of the car. Edek straightened up and looked around him. 'It does 
not smell,' he said. He sniffed the cold air. 'The smell is gone,' he said. 'We 
did say the smell would never go away.1 They walked towards a sign that said 
'Museum Entrance'. Ruth looked up. They were in front of the entrance gates to 
Auschwitz. The Arbeit Macht Frei sign was just in front of them. She gasped. The 
wrought
 


iron sign woven across the top of the gates looked so small. In photographs it 
always loomed so large. An image which had presided over so much horror. An 
image so blatant in its mockery. These gates, this sign, had seemed monumental 
to Ruth. They had signified so much. A symbol of so much that was impossible to 
comprehend. Ruth was shocked at how small the gates were. Almost domestic in 
scale. Average industrial-sized gates. They were too small, she thought. They 
should have been bigger, for all the damage they had wrought. She had expected 
them to almost touch the sky.
She stood and looked at the sign. Arbeit Macht Frei. Freedom through work. What 
a joke. The freedom had been in death. If death was a freedom. She started to 
cry. She couldn't bear the proximity to these gates. She wanted to run away. 
'There is nothing to cry about today, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'It did already 
happen. It is too late to cry.' But she couldn't stop. Tears poured down her 
face. How could they have fed so many people through these gates? How could they 
have ushered them through to their death? Shepherded them in. Assembled them for 
an assembly line, where they were stripped and packed and dismantled and shipped 
to the sky. It had just been a job for the Germans. A job they carried out in a 
workmanlike, if harsh, manner. They were hard workers, the Germans. They did 
what had to be done. This slaughterhouse was far more efficient than most of the 
world's abattoirs.
Images of long lines of Jews filled Ruth's head. Long lines of Jews on the 
unloading ramp, in Auschwitz. Small children holding their mother's hands. 
Babies being carried. Sisters clinging to each other. Mothers and daughters 
trying to stay together. She wept and wept. Edek started to cry. They stood in 
front of the Arbeit Macht Fret sign, and wept.
Ruth tried to pull herself together. 'We won't get very far,' she said to Edek, 
'if we disintegrate before we're even in the gate.' disintegrate. That's what 
had happened to all the Jews. Their bodies
had disintegrated. Disintegrated into charred remains. Sharp fragments of bone, 
pieces of teeth, bits of gristle, deposits of minerals, unidentifiable particles 
of organic matter. Dehydrated and blackened remains. The shavings and shards of 
people. The ash that was left of the Jews was dumped in the Vistula River. It 
almost choked the river.
'I am not going to disintegrate,' Edek said.
A man walked up to Ruth and Edek. 'Rothwax?' he said.
'That's us,' said Ruth.
'I am your guide, Jerzy Branicki,' he said. Jerzy Branicki looked okay, Ruth 
thought. He was about seventy, and had a sensitive face.
'I'll go and buy the entrance tickets,' Ruth said to Jerzy.
'You do not need to,' he said. 'It is not necessary to pay to go into 
Auschwitz.'
'That's good,' she said. The irony of paying to get into Auschwitz had not 
escaped her.
'My daughter is not saying good because she can't afford it,' Edek said.
'Jerzy probably understood that,' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Jerzy.
'I did just want to make sure,' Edek said.
Ruth looked at her father. He seemed quite wide-eyed to be where he was. As 
though he couldn't quite believe it. She was having trouble believing it, 
herself. A slight drizzle of rain began. Ruth was glad it was a dull grey, wet 
day. She wouldn't have wanted to see Auschwitz in sunshine. A sign near the 
front entrance of the building said Auschwitz Museum'. Ruth was furious. Why did 
everyone insist on using the word 'museum'?
Why can't they just say death camp?' she said to Edek.
It is a museum, inside,' Jerzy said. 'There are exhibits on display in the 
former death camp.'
Ruth said to him, 'This is not a museum. The Museum of Modern
 


Art is a museum, the Museum of Natural History is a museum, the Guggenheim 
Museum is a museum. This is not a museum. This is a death camp.' Jerzy shrugged 
his shoulders.
'What does it matter what it is called?' Edek said to Ruth. 'It is still the 
same place.'
'It is easier for people to believe it is something else, something abstract, if 
it's called a museum,' Ruth said. 'They can forget that it was a place for the 
slaughter of human beings.'
'Which people, Ruthie, is so interested in Auschwitz?' Edek said.
'Look at how many visitors are here today,' she said.
'Those what do come here know it is not the Luna Park they are
going to visit,' Edek said. 'It does not matter what they do call it.'
Inside the first building, there were signs to the public toilets. And
a cafeteria. Of course, museums needed cafeterias, Ruth thought. The
cafeteria sold drinks and sweets and cakes and several hot dishes,
including sausages. The whole room smelled of food. There seemed
to be something wrong about a cafeteria in a place of starvation.
Several Polish schoolboys were jostling at the counter of the cafeteria.
They were buying cans of Coca-Cola.
Ruth and Edek and Jerzy began to walk. Jerzy started to give them statistics 
about the prisoners. 'Would you mind if we walk quietly,' Ruth said. 'We'll ask 
you if we need any questions answered.' Jerzy looked momentarily annoyed. Ruth 
didn't care.
Everything in the former death camp looked so clean and neat. Almost 
nondescript. Non-threatening. As harmless as the average, standard housing 
development that it resembled. A sign of a skull with the word 'Halt' and the 
Polish word for halt, stoj, was the only sign of anything ominous. Jerzy hovered 
around Ruth and Edek. She regretted that she had hired him.
Ruth had a copy of the official guidebook to Auschwitz with her. It was 
published by the State Museum in Oswiecim, the town renamed Auschwitz by the 
Germans. The guidebook, where Ruth had first
seen that guides were available, stated on the inside front cover that the 
museum was open, but no guide service was provided on days when 'mass 
manifestations announced by the radio and press take place'. What did they mean? 
Ruth thought as she walked through Auschwitz. Manifestations of what? A 
manifestation was the indication of the existence or presence of something. The 
existence or presence of what was the guide book referring to? No lice had 
survived, no fleas. Were they expecting manifestations of ghosts or wraiths or 
spirits? These would hardly be announced in the press.
Ruth and Edek and Jerzy walked along one of the central paths. The path was 
lined with brick barracks on both sides. The cleanliness and neatness was 
disorienting. Auschwitz, cleaned up and turned into a tourist venue, looked like 
an ordinary, English working-class estate. Ruth was disturbed by the absence. 
The absence of dirt, filth, stench, stink. The absence of cruelty. The absence 
of suffering. She'd expected to see the suffering in the air, on the ground, in 
the walls and on every fence.
The museum was closed on twenty-fifth of December and on Easter Sunday, the 
small guidebook had said. Ruth had wanted to write to the publishers and point 
out that the death camp they referred to as a museum was never closed even for 
these most holy of Catholic
holidays.
Block 10 was being restored. The restoration work looked like the renovation of 
any middle-class dwelling. There was scaffolding around the building and ladders 
and workers' tools. Block 10 was where Mengele and the other SS doctors 
performed medical experiments on Jewish women. Ruth stopped outside Block 10. It 
looked like such an innocuous building.
'Mengele did his work here,' she said to Edek. Edek shook his head. 'Are you 
alright in this place, Dad?' Ruth 


said.
'I am alright,' Edek said.
Block 10 was closed to the public. 'Block 4 has very good
 


exhibitions,' Jerzy said.
'Shall we go there?' Ruth said. 'Okay,' said Edek.
Inside Block 4, the walls were painted two tones of grey. The stairs had had a 
marble and concrete composite added to their surface. In the different rooms the 
floor was painted with enamel paint. There were heating units along the walls. 
There was an odd primness about the decor. Totally at odds with the brutalities 
and obscenities that had taken place within the walls.
Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the 
atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How 
could you feel people's anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted 
barracks? But maybe nothing could ever replicate a fraction of the atmosphere, a 
fraction of the events that took place.
Nobody would come here, she thought, if the place was still covered in shit and 
piss and lice and rats and vomit and ash and decomposing corpses. The car park 
wouldn't be full of tourist coaches. People wouldn't be looking at the 
photographs and other exhibits on display in these rooms. These renovations were 
probably necessary. She had to stop being so judgemental, she told herself.
In front of an exhibit of a can of Zyklon B, Jerzy began to speak. 'Why do we 
present this?' he said. Ruth wasn't sure who he was addressing this stupid 
question to. It couldn't be to her or to Edek, she thought. She looked around. 
The dozen or so other tourists in this room were not looking at Jerzy. 'We give 
these tours,' he continued, 'so humankind can learn.' 'Thank you,' Edek said.
'Poles died here, too,' Jerzy said. 'It wasn't just Jews.' 'That's a line I've 
heard from quite a few Poles,' Ruth whispered to Edek.
'Shsh,' Edek said.
'My mother-in-law died here and my father-in-law died here,' Jerzy said.
'I am very sorry to hear about that,' Edek said.
'I am sorry, too,' Ruth said.
'My wife was a true orphan," Jerzy said. 'She had to live from the time she was 
sixteen without a mother and without a father.'
'I am very sorry,' Edek said.
'Polish people tried very much to help the Jews,' Jerzy said.
'I'd like to look at the exhibits,' Ruth said. 'Could we meet you outside?' 
Jerzy looked stunned. 'Please,' she said.
'If that is what you want, of course,' he said.
'Why did you tell him, like this, to go?' Edek said.
'I told him politely,' Ruth said. 'I don't want to hear about how much Poles 
suffered and how no Pole knew what was happening to the Jews. Or the even worse 
version of history he was just about to start on, which was how much Poles tried 
to help the Jews.'
'I did tell you we did not need a guide,' Edek said.
'I thought the place was going to be a real mess,' Ruth said. 'I didn't think it 
would be so cleaned up.'
'They did have to clean it, I suppose,' Edek said.
The exhibits in the rooms were moving. Ruth could see how moved most people were 
by the piles of old suitcases with names and addresses on them, the photographs 
of women being driven into the gas chambers, and the photographs of large piles 
of burning corpses. She looked closely at the bales of haircloth. She knew what 
it was. It was cloth woven from human hair and used as tailor's linings for 
men's suits.
'That is what did happen to Mum's hair,' Edek said.
'I was thinking of that,' she said. They both stood in front of the cloth, in 
silence for a minute.
In the next block, Block 5, there were exhibits of Jewish prayer shawls, shaving 
brushes and toothbrushes. The 


shaving brushes and
 


toothbrushes looked so forlorn, Ruth thought. As though they still hadn't 
grasped that they had been separated from their owners. There was a mound of 
spectacles and a mountain of shoes. Such persona] parts of so many people's 
lives. Still here so long after their owners had gone. There were artificial 
limbs and kilos and kilos of human hair. So many parts and addendums to so many 
people.
The volume of what was left behind, was just a fraction of what had been removed 
from prisoners in Auschwitz. Quite a few of the visitors had tears in their 
eyes. 'It is shocking,' Edek said to Ruth in front of the mountain of shoes. 
Small shoes, large shoes, women's shoes, men's shoes, and tiny baby shoes. They 
were all still here.
Outside, the turbulence present in the exhibits was absent. A trolley on rails, 
used for carting bodies to the crematorium, had candles and flowers on it. There 
was no sense of chaos, no sense of abandonment, no sense of a world gone awry. 
Where was the unpredictability? The never-ending blows and beatings? The always-
changing orders? The rules that never remained the same, and were always 
nonsensical? Where was the world in which everything was unpredictable and 
nothing could be divined or foreseen? A world where chance encounters could save 
a life or erase it. A world in which everything was uncertain and nothing was 
safe. And any news was unverifiable and indistinguishable from rumours. And 
orders were fickle and capricious. A world in which killing was ordered as an 
afterthought. Where was this uncurbed, unchecked, lawless universe?
Where were the endless twice-daily Appels, roll-calls that served little 
purpose. They were gone. Gone with the people. What did she expect? Ruth 
thought. Mock-ups of beatings and roll-calls and barracks crowded with lice-
ridden bodies. Mock-ups of men and women leaking with typhus. Representations of 
women with mixtures of faeces and menstrual blood running down their legs. Was 
this what she expected?
She expected something more than what was here. She had thought he air would 
ring with violence and insanity. She thought it would , choked with pain, 
bewilderment, disbelief and anguish. She thought it would be clogged and plugged 
with unsaid farewells. She remembered her mother telling her about her first 
Appel, in Auschwitz. 'We did join the other prisoners,' Rooshka had said. 'We 
were ourselves very thin from the ghetto, but we still looked like people. The 
people in the Appel did no longer look like people. They were not round, they 
were flat, like they were made of paper, not flesh. They stood so still in the 
Appel. There was no sign of life in them. Nobody moved. They stood with their 
rags hanging on them like broken torn paper puppets. Soon I looked just like 
them.'
Jerzy was waiting for them outside Block 11, which housed the prison cells 
within this prison. 'Would you like me to tell you about the prison block?' he 
said. 'No thanks,' she said. She looked at Edek. 'No thank you,' Edek said.
Ruth walked over to the formerly electrified barbed wire fence. She touched it. 
Nothing happened. She put her face against the fence. She wondered what had 
touched this particular piece of fence? She knew that pieces of prisoners' flesh 
often stuck to the fence after they had tried to escape or to kill themselves. 
That fence must have looked pretty tempting. One fling against it, and you were 
gone.
Rooshka had been ashamed of herself for being able to live through 'he nightmare 
of her days at Auschwitz. Ashamed that she didn't just die. 'The best people did 
die first,' Rooshka had said, many times, to Ruth. 'They couldn't have,' Ruth 
said to Rooshka when she was older. 'Niceness and goodness were not criteria the 
Nazis were using in their selections.' But she knew what her mother was saying. 
Her
 


mother was saying that she felt a contempt for herself for surviving all that 
brutality, all that baseness. Ruth wondered if the fence had tempted her mother. 
Edek came over and touched the fence. He looked surprised when nothing happened. 
He touched it again. 'Who would believe I would one day do this?' he said to 
Ruth. Ruth took Edek's arm.
More tourists had arrived. Groups of people were walking around with and without 
guides. Most of the visitors looked sombre. Still the visitors bothered Ruth. 
She would much rather have been here alone with Edek. Several classes of Polish 
school children walked by. They were talking and laughing. Ruth was surprised 
that the teachers accompanying them didn't ask them to be quiet. Ruth glared at 
several of the noisier children. The school children, who looked about twelve or 
thirteen, were chewing gum, and eating snacks. Two boys not far from Ruth 
suddenly started fighting. A few punches flew from one boy to the other. The 
teacher who was closest to the boys ignored them.
Ruth strode over to the two boys. 'Excuse me,' she said, loudly, 'this is a 
burial ground, a gravesite, not a circus.' The taller of the boys laughed, and 
said something Ruth couldn't understand, in Polish. The teacher just looked at 
Ruth. 'You are disgusting,' Ruth said to the teacher. Her heart was racing. She 
could hardly catch her breath. What were they doing bringing these adolescent 
hooligans to this place? For these boys, this was just another trip, just 
another opportunity to get out of the classroom.
'Ruthie, Ruthie, what are you doing?' Edek said, running up to her.
'Nothing,' she said. 'They're arseholes.'
'Ruthie, we cannot fix up anything by speaking like that,' Edek said. 'We cannot 
bring back anyone. If somebody does behave badly here what does it matter? The 
people who are dead are dead. They do not see this bad behaviour.'
'You don't know that,' she said to Edek. Edek looked at her. 'Ruthie, darling, 
the dead are dead,1 he said.
'Would you like to go to Birkenau soon?' Jetty asked.
'Do you think you're up to it?' Ruth said to Edek.
'I am up to it,' he said. 'I will show you my barracks and where
I did sleep.'
'Would you like to go to the museum shop before you go?' Jerzy said. Ruth had 
known that there would have to be a profit-making section of the Auschwitz 
Museum business. She didn't want to contribute to their profits.
'Let us see what they got,' Edek said. 'Okay,' she said.
A fly flew into Ruth's face and began buzzing around her head. She tried to 
brush it away, but it kept returning, it was a large black fly. Ruth watched the 
fly warily. Why was it attacking her? And what was it doing here in winter? She 
thought flies only appeared in summer. Was this fly lost? Was it supposed to be 
somewhere else? The fly flew at her again. She tried to flick it away by shaking 
her hair at it. It flew right back. She felt the sting of its bite on her cheek. 
The fly, apparently pleased with his successful mission, flew off.
Ruth felt her cheek. It felt hot. She could already feel a swelling. She looked 
around. There were no other flies in sight. Where did this fly come from? And 
why did it bite her? Maybe it wasn't a fly? Maybe it was someone's spirit. Who 
had she hurt that would need to get back at her with a bite? She shook her head- 
She had to put an end to that kind of thinking. It was absurd to imbue a fly 
with a spirit. A spirit that belonged to someone else. Poland was twisting her 
vision. Distorting her beliefs and understandings.
Edek turned and noticed the bite. 'Look what you got on your face,' he said. 
'What happened?'
'It's just a bite,' Ruth said. 'I was bitten by a fly.' She felt her face. She 
could feel the bite still swelling.
 


'There was no flies in Birkenau,' Edek said.
'Mum said there were no flies in Auschwitz,' Ruth said. 'Mum said she didn't see 
one single fly here.'
'No?' said Edek.
'She said there were no flies and no birds,' Ruth said.
'It doesn't look good, your face,' Edek said. 'It looks bad.'
'I'm always allergic to flies,' Ruth said. 'To all insects. I swell up twice as 
much as anyone else. And every gnat, mosquito or fly anywhere finds me in 
minutes.'
'You must have sweet blood,' Edek said.
'Plenty of people have said that to me,' Ruth said. She laughed. 'But you know 
my blood is not all that sweet. You know I am not all that sweet.'
'What are you talking about?' Edek said. 'Why do you think always that you are 
bad? You did do this even when you was a girl. You was never bad. You was always 
a good girl.'
'I felt it was my fault,' Ruth said.
'What?' said Edek.
'My fault that Mum had to suffer so much,' Ruth said.
'That is crazy,' said Edek.
'All children feel it must be their fault if their parent feels bad,' Ruth said. 
'It's too hard to understand that it's not your fault. That you didn't cause it. 
And you can't fix it up.'
'You did fix up a lot for Mum,' Edek said. Ruth was quiet. 'She was very happy 
with you,' Edek said. 'It was other stuff she was not happy about.' Tears came 
into Ruth's eyes. She didn't want to cry, again. She didn't want to set Edek's 
tears off again. He often still wept for Rooshka.
Terrible things did happen to Mum,' Edek said. 'I know,' she said. Her cheek was 
burning. She felt it with her fingers. She could feel a large blister forming in 
the middle of the swelling. 'I'm not usually bitten in winter,' she said to 
Edek.
'It does look terrible,' Edek said. 'It must have been a big fly.' 'It must have 
been the Commandant of flies,' Ruth said, and laughed. Edek laughed. 'Maybe he 
was the General field marschall Reichsfiihrer-SS of flies,' Ruth said. 'Or maybe 
there are bigger flies and he was just an SS Obergruppenfuhrer, a lieutenant-
general or a plain old captain, an SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer.'
Edek fell about laughing. Ruth thought he was going to fall over. She grabbed 
his elbow.
'What is the lowest this fly can be?' Edek said. 'A second lieutenant, an SS-
Untersturmfuhrer,' Ruth said. Edek looked at Ruth's bite. 'I do not think that 
this fly was an SS-Untersturmfuhrer,' he said, and collapsed with laughter. They 
both laughed until they cried. Edek had to lend Ruth his handkerchief to wipe 
away her tears. Jerzy stood behind them, silently. 'This was very funny,' Edek 
said to Jerzy. 'We walk to the museum shop,' Jerzy said. Ruth and Edek walked to 
the shop, still laughing.
The shop sold postcards, slides, books and videos. Ruth didn't want to buy 
anything. Two collections of postcards in folders were on sale. One was labelled 
Auschwitz I, the other Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Ruth opened the package of 
Birkenau cards. Every shot of Birkenau had a poetic hue, including the 
electrified wire fence. The railway tracks were photographed with yellow flowers 
growing in the grass at the side of the tracks.
On the back of the postcard of the International Monument to the Victims of 
Auschwitz, the postcard said that the memorial was located between the ruins of 
'two mass genocide devices'. Ruth was struck by the strange, detached wording 
used to describe the gas chambers and the ovens of the crematoria. There was 
also a photograph of the guard towers. It was a mid-distance shot. The towers 
and electrified fencing beside them looked too innocuous. Ruth felt flat. 
Nothing, not the most detailed graphic photographic enlargements
 


would ever be enough. Nothing was adequate enough to express a fraction of what 
should be expressed.
She bought the postcards, eight books, two videos and a box of slides. 'I'll 
have to leave these in the car,' she said to Jerzy. Jerzy was beaming at the 
woman who was wrapping Ruth's goods. Ruth hoped Jerzy wasn't going to get a 
commission from this sale.  'What for did you buy all this stuff?' Edek said.
'I wanted it,' she said.
'Have you not got enough stuff like this?' Edek said. 'Your apartment has got 
plenty of stuff like this. You got books, videos. Is it not enough?'  'It's 
never enough,' Ruth said.
Edek shrugged his shoulders.
'I am not sure this stuff is good for you,' he said. 'It could hurt you to read 
too much stuff like this.'
'Oh yeah?' Ruth said. 'You could live through it, but it's too dangerous for me 
to read about. The real danger is not reading about it. Isn't ignorance the real 
danger?'  'Maybe you are right,' he said.
'I am right,' she said.
'Okay,' Edek said.
'Can you put this stuff in our taxi for us please?' Edek asked Jerzy.
'Of course,' Jerzy said.
'Put it in the back seat,' Ruth said to Jerzy, 'not in the trunk. I don't want 
to forget it.'
'I do not think that our driver would want to keep this stuff,' Edek said, and 
laughed.
Ruth laughed. 'I don't think he would want to either,' she said.
'I will drive you to Birkenau in my car,' Jerzy said. 'Then I will bring you 
back to your taxi.'
'Are you up to Birkenau, Dad?' Ruth said.
'I am up to anything,' Edek said. Ruth looked at him. He  quite robust. In good 
spirits. His resilience reassured her. They drove the two miles to Birkenau. 
Auschwitz II.  'Survivors have the privilege of driving into Birkenau,' Jerzy 
said. 'Everybody else must walk.'
'Wow,' said Ruth, sarcastically. Edek silenced her with his look. 'It is not 
necessary, Ruthie,' he said quietly. They drove inside the entrance gate.  'You 
would like to drive to the monument?' Jerzy asked.
'We didn't come here to see the monument,' Ruth said.
They got out of the car. Birkenau was deserted. It was an eerie and ghostly 
place. Ruth shivered. She felt cold. She felt she could sense shrouds and shapes 
and presences. She felt she could feel haunted visions. Tormented prophets. She 
wasn't sure why she was so sure of this. She felt frightened. What she could 
feel was what she was able to imagine, she decided.  There were very few people 
in Birkenau. There were no exhibitions, no shops, no central heating. Just the 
bleak fields dotted with rundown barracks. The fields and broken barracks seemed 
to stretch for miles. Ruth knew that Birkenau covered four hundred and twenty-
five acres. It had contained over three hundred buildings. She knew there had 
been four crematoria with gas chambers, two makeshift gas chambers in farmhouses 
that had been specially converted for the job, and large cremation pyres and 
pits for when the job became too large for all the gas chambers and all the 
ovens.  A mournful mist hung low in the sky. Above the mist were dismal, §rim 
clouds. Were the clouds permanently blackened and soiled by soot? Ruth wondered. 
Everything was as deserted and abandoned as it must have been when the Nazis 
fled. Partly destroyed buildings had been left in their relative states of 
destruction. Empty patches or earth marked where barracks and buildings had been 
torn down. Wrenched out of the earth by Nazis who were trying to cover up their 
tracks. It was so still. So quiet.
 


'How do you feel, Dad?' she said.
'I am alright,' he said. He looked very subdued. She took his hand. 'We're here 
together, you and me,' she said. He nodded. Together in Auschwitz-Birkenau, she 
thought. Not a location most people would choose to share with each other.
'Here is where the prisoners were unloaded from the trains,' Jerzy said. Edek 
looked bewildered. 'Here?' he said.
'Yes, here,' Jerzy said. 'The prisoners did often come in sealed cattle wagons. 
Jammed together like cattle.'
'We know that,' Ruth said. 'My father was one of them. So was my mother and two 
of her sisters and her mother and father.' 'Of course,' Jerzy said. 'It was not 
here,' Edek said to Jerzy. 'What?' said Jerzy.
'The place where the train did arrive and stop,' Edek said. 'It was here,' Jerzy 
said. 'It was not here,' said Edek, agitated.
'It was here where the prisoners were unloaded from the trains,' Jerzy said.
'Don't begin your speech, again,' Ruth said to Jerzy, in what she hoped was a 
menacing tone.
'It was not here,' Edek said. 'I was here. This was not where I was pushed out 
of the cattle wagon. This is not something what a person does forget.' Edek 
looked distressed.
'This was the only place where the prisoners were unloaded,' Jerzy said. 'The 
train came into the gates and stopped here.' 'It was not here,' Edek said. He 
looked close to tears. 'They get old,' Jerzy said to Ruth. He had turned away 
from Edek so Edek wouldn't hear him. 'They get old,' he said. 'And they forget.'
'They?' said Ruth. 'Say that one more time and I'll punch you.'
She clenched her fists. Norman had taught her to punch effectively. He had grown 
up boxing with his father.
Jerzy looked completely startled. 'I'll punch you,' Ruth said, 'if you say that 
again. I'd like you to walk behind us now. My father and I will find the 
location my father is looking for.' She felt livid. How dare he refer to her 
father as 'they'. As though he wasn't there. As though Edek was one of the dead 
Jews that the guides were trained to talk about. The guides in Auschwitz were 
supposed to have completed a course of study not only on the facts, but how to 
present the facts, how to conduct the guided tours. What sort of a course could 
it be? Ruth thought. She wished she could tell Jerzy to piss off. But she didn't 
want Edek to have to walk the two miles back to Auschwitz, to their taxi.
'There were transports that were unloaded outside the gate, many times,' Ruth 
said to Jerzy. They were both now facing Edek, again. 'Especially in 1944,' she 
said, 'when they were overloaded with prisoners. Prisoners were arriving faster 
than it was possible to gas and burn them. Trains stopped at different places. 
Sometimes there were several trains that were backed up. Not everything was 
working like clockwork in those days.'
'Let's walk, Dad,' she said to Edek. Jerzy walked behind them.
'You are a clever girl, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'You do know many
things.'
Edek looked to the right and to the left as he walked. 'I did walk straight 
ahead from the train and then I did turn left,' Edek said. He looked flustered. 
'I have to find it,' he said, 'I was here. I know where I was.'
'Of course you do,' Ruth said. Suddenly Edek sped up. He walked across a field 
and into an area to the left. He signalled to Ruth to hurry.
'Look,' he said. 'Here is the tracks, and here is where I did get off the 
train.' He looked triumphant.
 


'That arsehole doesn't know what he's talking about,' Ruth said.
'Please, Ruthie, don't speak like that.'
'I knew you would find where you were unloaded,' she said.
Jerzy had caught up to them.
'The ramp in Birkenau was built in 1944,' he said. 'Previously all of the trains 
were unloaded in Auschwitz.' Edek dismissed Jerzy with a wave of his hand. A 
curt gesture, as though he was getting rid of a bad smell.
'We do not want to hear this, please,' Edek said.
'Could you allow us some privacy, please,' Ruth said to Jerzy. Jerzy looked 
angry. He walked a few feet away.
Ruth started thinking about her mother. Her mother had first been in Birkenau 
before she had been transferred to Auschwitz.
'I was separated from Mum here,' Edek said. He looked miserable. 'I will show 
you where my barracks was,' he said. 'I do remember every step I did take from 
this train to the barracks. I did know when I was walking away from Mum that my 
life would never be the same again.'
Nobody, who was on one of those transports, ever had the same life again. And 
they were the lucky ones, Ruth thought. The ones who still had a life. Rooshka 
had told her that the first thing she had been told, when she was still in the 
unloading area, was that there were no questions. 'There are no questions,' a 
German officer had shouted at her. 'And no answers.' Ruth felt fearful.
'Don't cry, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'Let me show you the barracks.'
'I hope they're still there,' she said. She followed Edek. They walked for 
several minutes, and then Edek broke into a run. 'Don't run, Dad,' she shouted. 
'It's raining and you could slip.' Edek kept running. He ran across a vast empty 
field. He ran, with his small, short steps. Ruth ran behind him. She was 
terrified he would fall. She looked behind her. Jerzy was running, too. She 
could hear his breathlessness.
A group of teenagers suddenly materialised. They had been in one
of the barracks. They were Israeli, Ruth realised. They all looked very subdued. 
One of them was carrying a large Israeli flag. It was almost an act of defiance 
to carry this flag, Ruth thought. They were defying anyone to object. Ruth was 
glad the Israeli kids were there. She felt calmed by their presence.
Edek was waving to her. He was standing outside one of the wooden barracks. Ruth 
started to tremble. Was this where Edek was housed? Was this the barracks he had 
lived in, if lived was the right word for the days and nights that he existed in 
this nether world. These decrepit wooden barracks, that were built to house 
fifty-two horses, housed up to a thousand men. The men slept on a bare concrete 
floor, squashed together, in rows and rows. Edek was standing at the doorway 
shaking his head. 'This was my barracks, Ruthie,' he said. He shook his head, 
again. 'I did not think I would come again, here, to these barracks,' he said. 
He paused. 'Come in,' he said. Edek issued his invitation to her almost in the 
manner of a host inviting a guest into his house.
Ruth stepped in. Edek walked in behind her. As soon he was inside the door, he 
let out a loud gasp. Ruth was startled. She turned around. 'It is everything 
exactly the same,' Edek said. 'Exactly the same.' Ruth looked around her. She 
couldn't believe she was standing, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the very barracks 
her father had been in. The long rectangular barracks had large wooden doors at 
each end. There were several holes in the doors. The wind was coming through the 
holes. 'The doors was like this when I was here,' Edek said. 'In winter it was 
shocking.'
The light in the barracks came from a small skylight high up on the walls, near 
the ceiling. There was one fireplace and a chimney at each end of the barracks. 
A brick flue ran down the length of the barracks. 'The smoke from the fireplace 
was supposed to pass through here,' Edek said, pointing to the flue, 'and it was 
supposed to heat up the barracks.'
 


'Did it?' said Ruth.
Edek laughed, grimly. 'Of course not,' he said. 'We was frozen. Every morning 
there was many dead frozen men.' Ruth started shivering. Edek ran to the far end 
of the barracks. 'I did sleep here, Ruthie,' he said, pointing to a spot in the 
middle of the left side of the barracks. He stood there, staring at the empty 
spot where he had slept as a twenty-six-year-old. A tall, five foot ten twenty-
six-year-old, who already weighed less than eighty pounds and was going to weigh 
even less. Ruth felt overwhelmed.
It was very quiet in the barracks. Ruth could feel the absence. And the 
presence. The presence of all of those poor young men. She knew they were young. 
Mostly under forty. She knew the older ones had been weeded out, in the 
selection process on their arrival. Ruth couldn't stop shivering. She could feel 
the calamity, in the air.
The rain leaked through the wooden roof. Everything was as grey as it must have 
been then. These barracks still held the horror. She could hear the horror, in 
the silence. It was palpable. It hadn't vanished. A four- or five-inch gap was 
at the top of the doors at the back and front of the barracks. Edek was standing 
at the back door. 'It was just like this,' he said. 'I remember it like it was 
yesterday. I did sleep in the middle not to be so close to the door. I was 
lucky.' Ruth wanted to ask him how he managed to hold on to his spot on the 
floor, in the middle of the barracks, but she didn't want to bother him with 
small questions. 'Nobody did want to sleep in the middle,' Edek said. 'You could 
get badly crushed.' He must have read her mind, Ruth thought. He must have known 
what she was thinking. The wooden walls were damp with rain. Puddles of water 
were on the floor. 'It was not so wet in the middle,' Edek said.
Ruth looked at Edek. He looked tired. He was walking slowly along the length of 
the barracks. He looked enveloped in the silence. The cadaverous quiet of all of 
those who were gone. Ruth sat down on the brick flue. She was still trembling. 
She wanted to cry. 'You want
to see where the toilets was, Ruthie, or maybe not?' Edek said after a few 
minutes.
'I want to see everything,' she said.
'You are a funny girl, Ruthie,' he said. He took her arm. She thought that he 
was pleased she wanted to see the toilet block.
Jerzy had been waiting outside. He looked impatient, as though they had taken 
too long. Ruth and Edek walked past two more of the wooden barracks, and then 
stopped. Jerzy, who was walking behind them, also stopped.
'Forty-five buildings made of brick have survived in Birkenau,' Jerzy said. 'And 
twenty-two buildings of wood.'
'Here is the toilets,' Edek said.
All three of them went inside. What looked like three broad concrete benches ran 
in parallel lines along the length of these barracks. The top of each of the 
concrete constructions had hole after hole cut out of the top of the bench. The 
holes were the size of a dinner plate. Not one of the new, large decorative 
dinner plates it was fashionable to use now. Just an average-sized dinner plate. 
There was not much space between the holes. They almost touched each other.
The holes, Ruth knew, were where the prisoners sat, in the brief time they were 
allowed for their ablutions. Although 'ablutions' was not the right word, Ruth 
thought. This is where they had to defecate and urinate in a very short period 
of time, while kapos screamed and urged more speed. And other prisoners, 
diseased and starving, jostled for their turn before their bowels and bladders 
emptied where they were standing. Thirty-four circles were cut out of the top of 
each block. They were inches apart. It was impossible not to touch the person 
next to you. Everyone had diarrhoea. The surface of the concrete was always wet 
and slippery.
Edek was standing in front of the concrete benches that had passed for latrines. 
He was shaking his head. Ruth hoped that he wasn't
 


remembering anything overwhelmingly horrific. Then, she realised there were 
nothing but overwhelmingly horrific memories in these barracks, in the other 
barracks, in the camp. There were no quiet moments. No better days, no pleasant 
afternoons. Every second of every minute was unbearable. No wonder that anyone 
who had survived had been surprised to find themselves still alive after all 
that horror. Years later some of those who had survived were still not sure that 
they were alive. Part of them had remained behind with the dead. Always 
attached, always affixed to that terror. Even in their dreams. No matter how 
hard they tried, they couldn't retreat. There was no exit. No way out. They 
couldn't absent themselves. They couldn't leave.
Ruth looked into the holes. There were scraps of what looked like dried mud, 
dust particles and normal debris. She wondered if anyone had cleaned these 
toilets out. She assumed they must have been cleaned. She peered in again. Whose 
lives were these specks remnants of? With DNA testing today, they could probably 
tell who had been here. Her father had been here. Was anything of him left in 
the bottom of this pit? The thought made her feel sick.
Ruth counted the holes. Two hundred men could relieve themselves at the same 
time on these holes. 'Relief was not the right word to use here, she decided. 
The pit underneath the holes must have filled up fast, she thought.
'It was full nearly to the top,' Edek said. He made a face and shuddered at the 
memory. 'It was shocking,' he said. 'So shocking I cannot believe it did happen 
to me. Sometimes I do think it must have happened to someone else.'
Ruth looked at a brown stain on the floor of the barracks. The stain looked like 
skin. Dying, diseased skin. An image she had been trying to keep out of her head 
appeared. An image of brown, shrivelled bodies. Bodies of men and women and 
children and babies. She had seen these bodies, dozens and dozens of them, laid 
out, behind glass,
in a museum in Guanajuato, in Mexico. Some of the glass wasn't sealed.
The bodies had been discovered in a former burial ground for the poor. They had 
been preserved by the tannin in the soil. The bodies lay in the Los Momias 
Museum, in Mexico, open-mouthed, as though they were trying to speak, trying to 
call out. Some of them were clothed. The boots and socks and trousers that they 
were wearing, still intact. There were several pregnant women with collapsed 
wombs, and the outline of the foetus visible.
The bodies had hair. Hair and beards. Nasal hair sprouted on several men, and 
the unclothed bodies showed pubic hair, perfectly preserved. Minutes after she 
had entered the museum, she had tried to leave. She had felt nauseated and 
distressed. Every doorway she had turned into had led to another roomful of 
bodies. She had been covered in sweat by the time she got out. Her breath had 
been short and shallow. As though her lungs had snapped shut. She had had to sit 
outside the museum for half an hour before she regained her breath.
The bodies reminded Ruth of Rooshka in the last days of Rooshka's life. All 
sunken and hollow. All protruding cheekbones and jawbones and leg bones. As 
corpse-like as Rooshka must have been when she was in Auschwitz and Stuthof. It 
had taken Ruth years to get that picture of her mother out of her head. She had 
thought that the beautiful, smooth-skinned image of her mother that she had 
carried inside her would never return.
Ruth felt bilious. She looked at Edek. He didn't look too well. She felt 
worried. She was starting to sweat despite the cold. She thought of Martina and 
her cool, blonde hair. Why was she thinking of Martina now? she wondered. There 
was no connection between her mother and Martina. Her mother would have liked 
Martina. Rooshka admired blue eyes and blonde hair. 'She has such beautiful blue 
eyes,' Rooshka would say, or, 'Look how beautiful is her blonde hair.' The
 


looks Rooshka had admired most were so Aryan, it had disturbed Ruth. It was as 
though Rooshka was in accord with the Nazis on that issue. Blue eyes were 
superior. And blonde hair. Still, Ruth thought, it was understandable. The 
Germans had flung so much shit about dark-haired, dark-eyed Jews, that some of 
it must have stuck.
Ruth was struck by the fact that she was standing in the latrines, in Birkenau, 
thinking about shit. Her mother had swallowed that Nazi line about blue eyes and 
blonde hair. Her mother had swallowed that Nazi shit. What a sentence. Ruth 
reeled. The sentence had winded her. Images of her mother swallowing shit filled 
her head. She bent over. She felt so sick. She quickly moved closer to one of 
the holes. She started vomiting. She vomited and vomited. When she finally stood 
up, she was surprised that she could still stand. She couldn't believe what had 
just happened to her. She had vomited so many times on this trip to Poland. She 
must have been making up for a lack of vomiting in her previous forty-two years. 
She wondered if people had a fixed quota of vomiting that they had to get 
through. She hoped she had fulfilled hers. She couldn't bear to go through this 
again.
She felt terrible. She straightened herself up. She was sure she must smell of 
vomit. Jerzy was standing in front of her. He looked horrified. The look of 
horror on his face almost made Ruth laugh. She would have laughed if she hadn't 
felt so weak. Edek looked worried. He put his arm around Ruth. 'Are you alright, 
Ruthie, darling?' he said. He gave her his handkerchief. He patted her on the 
head. 'It is alright, Ruthie,' he said. 'It is alright.' He held her arm as they 
walked back to the car.
Jerzy drove them back to Auschwitz.
'You want me to pay him?' Edek said to Ruth.
'No,' she said. 'I'll pay him.'
They got out of the car. Ruth paid Jerzy.
'I hope I was a satisfactory guide for you,' Jerzy said. He counted the money 
Ruth had given him. He looked bothered. 'Did you give him a tip?' Edek asked 
Ruth. 'No,' Ruth said. Edek gave Jerzy twenty zlotys. 'You was satisfactory,' 
Edek said to him.
Edek was quiet in the taxi on the way home. Ruth was glad of the silence. She 
had to collect herself. Collect herself. What strange words. Where did she think 
she had left herself? In Auschwitz? They were nearly at the Hotel Mimoza, when 
Edek looked at her. 'You did not eat your pears,' he said. 'But maybe now is not 
the time to eat pears. You can have something to eat later.' Ruth drank some 
more of her water.
Ruth and Edek walked through the front door of the Hotel Mimoza. Ruth felt a bit 
better now. She was so relieved to be feeling better. She looked up. Zofia and 
Walentyna were sitting side by side, on a sofa, in the lobby. Zofia was dressed 
in a deep red cotton shirt. The first few buttons of the shirt were undone. Even 
from the front door, Zofia's cleavage was visible. Zofia's breasts were lifting 
up and down, gently, with her breath. The red shirt was tucked into a straight, 
bright white skirt. The tan on Zofia's polished, bare legs gleamed. This was 
winter, in Poland, Ruth thought. Zofia was dressed as though she was on her way 
to St Tropez.
Walentyna was wearing a blue dress. Ruth felt a terrible pang of sadness for 
Walentyna. Clearly, no one had ever told her she should never wear sleeves 
gathered at the shoulder. Women as petite as Walentyna shouldn't have any 
puckers in their clothes, let alone a giant, billowing balloon of fabric, 
puffing out into a sleeve, on the top of each shoulder. Zofia spotted Edek. She 
got up and ran towards him, a concerned expression across her face.
'My poor lamb, my angel,' Zofia said in Polish to Edek. She put her arm through 
Edek's arm. 'How on God's earth did you survive
 


that trip?' she said. 'How are you feeling?' Ruth wondered if she had heard that 
correctly. Her poor lamb? Her angel? Edek wasn't hers. What was 'angel' in 
Polish? Aniot. Aniolek was the diminutive. Moj biedny aniotek. My poor angel. 
Yes, that was what Zofia had said.
Zofia took the arm she had linked through Edek's arm away. She stood in front of 
Edek and looked at him. Then, in a brisk movement, she threw both of her arms 
around Edek. 'My poor, poor angel,' she said. Edek looked startled, but pleased. 
'I am fine,' he said. 'Fine.' 'I don't believe it,' Zofia said. She pressed 
herself against Edek's body. 'You have to be looked after, after such an 
experience,' Zofia said. Ruth couldn't believe what she was witnessing. 'You 
need something to eat,' Zofia said. 'To face such terrible memories and tragedy 
takes a lot out of even a big strong man like you.'
Ruth thought that Zofia might be upsetting Edek. She was about to interrupt when 
she noticed that Edek looked much more cheerful than he had when they had 
arrived back at the hotel a few minutes ago. 'You need something to eat my poor 
lamb,' Zofia said. There it was, again. Zofia was staking a claim. Moja biedna 
owieczka. My poor lamb. Ruth felt stunned by the brazenness, the directness. 
Women in New York could take a lesson from Zofia, she thought. In New York, 
women went out of their way to not appear too interested in a man. Showing too 
much interest in a single man was considered the kiss of death in New York. Ruth 
was speechless with admiration. She stood there looking at Zofia and Edek. A big 
strong man like you? Or, a poor angel? Which one was it? Was it a contradiction? 
Or could Edek encompass both? Edek seemed to be encompassing Zofia. She was 
hugging him, again.
Walentyna caught up with them. 'I am so glad you are back, dear Edek,' she said. 
'We were worried.'
'We were very worried,' Zofia said. 'We were waiting here for two and a half 
hours. I didn't want to go anywhere. I did want to
be here when you got back.'
'I also didn't want to go anywhere,' Walentyna said. The spectacle of Zofia and 
Walentyna and their concern for Edek almost erased some of the morning's worst 
images. Images of her mother, and the image of the Vistula River choked with 
ash, and the image of herself vomiting into the latrines, began to recede. Zofia 
and Walentyna's studious concern was overpowering. Zofia and Walentyna were both 
clucking around Edek. Ruth was on the verge of laughter. She was amazed that she 
could find anything funny. But this was funny. Two grown women competing for an 
elderly man. Ruth thought that they were competing. She thought Walentyna was 
still in the competition.
'Come and eat,' Zofia said to Edek. 'We will have a little fish and a little 
liverwurst. I noticed yesterday how much you did like liverwurst'
"I noticed, also,' Walentyna said.
'Okay,' Edek said. 'Come on Ruthie, we deserve to eat after a day
like this.'
'He deserves to eat,' Zofia said. 'He deserves to eat,' Walentyna echoed.
'I think I'll go for a walk, Dad,' Ruth said. 'You go and have a bite to eat. I 
think I need some fresh air.'
Edek looked miserable. 'Come, just for a few minutes,' he said. 'Please, Ruthie, 
you do need to eat. You did bring up all the bananas from Auschwitz and you did 
not eat the pears.'
'You can buy bananas and pears in Auschwitz?' Zofia said. 'No,' Edek said. 
'Ruthie did bring them to Auschwitz, in the car. Then she did bring some bananas 
up in Auschwitz and she did bring the pears back in the car.'
Zofia and Walentyna looked bewildered. 'She did bring up the bananas when she 
was in Auschwitz and she did bring the pears back,' Edek said to the two women. 
He said this with a finality. As
 


though this explanation would clear up the matter. Both women looked perplexed.
'She did eat pears in Auschwitz and bring bananas back from Auschwitz?' Zofia 
said.
'No, she did bring the pears back,' Edek said. 'Back up?' Walentyna said. 'No,' 
Edek said. 'Back in the car.'
'I was a bit sick in Birkenau,' Ruth said. 'And I am fine now.' 'I thought it 
was Auschwitz you were sick in?' Zofia said. 'Auschwitz-Birkenau,' Ruth said. If 
she talked about this subject any longer, Ruth thought, she could well be sick 
again.
'What is the difference?' Edek said. 'She is better now. And that is the main 
thing.'
'That is the main thing," Zofia said. That is the main thing,' said Walentyna. 
Ruth really didn't want to sit in the lounge with Zofia and Walentyna. Their 
company felt too robust for the way she felt at the moment. She wanted to be 
quiet.
'Please, Ruthie, you do need something to eat,' Edek said. 'You did vomit up 
everything what you did eat.' 'She did vomit?' Zofia said. 'You vomited?' 
Walentyna said to Ruth. 'Yes, but I am fine now,' Ruth said.
'Probably it was that birdseed what you did eat what did make you sick," Edek 
said.
Ruth was trying to work out how to extricate herself from this situation with 
grace. She felt trapped in a spiralling kaleidoscope of bananas and pears and 
vomit and birdseed.
'You need some dry bread and a cup of tea,' Zofia said. 'Perfect,' said Edek.
'I was going to say this, too,' Walentyna said. 'Dry bread and tea with lemon.'
'Not tea with lemon, Walentyna,' Zofia said. 'Tea without lemon. Lemon is no 
good after vomits.'
Walentyna deferred to Zofia's expertise on the subject of post-vomits remedies. 
What a horrible word 'vomits' was, Ruth thought. She forced herself not to 
conjure up a picture of several vomits, lying next to each other on a road or 
some other surface. Ruth could see that she would have to capitulate. She 
couldn't hold out, on her own, against Walentyna, Zofia and Edek.
'I'll join you for a little while,' she said. Edek looked happy. All four of 
them walked to the lounge. Ruth chose the armchair furthest from Edek. This 
allowed Zofia and Walentyna to sit on either side
of him.
Zofia ordered pickled herring, smoked mackerel, sardines, liverwurst, cheese and 
a platter of potato salad. She also ordered some dry biscuits for Ruth. 'Dry 
biscuits will be better for you than dry bread,' Zofia said. Ruth was pleased. 
The thought of dry bread hadn't been appetising, to her. Zofia and Walentyna 
were beaming at Edek. Edek looked happy, too. Ruth suddenly felt grateful to the 
two women. Grateful to them for saving Edek from the slump that could have 
overcome him, after Auschwitz.
'Thank you for waiting for my father,' Ruth said to Zofia and Walentyna.
'We were waiting for you, also,' Walentyna said.
'Thank you,' said Ruth.
'You seem like a very nice young woman,' Zofia said to Ruth. Ruth was pleased to 
be called young. She didn't feel too young. She thought of people in their 
twenties as young. Not people her age.
'How old are you, Ruthie?' Zofia said. An irritability crept up on Ruth. She 
wished Zofia wouldn't call her Ruthie. She felt mean feeling annoyed with Zofia. 
It was unkind of her. And erratic. One minute she was feeling gratitude to Zofia 
and in the next instant, annoyance. This was not admirable, she told herself.
 


'She is clever about some things,' Edek said. Oh, no, Ruth thought. What was she 
going to have to listen to, now? 'She does marry such types what likes her, but 
not too much,' Edek said. 'She does not like them too much, too. The types what 
like her very much, she does not want to be with. She is nervous to be with 
someone what she does like too much.'
Zofia and Walentyna shook their heads in sympathy with Edek's plight about his 
daughter's predilection for partnerships which were less than they could be. 
Edek's analysis had startled Ruth. Edek had not been far off the mark. This was 
not bad for a man who had never seen a therapist or read a psychological 
journal. In New York, this sort of insight could almost qualify you to set up 
practice as a therapist. There seemed to be therapists who were former singers, 
therapists who were art dealers on the side, therapists who were also actors. 
New York had a therapist for everyone.
'Am I right, Ruthie?' Edek said. Ruth nodded her head. If she didn't feel too 
attached to a partner, it saved her a lot of anxiety. Anxiety about their 
health, anxiety about accidents, anxiety about losing them. Attachment made her 
feel fearful. Fearful of losing the person she was too attached to. Ruth thought 
it was probably a common problem and could account for the high percentage of 
mismatched partners.
'I had a friend with this problem,' Walentyna said.
'Did she leave her husband?' Edek said.
'No,' said Walentyna.
'My daughter does leave her husbands,' Edek said. Ruth was just about to laugh. 
An image of herself perpetually leaving a series or husbands came into her head. 
Just as the laugh was about to come out, she realised that every one of the men 
in her picture had been Norman. She felt annoyed at herself for thinking about 
Norman-was her father's fault. He was the one who was still connected to Norman.
'My daughter is not such a column type,' Edek said to Zofia and Walentyna Ruth 
was about to explain that he meant calm, when both women nodded.
'She looks column to me,' Zofia said.
'I think so, also,' Walentyna said.
'She does always look column,' Edek said. 'But inside she is never column.'
'Your father is a very clever man,' Zofia said.
'Very, very, clever,' Walentyna said.
The food arrived. Ruth was grateful for the distraction. 'It does look 
beautiful,' Edek said, looking at the platter of food, in front of him.
'Edek, dear, start with a little piece of herring,' Zofia said, as she lifted 
several strips of herring on to Edek's plate. Zofia seemed to be in charge of 
the food. She put a selection of mackerel and sardines on Walentyna's plate. 
'Walentyna likes mackerel very much,' Zofia said to Edek. Then she handed Ruth a 
plate with half a dozen dry biscuits on it. 'Ruthie, darling," she said. 'Eat 
the biscuits. You will feel better.'
Ruth sat back in her chair. Zofia's endearments were escalating. It was now 
'Edek dear', and 'Ruthie darling'. Walentyna had a long way to go if she wanted 
to catch up with Zofia. 'Is the mackerel good?' Ruth asked Walentyna. Walentyna 
nodded. Ruth realised she had asked the question at an inopportune moment. 
Walentyna had a mouthful of the mackerel she was eating. Walentyna looked 
embarrassed. She tried to finish the fish in her mouth quickly. 'The mackerel is 
very nice,' Walentyna said, still chewing the remnants of some Mackerel, 
nervously. 'It's very nice mackerel,' Zofia added.
Ruth looked at Zofia. Zofia had nearly as much food on her plate a$ Edek had on 
his. Ruth was sure that what she was looking at on Zofia's plate was a kilo of 
herring.
 


'Yes, Ruthie, you do need to eat,' said Edek. Edek and Zofia beamed at their 
shared agreement on what Ruth should do. Ruth thought that Walentyna looked 
slightly left out.  'My daughter does have her own business,' Edek said. 'She 
does make a lot of money in this business.'
Ruth decided not to argue this point with Edek, again. He always dismissed her 
protests, anyway.
'You told us this already,' Zofia said. 'What is the business?' 'She does write 
letters for people,' Edek said. 'Letters?' said Zofia.  'Letters,' Edek said. 
'It is a big business. In America many people do not know how to write a 
letter.'
'Really?' said Zofia. 'It is not so hard to write a letter.' 'American people 
are not like European people,' Walentyna said. 'Of course,' said Zofia.  Ruth 
was about to point out that some letters were hard to write, but she decided 
against it. The perplexing nature of her business was giving Edek and the two 
women too much pleasure.  'She does write many times very complicated letters,' 
Edek said. 'Oh,' both women said, with obvious relief that there was an 
explanation for both Ruth's business and what had appeared to be the oddities of 
Americans.  'She does write business letters,' Edek said. 'And letters for dead 
people.'
'Dead people?' Zofia said, looking bothered. 'Condolence letters, my father 
means,' Ruth said. 'Oh,' said Walentyna. 'A condolence letter is not easy to 
write.' Zofia agreed.  'She does write also love letters,' Edek said. Both women 
leaned forward.
'Love letters,' Walentyna said. 'It is very hard to write a love letter.' 'I 
know this of course, too,' Zofia said. The dry biscuits had settled  Ruth's 
stomach. Taken away her queasiness.
'The biscuits have made me feel much better,' Ruth said.
'Good,' Zofia and Edek said, in unison.
'Good,' Walentyna said, a minute later.
Edek had moved on to the liverwurst. His portion must have stripped the livers 
of several pigs or cows or whatever animal the livers had come from, Ruth 
thought. Edek's portion was enormous. He was eating the liverwurst without the 
aid of bread. Ruth admired his digestive system. It must be one of the world's 
best, she thought. Zofia was eating a large helping of potato salad. Walentyna 
was still eating her mackerel. Ruth felt sorry for Walentyna. She thought about 
asking Walentyna if she would like to join her for a walk around the old city. 
Then she thought the better of it. It would not be a good idea, she decided, to 
leave Zofia alone with her father.  'You could write very good advertisements 
for people to meet,' Zofia said to Ruth.
'Zofia means lonely hearts advertisements,' Walentyna said.
'Lonely hearts?' Edek said.
'When people advertise to meet another person,' Zofia said.
'I know what you mean,' Edek said. 'When a man does write an advertisement for a 
woman he does want. He says he is looking for tall and short and that sort of 
stuff.'  'That's right,' Zofia and Walentyna said.
'You could make a lot of money,' Zofia said. 'There are many lonely people.'
Edek agreed. 'There are many people what are lonely.'
'Edek is lonely, I am sure,' Zofia said.
'He is not,' Ruth said. She was surprised at the reply that had come out of her 
mouth. Why did she say that? Of course Edek was lonely. He just never admitted 
it.  'Sometimes I am lonely,' Edek said. Ruth was surprised to hear Edek say he 
was sometimes lonely. 'Eat, Ruthie, eat,' Zofia said.
 


'My poor lamb,' Zofia said to Edek, in Polish. She patted Edek on the hand. Edek 
smiled at Zofia.
'It is a very good suggestion what Zofia made,' Edek said. Ruth was startled. 
Which of Zofia's suggestions or suggestive behaviour was Edek responding to? 
This suggestion for the people what are needing lonely letters,' Edek said. 
Zofia beamed.  'They're called singles ads, in America, and they're very cheap,' 
Ruth said. 'It wouldn't be a good market for my sort of business.'  Zofia's face 
fell. Ruth felt mean. She needn't have said anything. It had been unnecessary of 
her to point out that singles ads were not the right venue for her business.  
'Have some potato salad, Edek,' Zofia said. 'The potato salad is very good.'
'Okay,' said Edek. Zofia spooned eight or ten spoonfuls of the potato salad on 
to Edek's plate. Ruth felt bad for dampening the atmosphere. 'Do either of you 
have children?' she said to Zofia and Walentyna.  'I have one child, a son,' 
Walentyna said.
'Walentyna's son is a good son,' Zofia said. Walentyna looked happy.
'He is forty-three, like you,' Walentyna said.
'But he is married,' Zofia said. Ruth laughed.
'I'm not looking for anybody,' she said. Particularly not a Pole, she added to 
herself.
'He is nearly a grandfather,' Walentyna said.
'Walentyna is nearly a great-grandmother,' Zofia said. 'Can you believe this? 
Our small, little Walentyna nearly a great-grandmother.' Walentyna looked 
confused. As though part of her knew that Zofia's comments were not quite 
complimentary, and the other part had been ready to acknowledge the nicety.  
'Zofia doesn't have children,' Walentyna said.
'I did want to have my own life,' Zofia said.
'Zofia is a woman ahead of her time,' Ruth said to Edek.
'What thanks do you get from children?' Zofia said.
That was a distinctly Jewish sentiment, Ruth thought, and Jewish phrasing. Maybe 
Zofia had some Jewish blood despite her blondeness and her athleticism.  'I am 
not happy with Ruthie that she does not have children,' Edek said. 'I would like 
still to have a grandchild.' Ruth was not happy with the turn this conversation 
was taking. She didn't really think Edek wanted a grandchild. He just wanted to 
see her settled into a relationship. With Norman, preferably.  'Ruthie nearly 
can't have children,' Zofia said to Edek. 'She is forty-three. If she wants to 
have children she has to find someone straightaway.'  'There is someone,' Edek 
said.
'Oh?' said Zofia.
'Dad, please don't go into that,' Ruth said.
'I will tell you later,' Edek said to Zofia.
'I don't want children,' Ruth said to make sure the conversation about Norman 
remained truncated.
'I can understand why Ruthie feels like this,' Zofia said. 'There is no 
guarantee with a child. You don't know what you will get. Walentyna is lucky, 
she got a nice son. But I have seen nice mothers with terrible children and 
terrible mothers with nice children.' Ruth felt a sudden affinity with Zofia.  
'I feel exactly that way,' she said. Zofia smiled. Edek looked unhappy.
'Children are good,' Edek said, after a minute. 'Where would I be without my 
daughter?' He produced this argument in favour of children with a flourish.  
'With me, in Sopot,' Zofia said. She patted him on the arm.
Walentyna looked disconcerted and began to fidget with her hair. Edek helped 
himself to more potato salad. Zofia's retort clearly hadn't
 


disturbed him. It had unnerved Ruth. Ruth looked at Zofia. Zofia seemed 
oblivious to the frisson of nervous surprise her reply had elicited. Ruth 
decided it was time for her to leave. She looked at her father. 'I'm going to go 
for a walk,' she said. 'Do you want to come with me?' Both women looked 
anxiously at Edek.
'No, Ruthie,' he said. 'I will stay here and finish my potato salad.' 'I'll call 
you in your room when I get back,' she said.
It had stopped raining. Ruth was glad. She didn't like walking in the rain. Even 
with a raincoat and an umbrella, rain made her feel damp. Flattened. She needed 
this walk. She needed to clear her head. She walked around the old city. The old 
city was small. Eight hundred and seventy-two yards wide and thirteen hundred 
yards long. Every street in the old city was charming. Pretty. There were lots 
of young people out walking and sitting in cafes. Groups of students talking. 
The young seemed to mingle easily with the older generation, the middle-aged and 
the elderly.
Most of the cafes were full. The people inside were looking at each other with 
such intensity, Ruth thought. They looked each other in the eye, with a direct 
unflinching gaze. In New York, people looked distracted, whether they were on 
their own or with someone else. Ruth was mesmerised by the way people talked to 
each other here. The conversations seemed passionate and emotional. Was this 
just Krakow? Or had she not seen this side of Warsaw and Lodz? Maybe there was a 
similar vitality and intensity in Warsaw, she thought, but definitely not in 
Lodz. No one in Lodz had this much life in them.
She looked at the people sitting in the window of a cafe in Kanonicza Street. 
There were women talking earnestly to other women, men talking to men, and men 
and women talking. Everyone was engaged. As though the conversation really 
mattered. In New York,
Ruth thought, people were often looking over their shoulders or at their watch. 
You didn't see this sort of passion. You didn't see it between acquaintances, 
friends or lovers.
There were still lovers in Krakow. Ruth had been struck by that the minute she 
had arrived. Couples walked around hand in hand or gazed into each other's eyes. 
Couples kissed passionately, in public. Ruth wondered if the abundance of lovers 
was a consequence of people having access to less. Polish people had less money, 
fewer distractions, fewer possessions, fewer prospects. They didn't have that 
much. Was that the reason they still had love? If only the love lasted, she 
thought, thinking of the posters of the battered wives and battered children. In 
New York, people had everything else. They had to look for love in the singles 
pages of local newspapers.
Ruth passed a store with more wooden Jews in the window. A large sign above the 
carved Jews said, in capital letters, souvenirs. What were these souvenirs of? A 
community of dead Jews? Ruth didn't think so. She didn't think most Poles were 
missing them. Suddenly, Ruth wanted to go to synagogue. She knew it was an 
irrational desire. What good would it do her or anyone else if she went to 
synagogue? Still she wanted to go. It was Friday, there would be a Shabat 
service at the Remuh synagogue. She looked at her watch. If she hurried back to 
the hotel, she would just have time.
Edek was in exactly the same position she had left him in. She couldn't believe 
that they were all still there. All the food was gone. The empty plates were in 
front of them.
'Back so quickly?' Zofia said.
'I've been more than an hour,' Ruth said. 'I came back,' she said to Edek, 
'because I want to go to synagogue.'
'To synagogue?' Edek said. 'What for?'
'I don't know,' she said.
'Sit down, Ruthie, and have a cup of tea,' he said.
'Have a cup of tea,' Zofia said.
 


'I want to go to synagogue,' she said.
There was a silence. All three of them looked at her. She felt as though she had 
intruded and disbanded everyone's happiness. The silence was as uncomfortable as 
if she had burped loudly or farted.  'Synagogue?' Zofia said.
'We do never go to synagogue,' Edek said.
'I would just like to go tonight,' Ruth said. 'It's a very sweet, small 
synagogue,' she said to Zofia. As though the size of the synagogue would make it 
appear more harmless.  'It is not so bad to go to synagogue,' Walentyna said. 'I 
go to church sometimes.'
'I never go to church,' Zofia said firmly.
'We do never go to synagogue,' Edek said.
'Don't worry, Dad,' Ruth said. 'You stay here and enjoy Zofia's and Walentyna's 
company. I'll go on my own.' She knew that pitching herself against Zofia and 
Walentyna might move Edek to declare his loyalty. She was right.  'I will go 
with you, of course,' Edek said.
'Of course,' Zofia said. 'He is a very good father,' she said to Ruth.
'I know that,' Ruth said. She wasn't sure why she wanted Edek to accompany her. 
Maybe she just wanted him away from Zofia and Walentyna. She thought he must be 
tired.  'Maybe I will see you later,' Zofia said to Edek, nudging him with her 
shoulder.
'We'll be home late,' Ruth said.
'This is such a small synagogue,' Edek said to Ruth. 'They not going to have a 
service what lasts hours.'  'Good,' said Zofia.
'You must be very tired, Dad,' Ruth said. 'You've had an exhausting day. You 
need to get a good night's sleep.'  'Of course,' Walentyna said.
'Edek is a strong man,' Zofia said. 'He does not look tired.
'I am okay,' Edek said.
'Well, I am going straight to bed as soon as I get back,' Ruth said.
'That is a good idea,' Zofia said, before Ruth could add that she felt her 
father should do the same.  'Goodnight,' Ruth said to Zofia and Walentyna. Edek 
and Zofia and Walentyna stood up. Walentyna and Zofia shook hands with Ruth.  
'Goodnight,' both women said to her. Walentyna patted Edek on the back. 'You 
have a good night and a good rest,' she said to him.  'Goodnight Edek dear,' 
Zofia said. She gave him a small peck on the cheek.
'Goodnight ladies,' Edek said.
'Thanks for coming with me,' Ruth said to Edek, in the taxi.
'It is okay,' he said. He looked at her. 'Did you eat something more than those 
biscuits what you had?' he said.  'No,' she said. 'But I'm not really hungry.' 
He shook his head.
'You do not eat enough,' he said. Edek was right, she wasn't eating much. She 
must be losing weight, she thought. She felt the waistband of her skirt. Even 
sitting down, it felt loose. Definitely loose. She was pleased. There must be a 
bonus to be had out of all of this. She would weigh herself as soon as she got 
back to Manhattan, she thought.  There were fifteen to twenty people at the 
Remuh synagogue. Even in a synagogue as small as the Remuh, fifteen to twenty 
people still looked not many. Ruth felt disappointed. What was she hoping for? A 
crowd. The sort of crowd who were already filing into the Samson Restaurant 
across the square, for the twice-nightly cabaret? Ruth counted the people who 
had turned up for the service. There were eighteen people, including the rabbi.  
and Edek stood in the entrance of the synagogue for a few
 


minutes. A man from Idaho introduced himself. 'I come here every year,' he said 
to Ruth and Edek. 'I grew up in a village not far from here, Tokarnia,' the man 
said. 'Near the mountains. We used to walk in the mountains every day. Me and my 
mother and father,' he said. 'From there we went to the ghetto in Plaszow and 
then to Auschwitz,' he said, pulling up his sleeve and displaying the familiar 
inked number. 'I don't know why I come here,' he said. 'I come here every year. 
And every year, after two or three days I want to leave.'
'Where is everyone?' a woman said to Ruth and Edek. Ruth knew what she meant. 
Where was the congregation? 'Dead,' Ruth said. The woman, a woman from 
California, in her fifties, looked shocked. 'Of course,' she said. There were 
three other Americans and a Canadian at the synagogue. All of them looked 
bewildered. 'Where is the congregation?' the Canadian man said. He was about 
Ruth's age. 'Dead,' Ruth said. The man looked stunned.
'Ruthie, maybe you should not put it this way,' Edek said to her when the 
Canadian man had walked away.
'What other way is there to put it?' she said. 'I can't say they're vacationing 
in the Bahamas.'
Edek shook his head, but laughed, in spite of himself. 'You for sure cannot say 
that," he said. The only Poles present in the synagogue were old. They didn't 
look Jewish, to Ruth. But they must have been. No old Pole would be attending 
Shabat services in a synagogue, she thought.
Ruth went into the back room of the synagogue with the rest of the women. The 
room was at the end of a small passage, and was quite dark. It felt airless. 
Ruth tried to open one of the windows, but it was jammed shut. It looked as 
though it hadn't been opened in decades. Ruth went back to her seat. In this 
small airless room in the back of the synagogue, Ruth could feel herself 
starting to relax. She realised she had left her bag, unattended, on a seat, 
several seats
away. She was obviously letting down her guard. She realised how rigidly she had 
been holding every part of herself. Her body felt almost limp, now.
She looked through the small window to see if she could see Edek. Edek was in 
the main room of the synagogue, with the other men. The window in between the 
rooms was covered with old lace curtains. Ruth could hardly see through them. 
She couldn't see Edek. She looked around her. The woman from California was 
still crying. Ruth hoped that the Canadian man was okay. She felt momentarily 
bad, but there was nothing else she could have said to either of them. The 
Californian woman blew her nose.
'It's only by being here, in Poland,' she said to Ruth, 'that you really can 
absorb what happened. There really are no Jews here,' the woman said, and shook 
her head.
'We're all here searching for something,' Ruth said. 'Going from cemetery to 
cemetery. From absence to absence. All of us looking for the presence of people 
who are no longer present.' The woman started crying again.
Ruth wished she hadn't said anything. She leaned back in the pew. It was such a 
relief not to be clenching her face, her jaw, her teeth. Not to have tense arms 
and legs. She felt as though she could fall asleep. The service was short. She 
met Edek outside, afterwards.
'It was not a bad service,' Edek said.
'Thanks again for coming, Dad,' Ruth said.
'I did enjoy it,' Edek said. He rubbed his hands together, in the cold. 'Let us 
go home,' he said.
 


chapter fifteen
Ruth woke up. For a moment she thought that she was in her apartment, on 
Fourteenth Street. She looked at the floral wallpaper on the walls and realised 
that she must be in Poland. Still. She felt terrible. She felt as though she 
hadn't slept. Her head was scrambled with random thoughts and images. 
Unarranged, unsorted, ungraded thoughts. All anxiety-provoking.
She sat up in bed. She had to get rid of this anxiety. There was nothing to 
fear. The formless, amorphous world of her dreams was not her world. She was 
here in the very expensive Hotel Mimoza. She was able to pay for this very 
expensive hotel because she had the ability to think clearly. To sort out other 
people's concerns and to articulate them. In her wallet, in the third drawer of 
the bureau, was an American Express card, a MasterCard, a Visa card, and a 
Diner's Club card. She was a purposeful person. She was not a lost soul.
Then she remembered her dream. In her dream, her soul had slipped out of her. It 
had slipped out with the ease of words leaving lips. A slippery, swift ease. As 
though it had been oiled or anointed. It had happened in an instant. One minute 
she had been intact, the next minute her soul was hovering above her. She could 
see its outline, in the dream. It was the same height as her. The same shape. 
But it looked lighter. It lacked the heaviness of living bodies. It was 
diaphanous. It floated. But it was her. Her mirror image. An imprint of herself, 
in the air, floating above her.
She used to have this dream as a child. It used to terrify her. She
I
would be floating, face down, above herself. For hours. However hard she tried 
she couldn't get herself back down, to the bed, again. She always woke from this 
dream feeling queasy. She had been so relieved when the dream had disappeared. 
It had seemed to leave her when she was about seventeen or eighteen. An age when 
she had toughened up. She had dyed her hair jet-black and whitened her face with 
the palest shade of make-up on the market. She had worn bare feet in the 
conservative streets of Melbourne, Australia. People had gasped and pointed. She 
had been a beatnik. On her own. Out of kilter with the culture and the times. 
Edek used to look at her and cry. Cry at her black-ringed eyes and white lips. 
"What did happen to my beautiful daughter?' he would say.
Rooshka had maintained a stony silence. She had tolerated the bare feet and the 
black outfits. Ruth had lost weight, and Rooshka was more pleased about the 
weight loss than she was distressed at being the mother of a beatnik. Ruth was 
happy being a beatnik. For the first time she slept through the night, most 
nights. She didn't wake when Rooshka screamed in her sleep. She didn't have to 
cover her head with her pillow in order to drown out her mother's shouts. The 
shouts which were always in Yiddish. Rooshka was shouting to her mother. The 
mother who went to the right, to the gas, when Rooshka went to the left. Ruth 
got lonely, as a beatnik. No one would join her in reviving the movement. She 
let her hair colour grow out and threw away the white lipstick.
Ruth rubbed her eyes. They felt raw. As though she had been awake all night. 
Even as a child she had woken up tired from that dream. The face that floated 
above her in her childhood dream was always sombre. It never smiled or laughed. 
It just hovered above Ruth. Looking at her. All night.
Suddenly, Ruth felt sick. The face in her childhood dream, the face that used to 
look down on her for hours, at night, was the face in the photograph. The face 
of Edek's sister Fela's child, Liebala. It
 


was Liebala's face floating above her. Liebala, who looked so like her. Liebala, 
who was always serious, always solemn, in Ruth's dreams.
Ruth remembered clearly the day the dreams began. It had been her first day in 
fourth grade. She had been eight years old. The youngest child in grade four. 
All the other children were nine. Some were ten. She had come home from that 
first day of the school year exhausted. Some of the boys had been rough with 
her. It was a working-class area. There were lots of tough kids. Ruth didn't say 
anything to Rooshka and Edek. Ruth knew even then that a little roughness in the 
classroom was incomparable to what they had endured. And Rooshka had been happy 
that day. Happy and proud that Ruth was eight and in grade four.
Eight. That was the age Liebala must have been, in the photographs, Ruth 
thought. Liebala's face had been less composed in the photographs. In the 
photographs she had looked more active, more eager, more spirited. In the 
dreams, Liebala's curls were the only unruly part of her. They sprang out at 
wayward angles. The rest of Liebala had been still. Still face. Still arms and 
legs. She had floated quietly. Hovering above Ruth. Hardly moving. In the 
dreams, Liebala was dressed in layers of a sheer, white, gauze fabric. The 
fabric floated. Sometimes Ruth could feel the movement of air as the layers of 
Liebala's dress shifted and moved in the room. Liebala, in her unclouded, 
gossamer layers, had looked down at Ruth, night after night.
Ruth sat on the bed, in her room at the Hotel Mimoza, and felt frightened. How 
could Liebala have been in her dreams? She had never seen Liebala's face. She 
must have been dreaming about herself. She and Liebala were so similar. So 
alike. Except for one small detail. Ruth had noticed, in the photograph, that 
Liebala had a mole on her cheek. Her left cheek. Ruth remembered the mole, from 
her dreams. How could she have known about the mole? She had probably
created the mole, Ruth thought, in order to distinguish herself from her 
nocturnal visitor. She felt her own cheekbones. She didn't have a mole on her 
cheek. Just an elevated bump where the fly had bitten
her.
She tried to calm down. There was nothing frightening about any of this. It was 
just a dream. And she must have been dreaming about herself. She and Liebala 
were so alike. She must have transposed the expression on Liebala's face, in the 
photographs, on to her memories of the face in her dreams. Of course that was 
it, that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
She should have a shower, she decided. Hot water and steam often cleared her 
head after a bad night. A hot shower made her feel internally cleansed, as 
though the steam had reached her brain and heart and lungs. Hot water seemed to 
wash some of the mess of bad nights away. It seemed to repair and redress the 
anarchy. To sanctify and purify. Most of the time, after five minutes in a hot 
shower, Ruth could feel herself returning. Returning to who she really was.
And who was she, really? she wondered. She was a person in Poland. Who she was, 
was always a vexing question for her. This morning she needed a clear answer. 
She was Ruth Rothwax, president, CEO, chairman, owner and director of Rothwax 
Correspondence. She could run ten miles, with ease. She could bench press fifty-
five pounds. And she was losing weight. Losing weight was always a cheering
thought.
Ruth had always had a troubled relationship with her dreams. She had had 
nightmares about children and babies for years. Children she kept losing. Babies 
she couldn't look after. The dream in which she gave birth to a damaged baby 
always left her out of kilter for days. Days later she would find herself trying 
to work out what was wrong with the baby, and where it had gone. It always 
disappeared by the end of the dream. Merely thinking about that dream gave her 
the creeps. Why had that dream come into her head? Just when
 


she had established herself, in her head, as a competent businesswoman. A woman 
who could wear a suit and bench-press and squat, metaphorically, with the best 
of them. That was who she was! Not some lost, slipped soul. Inhabited by others.
Where had that sentence come from? She was not inhabited by others. She had 
managed to separate herself from the mother. From the ghosts of her mother's 
past. From all of the dead. She was inhabited by her own thoughts and her own 
imagination. She was inhabited by her own self. The years when she had believed 
that she had been in Auschwitz were over. She knew that that was her mother's 
experience, not hers. The years of feeling more aligned with the dead than the 
living were over. She was living. She was definitely living. Living well.
Ruth was tempted to look at the photographs of Liebala and Hanka and Fela and 
Juliusz. But she decided against it. This was not the morning to look at the 
past. This was the morning to look to the future. To being back in her own 
apartment. In New York. The city had never seemed more like a haven. She 
corrected herself. The city had never seemed like a haven, before. That's what a 
comparison with Poland could do, she thought. Make any other place look cozy. 
Cozy and comforting.
She decided that she would wait to look at the photographs until she was back in 
New York. She would have them framed, she decided, and hang them on a wall. 
Maybe she would put them on one of the walls in her bedroom. Or maybe they would 
look better in the living room. She might have them enlarged, too, she thought. 
That way she could study everybody's features and expressions. She felt excited 
at that prospect.
She thought about the china. All the plates and bowls and cups and saucers. She 
wanted to touch the china. To run her fingers around the fluted gold rims. To 
hold the cup handles. To feel the glaze on the plates. It was going to be 
overwhelming to own the china. To
live with it. To look at it, every day. Ruth couldn't imagine eating from the 
china. Using it for meals. Her instinct was to preserve it, behind glass, like 
some museum piece. That was absurd, she thought. She would have to force herself 
to use it. The cups and saucers and bowls and plates were meant to be used. They 
had been in constant use, until late 1939. Ruth hoped they hadn't been used 
since then. She couldn't bear the thought of the stained-toothed old man or his 
bewigged wife using that beautiful china.
She would use the coat, too, she thought. She would have it altered. She would 
take it to the tailor on 12th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. She knew 
he was very expensive. She hoped that his prices reflected quality in his 
tailoring. She was looking forward to wearing the coat. She thought she would 
look good in it. Thinking about the coat and the china had lifted her spirits.
Ruth looked at her watch. It was still early. She thought she could fit in half 
an hour's work before she showered. She knew exactly how long it took her to 
shower. She knew exactly how long it took her to shower without washing her 
hair, and how long it took her to shower and wash her hair. She knew exactly how 
long it took her to shower and dress. She timed everything she did. On the 
surface, the timing seemed to be aimed at efficiency. But Ruth knew that knowing 
how long things took was one way of offsetting and avoiding the panic of the 
unknown. It reassured her to know how long things took. How long it took to walk 
to the post office or to cook vegetables or eat breakfast or read the paper.
It was an attempt at control, of course. It didn't take a genius to figure that 
out. Ruth had grown up frightened of the random elements that had arrived in 
Rooshka's life. Overnight. The errant and erratic events that changed 
everything. And left Rooshka unnerved, decades later, at anything unexpected or 
unplanned. A knock at the door or a phone call would cause Rooshka to gasp or 
tremble.
The world of letters was completely controllable. No one could
 


intrude on a letter. Or disagree. Or do something disagreeable. Today, the quest 
for control was seen as unhealthy. Ruth had nothing against control. So much of 
everyone's life was out of control, anyway. Why shouldn't you exercise control 
when you could?
She got out her notebook. She felt like writing by hand. She couldn't even begin 
to think about the three hundred and twenty-seven letters John Sharp had 
ordered. She decided to tackle the thank-you-for-the-introduction-to-the-agent 
letter. Dear X, she wrote. She always addressed her letters to 'Dear X'. She had 
to address them to someone. She couldn't write any letters without using the 
word 'dear'. Sometimes she began letters with the recipients' names, but mostly 
she began with 'Dear X'.
She had tried many times to write without addressing them to anyone first. But 
couldn't. She couldn't think of anything to say if she wasn't saying it to 
someone in particular. Even if that person was 'X'. She looked at the Dear X, 
she had written. She added a line. I want to thank you so much for your 
generosity, she added. Ruth thought for a minute or two. And I want you to know, 
she wrote, that I know that the generosity is in the offer, not the outcome. The 
introduction, and not what comes of it. Ruth put her pen down. She couldn't get 
involved in this letter. She would have to do it another time. She had too many 
things crowding her head.
She felt her bite again. It was still swollen and inflamed. Why had the fly 
marked her like this? What a stupid question, she thought. The fly hadn't marked 
her. It hadn't marked her out of the crowd. It had just bitten her. She felt 
annoyed to have been bitten by a fly, in Auschwitz. Still, to come out of 
Auschwitz with only a bite was something other inmates would have prayed for. 
She stopped herself. It was not other inmates. It was just inmates. She was not 
an inmate. Others, clearly distinct from her, were there. She was not there. She 
chided herself for this slip. She was born more than a decade after it was all 
over. All over for those who died. And all over for those
who didn't die. You couldn't really live, after you had been in Auschwitz. Even 
if you appeared to be living, like others around you, you couldn't live. Parts 
of you were gone. And would never return. It was hard to live with missing 
parts.
Ruth showered and dressed. She felt better. More herself. She had chosen a dark, 
burnished orange dress. She felt like having some colour on her. She had been 
dressing almost entirely in black since the day she arrived in Poland. She 
thought that she might surprise Edek and have eggs for breakfast. She went 
downstairs. She looked for Edek among the guests already eating their breakfast. 
The room was quite full. She couldn't see Edek. She found a table near the 
buffet. She put her room key on the table and walked to the buffet. They had 
boiled eggs and scrambled eggs and poached eggs today. This was the first time 
she had seen poached eggs in Poland. She sat down and waited for Edek. He would 
probably be here soon, she thought. He was usually punctual, for breakfast.
She felt hungry. It was one of the few mornings in Poland that she had felt 
hungry. She was glad she was hungry. Glad to have her appetite back. She asked 
the waiter if it was possible to poach her eggs to order, rather than take them 
from the buffet. He said of course. She told him she would wait for her father 
before placing her order.
Ten minutes later, Edek still hadn't arrived. Ruth had been trying not to feel 
anxious. Now she was worried. Edek was never late for meals. Auschwitz had 
probably been too much for him, she thought. And then she had dragged him to a 
synagogue. Suddenly a full-scale panic took hold of her. Her heart started 
racing. How could she have just sat here and waited? She should have gone to his 
room to check up on him, the minute he was late.
She ran to the elevator. Dear God, she prayed. Please let my father be alright. 
The prayer shocked her. Who was she turning into? A Person who prayed. She got 
out of the elevator and ran to Edek's room. She knocked at the door. There was 
no answer. She felt ill.
 


Dear God, she said, please don't let my father die. She knocked again. She 
looked around to see if there was a cleaning lady nearby. They usually had keys 
to all the rooms. She could feel her nausea rising. She knew the trip to Poland 
was a mistake. Edek hadn't wanted to come. And now look at what had happened.
She was almost breathless. She knocked one last time. She was about to turn and 
run down to the front desk for help, when she thought she heard a noise in the 
room. She knocked, again, with such force that her knuckles hurt. There was some 
more noise, and then the door opened. 'Good morning, darling,' Zofia said to 
her. Ruth stared at Zofia. What was Zofia doing here? Had she knocked on the 
door of the wrong room?
All the lopsided, uneven, disconnected and unrelated pieces of information 
started to settle. Suddenly, Ruth knew that she hadn't knocked on the door of 
the wrong room. This was Edek's room. Zofia was in Edek's room. And had been 
there for quite a while by the look of things. Zofia was half-dressed. Ruth 
stood there and shook her head. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. A 
minute ago she'd imagined that her father was dead. The prayer she had put in to 
God was completely unnecessary, she realised. Her father was far from dead.
Zofia was in her bra. Her breasts looked flushed and large. Larger than the very 
large breasts they already appeared to be when they were fully clothed. Ruth 
felt anxious and insignificant. A pallid, flat-chested, bloodless spectator.
Zofia was struggling to button up a very tight, stretch skirt. 'Darling,' Zofia 
said to Ruth. 'Your father is in the shower. We did go to sleep quite late.' 
Ruth just stared at her. She still hadn't spoken. A clutch of words, reasonable 
words, appropriate words, pertinent words, civil words, dignified words, seemly 
words, were all stuck if her gullet. She opened her mouth to see if that would 
free some ' the words. None came out.
of
What was happening? Ruth thought. The world seemed awry, askew, topsy-turvy, 
faulty. Nothing made sense. The unexpected and the improbable had been let 
loose. The questionable and the implausible had joined forces with the 
unfamiliar and undreamed of, and gathered momentum and run amok.
'Your father is a wonderful man,' Zofia said. 'I think so, too,' Ruth, finally, 
said.
Zofia smiled. 'A wonderful man,' she said, again. Ruth saw, from Zofia's smile, 
that she and Zofia were not talking about the same qualities in Edek. Zofia was 
thinking about something Ruth would rather not hear any more about.
'Tell my father, I'll go down to breakfast and meet him later,' she said to 
Zofia.
'Darling, we will have breakfast with you in a few minutes,' Zofia said. We? 
They were already a 'we', Ruth thought. She felt giddy. Zofia looked at Ruth's 
expression. 'Maybe your father will talk to you first,' she said, 'and I will 
see you later.' 'Okay,' Ruth said.
'Your father is a very nice man,' Zofia said. 'He is very good in that 
department,' she said, conspiratorially, as she cast her eyes in the direction 
of the bed. Ruth was mortified. Why did Zofia have to tell her that? Zofia had 
looked so matter-of-fact about it. Ruth didn't think it was a matter-of-fact 
matter to discuss someone's father's sex life, with the person in question's 
daughter. It horrified her. Was she just prim? Reserved? A prude? Zofia looked 
so comfortable with the subject matter. Ruth heard her father call out something 
from the shower. 'I'll be right there, my little boy,' Zofia shouted to him, in 
Polish. My little boy? Was that what she said? Ruth's head was spinning. Moj 
maty chlopczyku. My little boy. That's what she called him.
'A man like that is very hard to find,' Zofia said to Ruth. 'Too many men are 
not satisfying.' Ruth reeled. Too many men. Was it
 


Zofia's life that the gypsy woman was talking about? Too many men. That was what 
the gypsy woman had said. Ruth started to feel faint.
'I'm going downstairs,' she said to Zofia.
'Goodbye, darling,' Zofia said. She still hadn't managed to do her skirt up.
Ruth tried to calm down. What was so terrible about any of this? Nothing. There 
was nothing wrong. Nothing out of the ordinary. And she had to stop imbuing 
normal things with abnormal meaning. 'Too many men' was a common enough phrase. 
In regular usage. And so was sex. Sex was normal and common. Sex between 
friends. Sex between lovers. Sex between strangers. Her father was entitled to 
have sex with whomever he wanted. There was nothing strange about this. Still, 
she felt sick. She went to her room and got some Mylanta.
Ruth sat at the breakfast table. She could still feel the coating that Mylanta 
left on your tongue. She thought she should have something to eat. To displace 
the taste of the Mylanta. But she didn't feel hungry. She had lost her appetite. 
Her father clearly had no trouble with appetite, she thought. Appetite of any 
sort. Why was she so upset? she thought. Her father hadn't done anything wrong. 
There was no disloyalty involved. Why was she thinking about loyalty and 
disloyalty? Did she want her father to hate all Poles? Was that what was making 
her feel betrayed? She didn't know. She just knew she felt flat. Upset. 
Exhausted.
What a picture in contrasts they were. She and Edek. She was swallowing Mylanta 
day and night, and couldn't even keep a meagre breakfast down. And he was 
devouring everything in sight. She paused. Why did she have to use the word 
'devouring'? She didn't want to think of her father devouring Zofia's breasts or 
any other part of Zofia. She grimaced. She tried to shake that thought out of 
her head. She could have used other words. She didn't have to choose 
'devouring'. She could have used savouring, consuming, ingesting.
She could have used relishing or engulfing. No, she thought, they were no 
better. They led to the same series of images. She shook her head, again, more 
violently. It gave her a headache.
Edek arrived. Ruth could see his beam from the other side of the room. He looked 
refreshed and alive. He perused the breakfast buffet quickly as he ran towards 
Ruth.
'I am sorry I am late, darling,' he said to Ruth. 'Zofia was talking and 
talking. And it did make me late.'
'I think she was doing more than talking,' Ruth said, tersely. Edek laughed.
'Maybe,' he said. 'She is a very nice girl.'
'She's not a girl,' Ruth said. 'She's a woman. An old woman.'
Why did she have to say that? Ruth thought. It was completely unnecessary. And 
so bitchy. She hated not being supportive to women. Solidarity among women was a 
very important issue. An issue that decades of feminist tracts and organisations 
had not addressed effectively. Women needed to support each other if they were 
to get anywhere. That was the way men did it. And it was so effective. Women had 
reputations as nurturers and supporters. But this nurture and support was rarely 
directed at other women.
Women were in competition with other women. They competed with each other for 
men, for jobs, for waist and hip size, for everything. It was a puzzling thing. 
Ruth saw it in the workplace and in social encounters. Women did not want to 
help other women. They were reluctant to provide other women with references, 
contacts, introductions. Help of any sort. They would not even pass on 
superficial information like the name of a hairdresser or colourist or personal 
trainer.
Ruth had watched so many men nurture each other. They exchanged contacts and 
information. Men supported each other. They knew it was in their own interests. 
They knew it was good for them if other men were successful. Men understood that 
their own
 


success was enhanced and multiplied by the success of other men Women saw other 
women's success as depleting. As theft. It was not a good situation for women. 
Her own generation and the generation before her seemed as preoccupied with 
competing with women as any generation before them. And here she was, trying to 
demean Zofia on the worst grounds, her age. If she wasn't careful, Ruth told 
herself, she'd be hoeing into Zofia's looks next. 'She is not so old,' Edek 
said.  'You are right,' Ruth said. 'She is not old and she is very attractive 
for her age.' She examined what she had just said. Was that another slur? 
Attractive for her age. Was the antagonism in her so inherent that it sprang out 
even when she was trying to hold it in?  'She is not a bad looking woman,' Edek 
said.
'She is a very attractive, vibrant, energetic woman,' Ruth said. Edek nodded. 
Why had she had to use 'energetic' in that string of adjectives, Ruth wondered. 
She didn't want to think of any of Zofia's energetic activities. Particularly 
the most recent ones. She wanted to shake that thought away. She shook her head 
again.  'Why do you do this with your head?' Edek said.
'I am just annoyed with myself.'
'What for should you do like this with your head?' Edek said. 'It is not good I 
am sure for your head. You been doing this for years.'  'Really?' she said.
'Since you was a child, you was shaking your head like this.'
'No wonder I'm all shook up,' she said. The reference to Elvis Presley escaped 
Edek.
'You are not so shocked up,' he said.
'Thank you,' she said.
'Zofia is really a very nice person,' Edek said.
'I'm sure she is,' Ruth said. 'But do you mind if we don't continue this 
conversation?'
'You do not want to talk about Zofia?' said Edek.
'Ho, I'd rather not,' Ruth said.
'It is nothing what should make you upset,' said Edek. 'I'm not upset,' Ruth 
said. 'I can see that you are upset,' said Edek. 'I'm not upset,' she said. 'You 
are upset,' Edek said. 'I am not upset,' she shouted.  Several people eating 
their breakfast looked at Ruth. She glared at them. 'I am not upset,' she said 
to Edek. 'Your insistence that I am upset, upset me.'  'You are upset about 
Zofia,' Edek said. 'No I'm not,' Ruth said.
'Yes you are,' said Edek. 'I know my daughter.' 'Maybe I am a bit upset,' Ruth 
said. 'Doesn't it bother you that she is a Pole?'  'Bother me?' Edek said. 'Why 
should it bother me?' 'Because we don't like Poles,' Ruth said.
'We do not like some Polish people,' Edek said. 'But not all Polish people. 
Zofia is a very nice person.'
'Yes,' Ruth said. 'Zofia is a very nice person. A very nice big-breasted 
person.'
'Yes, she has such big breasts,' Edek said. 'What is wrong with  that?'
'Nothing,' Ruth said.
She couldn't believe that she had resorted to underhand, anti-women tactics 
again. And she couldn't believe she was discussing this subject with Edek. It 
wasn't normal to be discussing the anatomy of your father's lover with your 
father. Oh, God, she thought as she winced. Why did she have to put those words 
together? Father and lover. She wished she had never brought up the subject of 
Zofia's breasts. She wished she had been kinder about Zofia.  'There is no need 
for you to worry about Zofia,' Edek said.
 


'I'm not worried,' Ruth said.
'Zofia would like to speak to you after breakfast, herself,' Edek said. 'She 
wants to tell you there is nothing to worry about.'
Ruth looked around the room. Neither Zofia or Walentyna was at breakfast. Ruth 
wondered if Walentyna was giving Zofia hell. Probably not. Zofia was probably 
taunting Walentyna with details of the evening's encounter. Ruth knew 
'encounter' wasn't the right word. But she didn't want anything more detailed 
than 'encounter', she decided.
'Let's get some breakfast,' Ruth said to Edek. Edek stood up, 'As a matter of 
fact I am this morning a bit hungry,' he said. He walked over to the buffet.
'They got a very good sausage,' he called out to her from the other side of the 
buffet. The waiter came up to Ruth. 'Would you like your poached eggs now, 
madam?' he said. Ruth was startled. She had forgotten that she had discussed 
having poached eggs with the waiter. 'No, thank you,' she said. 'I think I'll 
have something from the buffet.'
Ruth watched Edek walk back to the table. Quite a lot, of whatever he had 
chosen, was extending further than the boundaries of his plate. Ruth spooned 
some compote into a bowl for herself and rejoined Edek. Edek was looking at his 
plate. He had chosen the blood sausage. What looked like a foot of thick blood 
sausage was lying across his plate.
Ruth stared at the blood sausage. Why did her father's breakfast look like a 
phallic announcement to her? Why couldn't she let a blood sausage be only a 
blood sausage? Only a roll of meat. 'Roll of meat'? Why did she have to use that 
phrase? Ugh, she said to herself. She was choosing all the wrong words today.
She looked at Edek. How could he eat that blood sausage on an empty stomach, 
anyway?
'Maybe you should start with cornflakes,' she said to him. Edek screwed up his 
face.
'I had enough with the cornflakes,' he said. 'I can get cornflakes as much as I 
want in Melbourne,' he added.
'Okay,' Ruth said.
'This sausage is very tasty,' Edek said, and took a large mouthful. Ruth looked 
at her compote. It looked a bit puny.
Edek ate his blood sausage with relish. Mouthful after mouthful of sausage 
disappeared from the plate. Zofia had clearly been good for his appetite, Ruth 
thought. Although maybe that part of him didn't really need improving. When Edek 
was almost finished, he looked up. 'I did speak to the lawyer about the Swiss 
bank account,' he said, to Ruth,
'When?' Ruth said.
'Last night,' said Edek.
'You had time?' Ruth said. 'You seem to have been pretty busy.'
'Do not be silly, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'The lawyer did tell me that the Swiss 
banks did agree to a settlement of 1.25 billion dollars.'
'I know,' Ruth said. 'I read about it in this morning's International Daily 
Journal.'
'The lawyer did say that the Swiss people are concerned about the damage what 
this dispute did do their image,' Edek said.
'It is sick, isn't it?' Ruth said. 'The Swiss people are not happy with the 
settlement. The Minister for the Economy, Pascal Couchepin, was quoted as 
saying, "Many people have the feeling that it was not the search for truth, but 
more a search for money." They drag out that old stereotype of the rich greedy 
Jew only interested in money. And that conveniently covers up their own greed 
and their own theft. It always works. People are very willing to embrace a bit 
of old anti-Semitism. It ensures that they never have to look at their own 
behaviour. If this is what Couchepin is saying in public, I'd hate to hear what 
he says in private. The fact that this money was stolen from the Jews gets 
completely overlooked, of course.'
 


'It is shocking,' Edek said.
 


'It gets worse,' Ruth said. 'Lily Nabholz, a Member of Parliament was quoted as 
saying that the amount of the money was "quite surprising because it is hard for 
the average person to understand how the small amounts uncovered in the dormant 
accounts suddenly turned into $1.25 billion. There is a lot of explaining to 
do," Lily Nabholz said.' Edek shook his head. 'You could explain the statistics 
forever,' Ruth said. 'The murdered millions, the plundering of every last penny, 
every piece of property and every part of the body they could put to use, down 
to the last hair and the last tooth, and they would still say the Jews had some 
explaining to do.'
'The average person that this member of Parliament, Lily Nabholz, is addressing, 
must have pea-sized brains and bigoted, rotting hearts,' Ruth said. 'Lily 
Nabholz's line about the average person finding it hard to understand how this 
could be true is so disingenuous. So poisonous. So clever. It makes me want to 
go over to Geneva and gouge her eyes out, until it becomes a bit easier for her 
to understand what really happened.' Ruth was flushed. She was surprised at her 
own heat. Her own rage. She was on a rampage. Gouging out eyes, again. What was 
being in Poland doing to her? 'Column down, Ruthie, column down,' Edek said. 
'Doesn't it make you feel like hitting your head against a wall?' she said, to 
Edek.
'No,' Edek said. 'It does make me angry. But I am used to such things.' Ruth 
poured herself a glass of water. 'The lawyer did tell me that the Swiss 
Government's Swiss National Bank what did make such big profits from dealing 
with the gold the Nazis did take from the Jews, did not contribute to or endorse 
this settlement,' Edek said. 'I know,' said Ruth. 'The private banks agreed 
because of the pressure of the financial sanctions that local American 
governments were putting on them.'
'It was New York City and New York State what wanted to put sanctions on the 
Swiss banks, wasn't it?' Edek said.
'Yes, among others,' Ruth said. 'New York is not a bad city,' Edek said.
Ruth felt homesick. Homesick for New York. She didn't think she had ever missed 
New York this much before.
'I'm looking forward to going home,' Ruth said. 'We fly to Warsaw tomorrow, and 
then home.' She looked at Edek. From Warsaw she and Edek were flying to separate 
destinations. She was flying to New York, Edek was returning to Australia. 'I'll 
miss you, Dad,' she said. 'It's been one helluva trip.'
'One helluva trip as they say,' Edek said. He looked sad. 'We'll see each other 
again soon,' Ruth said. 'I'll come to Australia or you'll come to New York.' 
Parting from Edek was going to be the hardest part of this trip, she thought. 
She had hated every goodbye she had ever uttered to her father. Each goodbye was 
tinged with the fear that she wouldn't see him again. Tears came
into her eyes.
'We will see each other very soon,' Edek said.
'Of course we will,' she said. 'I love you, Dad,' she said a minute
later.
'I do love you, too, Ruthie,' he said.
Ruth looked up. Zofia was walking towards them. Zofia saw Ruth
and waved.
'Zofia is here,' Ruth said to Edek. 'I think we should go. It's our
last chance to walk around Krakow.'
'To walk in Krakow?" Edek said 'What for is there such a big rush to walk in 
Krakow? We got plenty of time to walk in Krakow.'
'It's our last day here,' Ruth said.
'We got all day,' said Edek.
'Hello, hello,' said Zofia. She kissed Edek on the cheek and then bent over to 
kiss Ruth. Ruth moved her head, in a reflex action. Zofia's kiss landed on the 
side of Ruth's head.
'We were just going to go for a walk,' Ruth said to Zofia.
 


'We got plenty of time to go for a walk,' Edek said.
'I would like to have a cup of tea with you, Ruthie, for a few minutes,' Zofia 
said. Ruth hesitated.
'Go on, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'It cannot do you harm to have a cup of tea with 
Zofia. She does only want to tell you that there is nothing to worry about.' 
Ruth was quiet. 'Ruthie, we are going tomorrow,' Edek said. 'Please, behave 
yourself with Zofia.'  Edek turned to Zofia. 'My daughter is normally a very 
nice person,' he said. 'She is being a bit not so nice because this situation 
what she found us together in, is not so easy for her.' 'Of course, Edek,' Zofia 
said. 'Of course.'  'I am going to my room to write a few postcards to people,' 
Edek said.
'Okay,' Ruth said to Zofia. 'I'll have a cup of tea with you.' She tried to 
inject a gracious tone into her voice, but she could hear that she sounded flat.  
'Thank you, darling,' Zofia said.
'I will be back when I am finished with postcards,' Edek said. Ruth felt 
unreasonably nervous at being left alone with Zofia. She smiled at Zofia. She 
hoped her smile was not too stiff.  'You don't have to be frightened of me, 
Ruthie,' Zofia said. 'I am a good person. I am honest. I say what I am thinking. 
I do not hide things.'  'Especially your breasts,' Ruth said, and then lifted 
her hand to her mouth, in horror at what she had just said.  Zofia laughed. 'It 
is hard to hide my breasts,' she said. 'I didn't mean to say that,' Ruth said. 
'I don't mind,' Zofia said.  'Well, I apologise, anyway,' Ruth said. Zofia 
smiled at Ruth and nodded her acceptance of the apology.
'I like your father very much,' Zofia said. Ruth didn't say anything-'He likes 
me very much, too,' Zofia said. Ruth remained quiet. She  didn't know what to 
say. 'I think I am the woman for him,' Zofia  said.
'What?' said Ruth. The exclamation had come out with more force and volume than 
Ruth had intended. Zofia took offence.  'What is wrong with me?' she said. 'Why 
are you so surprised?'
'There's nothing wrong with you at all," Ruth said. 'I was just surprised 
because your remark was so unexpected.'  'Unexpected?' Zofia said. 'A woman 
knows when a man is the man for her.'
'But you don't know my father,' Ruth said.
'I know him,' said Zofia. 'I know him. You do not have to know a person for ten 
years in order to know him.'  'Well you have to know them for more than ten 
minutes,' Ruth said.
'It depends what does happen in those ten minutes,' Zofia said.
'He doesn't know you,' Ruth said.
'He knows me, believe me," Zofia said.
What did Zofia mean, Ruth thought. Was Zofia talking about her father's 
knowledge of her, in terms of physical intimacy? Or had they talked all night, 
as well? Had they revealed more than their physical selves to each other? What 
did Zofia mean?  'We are going tomorrow,' Ruth said to Zofia. 'There's no time 
for anything more to develop.' Zofia was not daunted. She smiled at Ruth.  'Some 
things do not require time,' she said. Ruth was confused by that enigmatic, Zen-
like remark. She decided Zofia was just bluffing.  'I will be good to Edek,' 
Zofia said.
'He's managing quite well,' Ruth said. Suddenly the absurdity of the situation 
struck Ruth. Here she was, fending off a prospective interloper, in much the 
same way that parents screened potential Partners for their teenage children. 
She had a parental attitude to
 


this prospective girlfriend. She was judgemental. Critical.
Maybe she was merely being discerning, she thought. After all, she knew her 
father well. She was well qualified to assess the suitability of prospective 
partners. Anyway, the whole conversation was ridiculous, she decided. They were 
leaving tomorrow. Zofia had no time for any further manoeuvres. She chided 
herself again. That was a sexist attitude to take. To ascribe the maneuvering to 
Zofia and not Edek. Maybe it was appropriate. She hadn't seen Edek make any 
overt moves towards Zofia.
'I look after my father,' Ruth said to Zofia. 'Your father doesn't need more 
money,' Zofia said. Ruth stopped herself from saying that she gave her father 
much more than money. After all, this was not a competition. She and Zofia were 
not competing for Edek. And if they were, Ruth had already won. Edek was her 
father. He already belonged to her.
'Your father is not a man who is very interested in a lot of money," Zofia said.
'That's true,' Ruth said.
'Edek does not look after himself,' Zofia said. 'I will look after him. I will 
make sure that he does exercise.'
'That would be an uphill battle,' Ruth said. Zofia looked bewildered. 'It's just 
an expression,' Ruth said. 'I meant that it would be very hard to get my father 
to exercise.'
'There are many ways to force a man to exercise,' Zofia said with a smile. What 
was Zofia talking about? Ruth thought. She smiled, despite herself. Zofia was 
incorrigible, Ruth had to admire that. What did Zofia know about men and their 
ways that Ruth didn't? Probably everything, Ruth decided. Next to Zofia she was 
a naif, a rank amateur. 'I will make Edek fit,' Zofia said.
'He is fit,' Ruth said. 'He is very fit for an eighty-one-year-old.' 'I know 
better than you how fit he is,' Zofia said with a wink. Ruth felt sick. She 
definitely didn't want to linger on this aspect
of the conversation. 'I will make him more fit," Zofia said. 'I will walk with 
him and we will swim together.'
'He can't swim,' Ruth said.
'I will teach him,' Zofia said. 'It is very easy to swim in Sopot.'
Ruth was horrified. 'My father can't live in Sopot,' she said.
'Why not?' said Zofia.
'It is too far,' Ruth said. She wasn't sure where Sopot was too far from. Too 
far removed from any reality, she decided.
'Sopot is closer to New York than Australia,' Zofia said.
'My father is not going to live in Poland,' Ruth said, firmly.
Zofia looked at her. 'Okay,' she said. 'Maybe we will both live in New York, 
Edek and me.' Ruth was stunned. 'I am a very good cook,' Zofia said. 'I make a 
much better cheesecake than Walentyna.'
'My father doesn't need cheesecake,' Ruth said.
'He loves cheesecake,' Zofia said. 'And I make a special one with cottage 
cheese. It is not so fattening.'
Ruth contemplated asking Zofia where you could buy cottage cheese, in Poland. 
She had only seen full-fat cream cheese on sale, anywhere. She hadn't seen any 
skim milk or non-fat yoghurt either. She decided against inquiring about the 
cottage cheese.
'I will make your father happy,' Zofia said.
'I don't think so,' said Ruth. She was about to explain her seemingly harsh 
attitude. To explain Edek's past and the traumas he had suffered in Poland, when 
Zofia interrupted her.
'You don't know,' Zofia said.
'Yes, I do,' Ruth said, before she could stop herself.
'No, you do not,' Zofia said. 'I know what Edek needs in order to be happy. He 
needs me. He is a wonderful man,' Zofia said. 'He has more life in him than men 
one-quarter of his age. I have been looking for a man with life. I have much 
life, myself.'
 


'I can see that you are a very lively person,' Ruth said. She meant it kindly, 
and hoped it hadn't appeared as a censorious comment
 


on Zofia's sexual activities the night before.
'I have said no to many men,' Zofia said. There it was, again, Ruth thought. To 
many men. But it was the wrong 'to'. The gypsy woman had definitely meant 'too', 
not 'to'. You have too many men in your life, the gypsy had said. It really must 
have been Zofia's life the gypsy woman had been thinking of, Ruth thought. 'I 
have said no to men of thirty,' Zofia said. 'Really?' Ruth said. She was 
impressed. No men of thirty were running after her.
'My word of honour,' Zofia said. 'On the grave of my mother, I am telling you 
the truth.' 'I believe you,' Ruth said.
'I would like to be your friend,' Zofia said. She leaned over and put her hand 
on Ruth's hand.
'You can be,' Ruth said. 'But you can't have my father.' Zofia removed her hand. 
'I think I can,' she said. 'I've got nothing against you,' Ruth said to Zofia. 
'But you are too young.' Where had she come up with that notion from? Ruth 
thought. That was a stupid thing to say. She must be feeling more anxious about 
Zofia than she knew. 'I am sixty-three,' Zofia said.
'That's too young for my father,' Ruth said. She was stunned at herself. She 
couldn't believe the stern and judgemental attitude she was taking.
'Your father needs someone young,' Zofia said. 'He is very young.' Ruth didn't 
say anything. She didn't want to let any more disapproving, disparaging or 
vituperative sentences loose. 'You will see,' Zofia said. 'Your father will be 
very happy.'
Ruth kept quiet. She was torn between admiring Zofia's audacity and feeling 
annoyed at her certainty. 'I can move anywhere,' Zofia said. 'I can pack up in a 
minute. I don't have children. I don't even have a cat.'
'Do you like cats?' Ruth said.
'No, not at all,' Zofia said. 'And I do not like dogs.' Zofia said this with no 
hint of apology. Few people would admit so directly to an indifference or a 
dislike of pets. It was an admission that almost guaranteed hostility.,
'My father likes dogs,' Ruth said.
'That is fine with me,' Zofia said.
Ruth was tired. She wished her father would come back. She wondered how she 
could end this conversation. She wanted to end it on a conciliatory note, to 
erase the tensions and frictions. To eliminate the discord that seemed so 
unnecessary. She and Edek were leaving tomorrow. They would never see Zofia 
again. Why not leave on a harmonious note?
'I don't like cats myself,' Ruth said. 'Or dogs. It's definitely not a popular 
attitude to have, in America.'
'Even in New York?' Zofia said.
'Even in New York,' Ruth said.
'I always wanted to go to New York,' Zofia said.
Ruth knew she had to veer the conversation straight back to animals. 'They have 
acupuncture for dogs and cats in America,' she said to Zofia.
'No,' Zofia said.
'And chiropractors for dogs and cats, too,' Ruth said. 'Do you know what a 
chiropractor is?'
'Of course,' Zofia said. 'I swim every day. I know very much about the body.'
Why did every sentence seem to be heading in a dangerous direction? Ruth 
wondered. How could she reroute this?
'Americans have veterinary chiropractors and canine massage therapists,' Ruth 
said. 'Dog masseurs.'
'I know what a massage therapist is,' Zofia said. 'In Sopot they have very good 
masseurs and masseuses just next to where I swim
 


every day. I love to have a massage. Sometimes I go first to the steam room, 
then back to the sea and back to the steam room before I have a massage." Zofia 
looked at Ruth. 'Massage is very good for you. Makes you very firm,' she said, 
slapping her thighs loudly. Ruth felt her own thighs. They didn't feel as firm 
as they could. How could she retrieve this conversation? Redirect it back to 
cats and dogs. Away from Zofia's thighs.
'There are even psychics for dogs,' said Ruth. Zofia roared with laughter, and 
slapped her thighs again. Ruth could see that the flesh on Zofia's thighs didn't 
tremble or wobble with the slap. It didn't move. Zofia's thighs were very firm 
thighs.
'That is very funny, psychics for dogs,' Zofia said. 'Do you believe in any of 
that?' Ruth said. 'In psychics or anything supernatural?'
'No,' Zofia said with certainty. Ruth admired the firmness of Zofia's beliefs. 
She herself was always prevaricating. Did firm thighs go with firm beliefs? If 
so, she should turn to religion, immediately. She caught herself. Why was she 
being so frivolous? It was because she was beginning to feel less burdened, she 
realised. She knew that she would be home soon. Out of Poland. And home.
'You are not interested in having children are you?' Zofia said to Ruth.
'No,' said Ruth.
'I was the same,' Zofia said. Ruth wanted to put some distance into this 
togetherness, this shared view on parenthood.
'Lots of people feel the same way,' Ruth said to Zofia.
'Not too many women feel like this,' Zofia said.
'More and more women do,' said Ruth.
'Maybe,' said Zofia.
Ruth couldn't believe her own argumentativeness. Would she argue with Zofia 
about anything at all? Couldn't she allow some accord between them?
'I would have had children if I could have been assured of having identical 
twins,' Ruth said. 'I've had a fascination for identical twins all my life. 
Triplets would have been even better.'
Zofia laughed. 'I would have liked twins, too,' she said.
Ruth stared at Zofia in disbelief. She was sure Zofia was making this up. Making 
it up in an effort to align herself with Ruth. 'My sister had twins,' Zofia 
said.
'Identical twins?' said Ruth.
'Yes,' said Zofia.
'Lucky woman,' Ruth said.
'My sister did feel very lucky to have her twins,' Zofia said.
So Zofia was telling the truth, Ruth thought. Or was she? She could be making up 
the whole sister story. She may not have a sister, let alone a sister with 
identical twins. Ruth knew there was something very unpleasant about her own 
suspicions, but she couldn't discard them. She had to get out of Poland, she 
thought. Poland was turning her into someone else. Someone she didn't like much. 
Maybe being in Poland was revelatory. Maybe she was seeing aspects of herself 
she should know about. She didn't like that thought, either.
'Identical twins are not hereditary,' Ruth said to Zofia.
'I know that,' Zofia said. 'Otherwise I would have tried.' Ruth wondered why 
Zofia had wanted twins. She thought her own desire for multiple units of the 
same person was a desire to replicate those who had been lost. She corrected 
herself. The word 'lost' was too amorphous. Those who had been killed. She had 
wanted twins or triplets to make duplicates. Duplicates of people with similar 
traits and faces. It was lucky that it hadn't been possible. Lucky that 
technology could only induce fraternal twins. She thought she would have gone to 
any lengths to have identical children. It was such an intense longing. She 
really was lucky it wasn't possible, she thought. She couldn't imagine herself 
as the mother of twins or triplets or quadruplets 



 


She had to veer this conversation back to more subdued ground, she thought. To 
animals. Animals were always a safe subject. 'Do you know," she said to Zofia, 
'that in Australia they have invented a protein injection for sheep that makes 
the wool come off by itself?'
Zofia laughed. 'I don't believe this,' she said.
'It's true,' Ruth said. 'It was developed by government scientists.'
'What happens?' Zofia said.
They inject the sheep with this protein,' Ruth said, 'and a week later the 
fleece falls off.'
'Exactly a week,' Zofia said. 'This is very well planned.'
Ruth laughed. She hadn't thought about the precise timing. The precision of the 
procedure made her laugh. 'It would not be good,' Zofia said, 'if the wool fell 
off at the wrong moment.' Images of sheep losing their fleece, while shopping or 
strolling in the street or having their hair done, came into Ruth's head. She 
fell about laughing. Tears ran down Ruth's face at the thought of groups of 
sheep losing their fleece at inopportune moments. Zofia was laughing hard, too.
The two women were still laughing when Edek arrived. Ruth saw her father. She 
sat up in mid-laugh. Edek was beaming. 'I was just telling Zofia about a new 
invention by the Australian government,' she said to Edek, and told Edek about 
the self-shearing sheep.
'I did not know anything about this,' Edek said to Ruth. 'My daughter does know 
everything,' he said to Zofia.
'Maybe not everything,' Zofia said, with a broad smile. She stood up and kissed 
Edek on the cheek. 'I will see you later,' she said.
'I am very glad you did get on well with Zofia,' Edek said to Ruth as they were 
walking in the Market Square.
'I was being polite,' Ruth said. 'Because she's your friend.' She waited for 
Edek to deny that he was Zofia's friend. She had expected him to brush off the 
suggestion that theirs was a real friendship.
Edek said nothing. Ruth began to feel nervous that her father had made plans 
that she was unaware of.
'We are going tomorrow, aren't we?' she said.
'Of course,' Edek said. Ruth felt her tension dissipate. 'Maybe we will go even 
a little earlier than what we did plan,' Edek said.
'Okay,' she said. 'But why?'
'I will explain to you while we have a cup of coffee,' Edek said.
Ruth felt relieved. They were definitely leaving. Possibly leaving for Warsaw 
even earlier than they had planned. An earlier departure for Edek was definitely 
not on Zofia's itinerary. Maybe Edek was trying to get away from Zofia. Ruth 
could feel herself relaxing. She would be home very soon. She would be going 
home to New York. Home to her apartment. To her office. To her routines. Life 
would be back to normal, very soon.
'This cafe does look good,' Edek said, pointing to a cafe with a large display 
of pontshkes in the window. They went inside.
'I'm glad to be in a cafe,' Ruth said. 'If I see one more of those anti-Semitic 
carved wooden caricatures of Jews, I'll scream.'
'Do you want a pontshke, Ruthie?' Edek said.
'No thanks,' she said. 'You have one.'
'I will have just one,' he said.
'Excuse me,' a man sitting at the next table said to Ruth and Edek. 'I heard you 
saying that the Polish people are anti-Semitic,' he said. 'Please forgive me but 
I had to say something.' Ruth looked at the man. He was in his mid-thirties, 
with an intelligent, well-defined face. 'There is a reason why Polish people are 
hostile to Jews,' he said. Ruth turned around to face him.
'Yes?' she said.
 


'Ruthie darling, please,' Edek said.
'Polish people did suffer greatly at the hands of the Jews after the war,' the 
man said. Ruth could feel her blood pressure rising. She knew that the elevation 
of one's blood pressure was supposed to be
 


indiscernible, but she knew that hers was rising. She could feel it.
'Really?' she said to the man.
'Ruthie,' Edek said. She ignored him.
'Yes?' she said to the man, again.
'Yes,' he said. 'Before and during the war, the Jews, who were communists, ran 
off to Russia to save their necks when the Nazis arrived.'
'You think all the Jews escaped to Russia when the Nazis arrived?' Ruth said.
'Not all of them, but quite a few,' the man said. 'After the war they all came 
back and occupied top positions in the communist government, and persecuted the 
Polish people.'
Ruth was speechless. This man looked so presentable, so reasonable, so 
intelligent. His English was immaculate. He was clearly educated. How could he 
have got things so wrong? And what hope was there for other less educated Poles?
'They all came back after the war?' she said. 'No one came back. Two and a half 
Jews came back. The only Jews in Poland are the imaginary Jews, and the carved 
wooden Jews. Do you understand me?' she shouted. 'No one came back. Maybe a few 
lucky Jews did manage to get away from the Nazis, and survive, in the Soviet 
Union. And maybe they were communists. But you can't translate that into 
communist Jews persecuting the Polish people.' 'Ruthie, Ruthie, please column 
down,' Edek said. The man looked at Ruth. 'I did not expect you to agree with 
me,' he said. 'But I did not expect you to be rude.'
'Rude?' Ruth shouted. 'You people are the rudest people on earth. Vulgar, 
coarse, bigoted, obscene arseholes.' Ruth looked at him. 'If you stay here any 
longer, I'll slug you,' she said. She was in a sweat. How could this man say 
what he had just said? The country was full of ignorant imbeciles and every one 
of them was hooked up to an intravenous anti-Semitic drip. The man stood up and 
began to walk
out. 'I wish you every misfortune in the world,' Ruth shouted out,
after him.
'Ruthie, darling, you got to take it more easy,' Edek said.
'He's an arsehole,' Ruth said.
'I know,' Edek said. 'But you cannot take it all so hard. It is not
good for you.'
'I'm alright,' Ruth said. 'Maybe I will have a pontshke.'
'Good,' said Edek. 'I will go and get us a couple of pontshkes. Do you want also 
a hot chocolate?'
'No, thanks,' Ruth said. 'I'll have chamomile tea.'
'With lemon?' Edek said.
'With lemon," she said.
She took off her jacket. She was still hot. Edek was right, she had to calm 
down. She took a couple of deep breaths. She was pleased she had shouted at the 
man. It felt good to say what she wanted to say. Or rather to shout it. In New 
York, she never shouted at anyone. In New York there was little cause to shout. 
The city wasn't populated
by Poles.
She couldn't wait to be out of Poland. She decided she would call Max and ask 
Max to put some fresh fruit in her apartment. It would be nice to come home to 
some fresh strawberries and mangoes and kiwi fruit. You could get the best fruit 
in the world, in New York. She made a vow to herself. She would never criticise 
New York again. Edek came back with four pontshkes. 'Four?' Ruth said. 'You need 
to eat,' Edek said. Ruth laughed. 'I'll have one,' she said. She wanted to 
mention Zofia. To see Edek's reaction. She really wanted to ask him how he felt 
about Zofia, but she didn't want to imbue the issue of Zofia with any more 
importance than it already had. If, in fact, it was important at all. She wished 
she knew what Edek felt about Zofia. It couldn't be much. He seemed to be 
leaving Krakow without any evident regret.
 


She decided to bring up Zofia's name. 'Zofia doesn't like dogs,'
 


she said. Edek looked puzzled. Ruth thought she should have introduced the 
subject of Zofia more languorously. This fact about Zofia and dogs obviously 
seemed out of context, to Edek. As out of context as it was, she thought.
'I was just thinking about it because I saw a dog go by,' she lied. 'Where?' 
said Edek.
'It's gone, she said. Why was she behaving in this adolescent, juvenile manner? 
Why didn't she just ask her father how he felt about Zofia? 'She doesn't like 
cats either,' Ruth said. Edek looked at her again.
'You do not like dogs, too,' he said. 'It looks like there are many people what 
do not like dogs or cats.'
Well, she hadn't got very far with that opening gambit, Ruth thought. She had 
learnt nothing at all. She cut her pontshke into quarters. Edek had already 
finished his first pontshke. He took a bite out of a second pontshke. 'Ruthie, 
darling,' he said. 'I want to tell you something and I want you to promise not 
to be angry with me.' Oh no, Ruth thought. She stiffened. Here was the news that 
she didn't want to hear about Zofia. What was Edek going to tell her? That he 
was madly in love with Zofia? That he wanted to run off with her and live in 
Sopot? That he was going to live in Poland, surrounded by Poles? She prepared 
herself to respond to the news with moderation, reasonableness and 
understanding.
'Okay,' Ruth said. 'What is it? I hope it's not something terrible.'
'What could be terrible next to what we been seeing and thinking
about in Poland?' Edek said. Ruth wondered if Edek was bringing
in the anti-Semitism and the absence of Jews and the horror of the
past, in order to make the news of Zofia seem less disastrous. No,
she decided. That was unfair of her. Edek was not that manipulative.
'I want to tell you,' Edek said, 'that I did see Norman just before
I came to Poland.' Ruth felt a flood of relief. The news was not about
Zofia.
'That's fine,' she said to Edek. 'You can see him as often as you want to. It's 
no big deal, to me.' 'I saw him in Sydney,' Edek said. 'When were you in 
Sydney?' said Ruth. 'I was there on my way to Bangkok,' said Edek. 'But that was 
only a two-hour stop-over,' Ruth said. 'Yes,' said Edek. 'It was such a big 
rush. I never did anything like this in my life before.'
'What did you do?' said Ruth. She couldn't see what Edek was worried she would 
be angry about. She had often told him she had no objection to his seeing 
Norman. It was extreme though, she thought, of Edek to try and fit in a visit to 
Norman while he was in transit on his way to Poland. But she wasn't annoyed.
'I did catch a taxi and go to Norman's place,' Edek said. 'I do not have to tell 
you how this did make me nervous. I was frightened I would miss the plane and 
you would be annoyed.'
'If you had missed the plane I would have been worried, not annoyed,' Ruth said. 
'Anyway, you didn't, so it's all okay.'
'I was frightened,' said Edek. 'I never been to Sydney before. I did not know 
how far was Norman's place from the airport. I did just get a taxi and I did 
give the driver the address.' Edek shook his head, still surprised at his own 
boldness. 'I did ask the driver to go very fast,' Edek said.
'I can't believe this,' Ruth said. 'You were speeding through Sydney, 
endangering your life to see Norman?'
'It was lucky he was home,' Edek said. 'I did ask the driver what did drive me 
to wait for me in case there was no one home. If there was no one home he could 
take me straight back to the airport. As it was, Norman did take me back to the 
airport.'
'Why did you do all of that rushing around when you were about to begin a long 
plane flight?' Ruth said.
'I did want to ask Norman something,' Edek said.
 


'Couldn't you have just called him?' Ruth said. 'No,' said Edek. 'This I did 
have to ask him in person.' Ruth felt apprehensive.
'What did you want to ask him?' she said. 'You promise me you will be column,' 
Edek said. 'I'll try,' she said.
'I did ask Norman to meet me in New York,' Edek said. He looked at Ruth as 
though he was expecting an explosion.
'What?' said Ruth. 'How could Norman meet you in New York? You're not going to 
New York.' 'Maybe I am,' Edek said.
Ruth's head started to spin. Was everything in her life not what it seemed? Not 
what she thought it was? Why was so much up-ended? Unravelled and unfastened? 
'What's happening?' Ruth said to Edek. 'What do you mean you may be going to New 
York?' She looked at Edek. 'Tell me, clearly, what's going on,' she said. 'I 
can't take too many more unexpected and unexplained things. This trip has been 
difficult enough, as it is, for me.'
'This trip is difficult for you?' Edek said. 'This trip was your big idea. You 
was the one who did want so very much to come to Poland. Do you think I did want 
so very much to be in Poland? No.'
'Okay,' she said. 'Let's not argue about that. Tell me the rest of the something 
you don't want me to be angry about.' She tried to calm down. In the context of 
other possible occurrences, seeing Norman wouldn't be all that terrible. She 
would keep herself in check. She would be friendly and cheerful. She would make 
sure the subject of their past together was kept at bay. It wouldn't be too bad. 
Nothing seemed too bad as long as it was out of Poland.
'I can invite Norman to New York if I do want to,' Edek said. 'Of course you 
can,' Ruth said. 'But as he was part of my life it would have been a good idea 
to discuss it with me first.' 'You would say you did not want to see him,' Edek 
said.
'Well, I would be saying it for a reason,' Ruth said.
'This reason is not a reason I can understand,' Edek said. He looked at Ruth. 
'Norman is like a son-in-law to me,' he said.
'Great,' Ruth said. 'You've married him to me despite any participation on my 
part.'
'He can be a son-in-law to me even if he is not married to my daughter,' Edek 
said. 'He is like a son to me.'
There was a silence between them. Ruth looked up, and to her horror saw that 
Edek was on the verge of tears. She felt terrible.
'I understand, Dad,' she said. 'I understand how you feel about Norman.' Edek 
started to cry.
'He is like a son to me,' he said. 'Norman is the only company what I feel very 
happy with since Mum did die. Except for you, Ruthie. With other people I do 
feel okay, but with Norman I feel comfortable. He does know me and I do know 
him.'
'Don't cry, Dad,' she said. 'I'm sorry I sounded upset. I do understand.' She 
did understand, she thought. Norman loved Edek. Norman lit up with love when he 
was with Edek and Edek was alright, in Norman's company. She was glad Edek had 
Norman. She realised she had been holding her breath. She breathed out. Well, at 
least Zofia seemed to be out of the picture, she thought.
'I'm not angry,' Ruth said to Edek. 'You can see Norman. But in New York? You're 
not going to New York.'
'I am going to New York,' Edek said.
'When?' said Ruth.
'With you,' said Edek.
With me?' Ruth said. 'What do you mean?'
'That is what I was doing in the airport, in Warsaw,' Edek said.
 


'What?' she said. She was finding it hard to follow what her father was saying.
In the airport, in Warsaw, I did change my ticket,' Edek said. He looked at Ruth 
expectantly, and nervously. She still didn't
 


understand what he was saying. 'I did change my ticket to go via New York from 
Warsaw,' he said. 'Now my ticket is from Warsaw to New York, then from New York 
to Sydney and then Melbourne.' Ruth was speechless. 'I will stay with you a few 
days in New York,' Edek said.
'When did you change your ticket?' Ruth said. 'You did see me,' Edek said. 'At 
the airport.' 'When you were getting upgraded?' Ruth said. 'I did not get such 
an upgrade,' Edek said. 'There was nothing wrong with my seat. I did tell you 
this about the rest for the feet so you would understand why I had to go to get 
something fixed up.' Ruth shook her head. She couldn't believe what she was 
hearing. Her father had tricked her. He had invented a whole dialogue of 
detailed explanations for his actions, which was fraudulent. Not true. How could 
he have done this to her? How could he have carried out that charade so 
masterfully? She hadn't suspected a thing. 'You did believe me?' Edek said. 'Of 
course I believed you,' Ruth said.
'You should be more suspicious,' Edek said with a smile. Ruth was glad to see 
him smiling. 'Suspicious of you?' she said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'It was such a stupid story about the rest for the feet, and 
the chair what did not go back. Who has a chair what is broken like that, in a 
plane? Not even Polish Airlines.' 'I must be an idiot,' Ruth said. 'I didn't 
suspect a thing.' 'I love you, Ruthie,' Edek said. He looked much happier. He 
was clearly relieved that she had not gone ballistic about the news. 'Gone 
ballistic'. That was a very contemporary expression, she thought. On the whole 
she preferred more traditional expressions. She could have used 'exploded with 
anger' or 'lost her temper'. She shook herself back to the present. She couldn't 
afford to get lost, at this moment, in a welter of words.
'I did tell Norman what day we will be back in New York,' Edek said. 'And he 
will be there two days later.'
Ruth shook her head again. She wouldn't have believed this of Edek. She wouldn't 
have thought him capable of orchestrating a deception and keeping it to himself 
for the entire trip. She hadn't had a hint of his intention to accompany her 
back to New York. She had thought they would be saying goodbye in Warsaw. At the 
airport. She had managed to get flights that left more or less at the same time. 
Hers bound for New York, and Edek's for Australia.
Her father had constructed a pantomime. A spectacle. He had run backwards and 
forwards to her, at the airport, improvising explanations for his bizarre 
activity. She wouldn't have thought him capable of this, or capable of keeping 
it to himself for the bulk of the trip. It was not easy to act out a lie. And 
she wouldn't have thought it was in Edek's nature to do it so well.
Edek was now looking quite pleased with himself. He bit into another pontshke. 
'I did ask Norman to come to New York two days after us because I did want to 
give you a chance to not have a jet-lag still,' he said.
'Thank you,' Ruth said.
'Have your pontshke,' Edek said. 'You did not eat one piece of it, yet.'
'I am going to take you and Norman to a beautiful dinner in New York,' Edek 
said.
'With my American Express card?' Ruth said, with a smile.
'With your American Express card,' Edek said. 'You did say I should use it as 
often as I want to. And I want to take you and Norman °ut to a beautiful 
dinner.'
'I'm surprised you haven't already made a booking at a restaurant,' Ruth said. 
She picked up a piece of her pontshke. She put it in her mouth. It tasted good. 
The sweetness of the doughnut soothed her. This pontshke is very good,' she said 
to Edek.
 


'What did I tell you?' he said. 'In Poland they got the best pontshkes' Ruth 
took another bite of pontshke. She thought of her father at Warsaw airport. She 
thought of him running from one side of the airport to the other. Appearing and 
disappearing. She thought of the details he had provided her with.  'Seat 2B?' 
she said to Edek. 'That's what you told me you had arranged for yourself. Seat 
2B.'
'Not bad, eh?' said Edek. 'I did learn a lot about clues from my detective 
books. I did learn how to make sure people are not suspecting what is 
happening.'  'You did a good job,' Ruth said.
'I did learn all this from my books,' Edek said. 'You put in such a clue. Like 
what I did with the seat 2B, and then no one is suspecting anything. It is 
called a herring.'  'A herring?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'A herring.'
'Oh, you mean a red herring,' Ruth said.
'That's it,' Edek said. 'A red herring.' He looked very pleased with himself.
'You certainly know a lot about herring,' Ruth said. 'Red herrings and pickled 
herrings and smoked herrings.'  Edek laughed. 'I do not like so much the smoked 
herrings,' he said.
'I know,' said Ruth. 'You prefer pickled herrings. Especially rollmops.'
'Oy, a rollmop is very good,' Edek said. 'We did not have a rollmop in Poland.'
'I think that's because rollmops are Jewish,' Ruth said. She herself quite liked 
rollmops.
'You do like a rollmop yourself, Ruthie,' Edek said.
'That's true, I do,' she said.
'I did not do such a bad job,' Edek said, wiping the last of the  icing sugar 
off his plate. 'You are not so easy to tell a lie to. You are not stupid, and 
you do notice everything what I do.'  'Really?' she said.
'I do watch you,' Edek said. 'I see that you do watch everything. You are 
watching me and other people what are next to us. You are watching everything.'    
'You're probably right,' she said. Edek was right, she had spent her whole life 
watching and observing.
'And you know things, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'Things what you did not even see.'
Ruth felt alarmed. Jolted. What did Edek mean?
'I see what you feel about the Jews who used to be in Lodz,' Edek said. 'I can 
see how you do feel them even though there is no more any Jews in Lodz.' Ruth 
was relieved. It was sensitivity and sympathy her father was talking about. 'You 
can feel the Jews, Ruthie,' he said. 'I did watch you in the cemetery. In the 
ghetto. In Kamedulska Street. It is like you was there yourself when the Jews 
was there. Sometimes I think that you do understand too much, Ruthie.'  'I'm not 
sure you can ever understand too much, Dad,' she said. She felt that her life 
had too much in it that she was still trying to understand.  'Why don't you 
understand about Norman?' Edek said. There it was, the trick question. Why 
didn't she understand about Norman? What was there to understand? They had a 
relationship, once, and it ended. That was it.  'What is there to understand, 
Dad?' she said, wearily. 'That you love him?'
'What you do need to understand,' Edek said. 'Which is not such a hard thing to 
see is that Norman does love you. You will see that in New York when we are all 
together.'  'Thanks, Dad,' she said. 'I'm going back to a mountain of work and 
you've arranged for me to see Norman.'
 


'You did already too much work in your life,' Edek said. 'You did not have 
enough of other things.'
'I've had more than enough of everything that I have needed,' Ruth said. She 
felt annoyed. She had worked so hard to have a balanced life, and here was Edek, 
flippantly suggesting a lack of balance. She had thought long and hard about 
balance. Her life was balanced.  'You didn't have a man what was your husband 
for a long time,' Edek said.
'You can live without husbands, you know,' Ruth said, with what she hoped was 
obvious sarcasm. 'Not every woman needs a husband. I don't need a husband. I 
don't need a man in my life.'  'Column down, Ruthie, column down,' Edek said.
'I'm calm,' she said. 'The world is a different place, now, Dad. Women don't 
need a man in order to be happy and fulfilled.' She felt distressed. 'I'm 
happy,' she shouted at Edek in case he hadn't understood. She was close to 
tears. Why was it such a difficult concept to grasp? Nobody thought men were 
unfulfilled or unhappy if they didn't have wives. On the contrary, many men who 
didn't have wives were seen as lucky. Happy bachelors. Envied by other men. And 
attractive to women. A tear ran down the side of her face. She wiped it away.  
'If you are so happy why do you cry?' Edek said.
'They're tears of frustration,' Ruth said.
'If you are so happy,' Edek said. 'Why do you move your leg so up and down, and 
do such funny things with your eye?' Ruth felt exhausted.  'Don't pick on me, 
Dad,' she said.
'I am not doing a picking,' he said.
'You did have many men what did want to marry you,' Edek said. Ruth kept quiet. 
She didn't have the energy to explain again that times had changed. That being 
married was no longer a top priority for quite a few women.  'You did have many 
men what did want to marry you,' Edek said. 'Too many men.' What had he just 
said? Too many men. She was beginning to feel haunted by that phrase.  'Who 
wanted to marry me?' she said to Edek.
'The two husbands for a start,' he said. 'And maybe even the green card man.'
'That's a joke, Dad. I had to pay him,' Ruth said.
'You had to pay him?' Edek said.
'I had to pay him four thousand dollars,' Ruth said. 'Two when we got married 
and two after the final interview.'
'Oh brother,' Edek said. 'Four thousand dollars. You did not tell me this.'
'It was just another detail of what I needed to do to live in New York,' she 
said. 'Anyway, I was worried that you would be bothered by husband number three. 
The first two divorces were difficult enough for you. I didn't want to burden 
you with divorce number three.'  'You are right,' Edek said. 'Your divorces was 
more difficult for me than they was for you.'
'I don't know if I'd go that far,' Ruth said. 'I didn't breeze through them.'
'Well they was definitely not breezes for me,' Edek said.
Ruth was glad the conversation had veered away from the men who had wanted to 
marry her. There had been so few of them, anyway.  'Shall we go back to the 
hotel?' Ruth said. 'I want to see if there are any faxes.'
'Okay,' Edek said. He looked at his watch. 'It is nearly lunchtime,' he said.
'I saw a small vegetarian restaurant,' Ruth said. 'We could have lunch there, 
after I check the faxes?'
'Vegetarian?' Edek said. 'You can eat such vegetables when you go back to New 
York. Why do we not have some pierogi today? In
 


New York you cannot get such good pierogi.'
'That's true,' she said. 'The pierogi in New York are good, but not as good as 
the ones in Poland.'  'You can say that, again, brother,' Edek said. Ruth was 
looking for her purse to pay the bill, when she felt Edek staring at her. 'That 
John and that Allan did want to marry you,' he said. Ruth groaned. 'I went out 
with John what's-his-name for about four weeks and Allan never wanted to marry 
me,' she said. 'And I definitely didn't want to marry him.'  'That Allan did 
tell me he did want to marry you,' Edek said. 'He was nuts,' Ruth said. 'And so 
what if he wanted to marry me. You can't measure a woman's worth by the number 
of men who have wanted to marry her.' 'No?' Edek said. 'No,' she shouted.  
'What's the difference?' Edek said. 'The main thing is that you could not see 
that from all of these men Norman was the one who did love you.'  'I could see 
that,' Ruth said.
They were both quiet. 'We will be in New York on the thirteenth, yes?' Edek 
said.
'Yes,' Ruth said. Suddenly the number thirteen seemed an ominous number. 'Do you 
think thirteen is an unlucky number?' Ruth asked Edek.  'Unlucky? A number? Are 
you crazy?' Edek said. Ruth felt better. Believing in superstitions was just a 
way of burdening yourself, she decided.  She tried to think about the news of 
Norman's visit, and what it would mean. But she was tired. She realised that she 
could have dispensed with all of her worries about Zofia. Zofia didn't seem to 
be at the centre of Edek's universe. Zofia didn't seem a problem, anymore. There 
was a problem though. Edek's plans to reunite her  with Norman. But that problem 
seemed surmountable, soluble. Not anywhere near as big a problem as Zofia had 
seemed to be, earlier  in the day.
The word 'big', in the same sentence as Zofia, reminded Ruth of Zofia's breasts. 
Why did Zofia's breasts fixate her? Big breasts were not that desirable. Many 
big-breasted women had problems managing their big breasts. Problems with bras, 
problems with men, problems with other women. Why was she making Zofia's breasts 
a problem for herself?  'I'll see Norman in New York,' she said to Edek. 'But 
nothing will  happen.'
'We will see,' Edek said.
'Norman is in the past, for me,' Ruth said. 'What's in the past is in the past.' 
If only that was true, she thought, after she had said it.  Walentyna was 
sitting in the lounge of the Hotel Mimoza when they got back. She jumped up when 
she saw Ruth and Edek.  'Could I speak for a moment with Ruth alone?' she said 
to Ruth  and Edek.
'Of course,' Edek said.
'Excuse me,' Walentyna said to Edek. 'I hope it is not rude for  me to ask 
this.'
'Of course not,' Edek said.
Ruth was puzzled by Walentyna's request to talk privately with  her.
'I will go to my room,' Edek said to Walentyna, 'to get ready for lunch.' He 
looked at his hands. 'I have to wash my hands,' he said. 'They are sticky from 
the pontshkes.'  'You had pontshkes? Walentyna said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'Very good pontshkes.'
'They were very good pontshkes,' Ruth said.
 


'I will see you two ladies later,' Edek said. Ruth sat down next to Walentyna. 
'Zofia is a very good woman,' Walentyna said. So, this was what the talk was 
about, Ruth thought. Walentyna was making a pitch on Zofia's behalf. She was 
surprised that she hadn't guessed. She wondered whether Zofia had asked 
Walentyna to intercede. Somehow Ruth couldn't imagine Zofia needing Walentyna's 
help. She was annoyed at herself. Why did she have to view Walentyna's actions 
so cynically? Why couldn't she just see it as a sensitive act of friendship? As 
a sign of a deep bond between two deeply dissimilar women. She hated herself for 
being cynical. 'I'm sure Zofia is a very good woman,' Ruth said. 'I know that 
she is,' Walentyna said. Walentyna looked at Ruth. 'Zofia did not ask me to talk 
to you,' she said.
'Zofia doesn't seem to be the sort who asks for help,' Ruth said. Walentyna 
laughed.
'You are right,' she said. 'Zofia is very independent. But she is a good person. 
You do not need to be nervous of her.' 'I'm not nervous,' Ruth said. 'You are 
nervous,' Walentyna said. 'I can see this.' Everyone, apparently, could see her 
nerves. Could see that she, Ruth Rothwax, was a nervous person, Ruth thought. 'I 
did see that you were nervous about me and Zofia on the first day,' Walentyna 
said. 'There is no need to be nervous. There is no need to be nervous of me. 
There is no need to be nervous of Zofia.'
Ruth wished Walentyna would use a different word. She was becoming sick of the 
word 'nervous'. What other words could Walentyna have used? She could have used 
anxious, apprehensive, troubled. She could have used fearful, agitated, 
skittish. No, that was unfair of her. You couldn't expect a Polish-speaking 
person to know the word 'skittish'. Ruth was settling into her reverie about the 
word 'nervous', when Walentyna spoke again. 'Zofia is a good person. A very good 
person,' Walentyna said. 'And a very good friend.'
A good friend? Was the face that Zofia had made about Walentyna's cheesecake the 
act of a good friend? Ruth thought. It could have been if Walentyna's cheesecake 
was terrible, she decided.
'I know Zofia is sometimes not easy,' Walentyna said. 'Sometimes she does say 
too strongly what she does think. She doesn't know how strong she is. It is hard 
for me to speak sometimes when I am with her. But she is a good friend and a 
good person.'
'I'm sure she is,' Ruth said. Walentyna hadn't finished, Ruth realised. She had 
only paused to draw breath.
'And she does adore Edek,' Walentyna said, a bit flushed and a bit breathless 
from her speech. 'Who would not adore Edek?' Walentyna added quickly. 'I think 
he is wonderful, myself, but Zofia did get to him first.' Zofia got to him 
first, Ruth thought. What was Edek? A prize to be divided out or delivered to 
the earliest arrival? Ruth decided Walentyna had intended this remark as a 
compliment. As a sincere declaration of Edek's worth. Not as a sexist statement. 
'In any case,' Walentyna said, 'I am too quiet for Edek.' She put her hand on 
Ruth's arm. 'Give Zofia a chance,' she said.
'I don't think Zofia needs my help,' said Ruth. 'She's doing quite well on her 
own.'
'She does need your help,' Walentyna said. 'There is nothing to help her about,' 
Ruth said. 'We are going tomorrow. We won't see you or Zofia for a long time.'
She stopped herself from adding, if ever. She didn't want to be too harsh to 
either woman. 'I don't think we'll be making another trip to Poland in the near 
future,' she said to Walentyna. That was a reasonable compromise, she thought. 
'We will see,' Walentyna said. 'Yes,' said Ruth. 'We will see.'
'I hear that you will have an old boyfriend visiting you in New York,' Walentyna 
said. Ruth was startled. How did Walentyna know that? Had Zofia told her? Zofia 
must have told her. Edek must have
 


told Zofia. Before he told Ruth. Ruth felt uneasy. This was not a good sign. She 
took a deep breath. She was being silly, she thought. There was nothing to worry 
about. Edek had kept quiet about the news of Norman's visit for a long time. 
Obviously he had had trouble containing himself and had leaked the news to 
Zofia.
Ruth shuddered. Why had she had to use the term 'containing himself? It was too 
sexual a metaphor for that sentence. And then the words 'leaked' to Zofia. She 
didn't want to think of her father not being able to contain himself or leaking 
anything, with Zofia. She shuddered again.
Edek was back. 'Are you ready for lunch?' he said to Ruth.
'Yes,' she said quickly. She didn't want to give Edek the opportunity of 
inviting Zofia or Walentyna to lunch.
'I must go and find Zofia,' Walentyna said. 'We are going to visit the site of 
Schindler's factory.'
'Don't take a guide,' Ruth said. 'Unless you want to hear about Steven 
Spielberg.'
'Why do you have to say such things?' Edek said to Ruth, after Walentyna had 
left. 'Maybe Walentyna does want to hear about Steven Spielberg.'
'That's probably exactly what she wants to hear about,' Ruth said. 'There is 
nothing wrong with that,' Edek said. 'I want people to hear about the Jews or 
about Oscar Schindler before they hear about Steven Spielberg.' 'What does it 
matter?' Edek said. 'It matters,' Ruth said.
'It does not change anything what did happen to the Jews,' Edek said.
A couple, a man and woman, in their sixties, were standing next to Ruth and 
Edek.
'I couldn't help overhearing your conversation,' the woman said-'I'm Sylvia 
Rosenzweig and this is my husband Tommy,' she said-
'We want to go to the Jewish Cabaret at the Samson Restaurant tonight. Do you 
know if we have to book tickets?'
'Don't bother going,' Ruth said to Tom and Sylvia Rosenzweig. 'It's just a lot 
of anti-Semitic drivel. There's nothing Jewish about this cabaret.' Both looked 
shocked.
'I heard it was a Jewish cabaret,' Sylvia Rosenzweig said.
'That's what they advertise,' Ruth said.
'Why?' said Tommy.
'I don't know,' said Ruth. The Rosenzweigs left, shaking their heads.
'Why did you say this?' Edek said. 'You are upsetting every Jewish person what 
is travelling in Poland, and every Polish person what you do meet.'
'There is a lot to be upset about,' Ruth said.
Edek looked happier when they were having lunch. His irritation with her seemed 
to have diminished. Eating often made him happy. Ruth thought about that 
sentence. It was incorrect. Eating always made her father happy. It seemed to be 
an obvious consequence of years of starvation. Or maybe he had been that way 
before the war. There had been so many maybes in Ruth's thoughts about Edek and 
Rooshka's lives.
Ruth and Edek were in a small restaurant in Mikolajska Street, just off the 
Rynek Glowny. The restaurant specialised in pierogi. Edek had chosen a selection 
of beef pierogi, veal pierogi and potato and cheese pierogi. Ruth was eating 
chicken soup, again. Her stomach was unsettled. Feeling ill had its advantages, 
she thought. She had never had so little trouble resisting food.
Edek was eating unusually fast. He always ate speedily, but something about 
today's speed alarmed Ruth. She looked at him. He had nearly finished the 
pierogi. His good mood seemed to have vanished with the beef, veal and potato 
and cheese pierogi. Suddenly he put
 


down his knife and fork. He banged the table with his right hand. 'I have made a 
decision,' he said.
Ruth's heart sank. What was she going to hear now? She put down her spoon. She 
tried to steady herself in preparation for what she was about to hear. What was 
Edek's decision? It sounded more decisive than a decision to order more pierogi 
or have a slice of cake.  'I have something to tell you, Ruthie,' Edek said.
Ruth shook her head. Whatever it was, she didn't want to know about it. 'Why do 
you shake your head?' Edek said.  'I know more than I need to know about a 
number of things,' Ruth said. 'I don't need to hear anything else. I'm already 
overloaded.'  'But you do always want to know things,' Edek said.
'Not now,' Ruth said. 'I don't want to know about Zofia, I don't want to know 
about Norman. I don't want to know about anything. I just want to go home.'  
'This is not to do with Zofia,' Edek said, 'and it is not to do with Norman. I 
did tell you everything what there was to tell about Norman.'  'It's not?' Ruth 
said. 'Then, what is it?'
'I do need to go back to Lodz,' he said.
'You want to go back to Lodz?' Ruth said. 'But you couldn't wait to get out of 
the place. You hated being there.'  'I did not hate it,' Edek said.
'You weren't happy there,' said Ruth.
'What person in my position would be happy to be in Lodz?' Edek said.
'Exactly,' said Ruth. 'So why do you want to go back?'
'I want to go only for one hour or two hours,' Edek said.
Ruth felt frightened. They had spent three days in Lodz. Why hadn't Edek done 
whatever it was that he wanted to do, then? What was different now? She started 
to tremble.  'What is wrong, Ruthie?' Edek said.
'I'm just cold,' she said.
She wondered where the chill in her bones had arrived from. Her teeth started 
chattering. She wanted to put on her coat, but she couldn't move. She could feel 
her lips turning blue. 'I'm frightened,' she said to Edek.  There is nothing to 
be frightened of, Ruthie,' he said. It didn't reassure her. If she became any 
more immobile, she thought, her blood would halt. It would just stop in whatever 
artery or vein it happened to be coursing through. And she would be frozen 
stiff. 'This is not something to be frightened about,' Edek said.  'Could you 
help me put my coat on?' Ruth said. Edek got up and helped Ruth on with the 
coat.
'I do only want to go for one hour or two hours maximum,' he said. One or two 
hours, she thought. What could they discover in one or two hours that could be 
so bad? Why did she think it would be a discovery? Maybe Edek wanted one last 
look at Kamedulska Street. She held her teeth together to stop her jaw from 
making its involuntary movements.  'There is probably nothing there,' Edek said.
'I thought we had established that,' said Ruth.
'I have to dig a little bit,' Edek said. Dig, Ruth thought. Dig where? Why did 
her father always speak in such cryptic, clipped sentences?  'Dig where?' said 
Ruth.
'In Kamedulska Street, of course,' Edek said. Ruth was startled. 'My cousin 
Herschel did bury something there,' Edek said.  'So the old man was right,' Ruth 
said. 'There is something buried there.'
'There was something buried there,' Edek said. 'I do not know if it is still 
there.'
'It is still there,' she said suddenly. Edek looked at her. He looked disturbed. 
She was disturbed herself. Why did she have to say things like that? It had come 
out of her mouth, with no warning. It is still
 


there. The words had been uttered before she had even known about them.
'How do you know this?' Edek said.
'I don't know,' she said quietly. 'I'm probably just guessing.'
'I did never tell you about this,' Edek said.
'It was just a guess,' Ruth said. Edek looked at her suspiciously. 'It was a 
guess,' she said, 'and I had a fifty per cent chance of being right. Whatever it 
is is going to be there or not be there.'  'Do you know what it is?' Edek said.
'It's something small,' Ruth said. Edek shook his head. He looked a bit pale. 'I 
don't know why I said that,' Ruth said.
'It is something very small, Ruthie,' Edek said quietly.
'It was just a good guess, Dad,' she said. 'I've always been good at guessing.' 
Edek looked carefully at her. He looked unnerved.  'I do not think it is a 
guess,' he said.
'Of course it is,' she said. 'It's a logical guess. If it had been something 
big, those Poles would have found it in a flash.' Ruth felt the back of her 
neck. It was damp. She was in a cold sweat. 'It was an intelligent guess, Dad,' 
she said, and laughed in order to lighten the atmosphere.  'Maybe you are 
right,' Edek said.
'It wasn't gold?' Ruth said. Edek laughed. 'No, Ruthie, darling, it was not 
gold.'
'I thought we'd never go to Lodz again,' she said.
'What do you think?' Edek said. 'That I did think I would go many times more? I 
did think I was finished with Lodz.'
'We might as well stay at the Grand Victoria again,' Ruth said. She cheered up. 
If they were going to go back to Lodz, there were things to be organised. Travel 
arrangements. A hotel. The organisation required for the trip to Lodz 
revitalised her. There was a normality to arrangements. To schedules and 
bookings and dates and appointments. She loved to know hotel rates and airline 
prices  and train schedules. She used to read train schedules, sometimes, for 
relaxation.
She had a copy of the Long Island Railroad timetable in her desk, at work. She 
loved the precision of the schedules, the destinations and the times. A train 
scheduled to leave Penn Station at 7:03 a.m. was scheduled to arrive at its 
destination at 9:07 a.m. It was a wonderful world of order and certainty. Max 
had decimated Ruth's pleasure in the Long Island Railroad schedule, one day, by 
telling her that that particular railroad company was never on time.  'Why do we 
need to go to a hotel?' Edek said.
'Because we need a base. We need to get a shovel. We need to organise 
ourselves.'
'Okay,' said Edek. There is probably nothing there,' he said after a couple of 
minutes. Ruth didn't say anything. She knew that whatever was there, was there. 
The knowledge frightened her.  'What is it, Dad?' she said. 'What's buried 
there?'
'I will tell you, Ruthie,' he said, 'I will tell you, in Lodz. It is not such an 
easy story.' Ruth felt sick, again.
'It is nothing to do with you, Ruthie,' Edek said 'It is nothing to do with 
you.'
'I'll get the doorman to get us a shovel,' Ruth said. 'Maybe I'll ask him to 
come with us. He'll keep that old couple at bay.'  'You was not so nice to this 
doorman,' Edek said. 'I, myself, was always nice to him. It can never hurt to be 
on someone's good side.'  'You're right, Dad,' she said. She was glad they had 
tipped the doorman well.
She couldn't believe that they were going back to Lodz. And for what? For 
something that was buried in the ground, fifty-two years ago. If it was in the 
ground, it couldn't be too frightening. That was a ludicrous thought, she 
thought. She had spent half of her life tormented by buried beings. This was 
something very small, though.
 


Too small to be a being. How big did a being have to be, to be a being?
Ruth shook her head. She had to stop driving herself crazy with abstract 
riddles. She thought of a distraction. What was it that Edek had said before? He 
had said that what he wanted to tell her was not about Zofia, and not about 
Norman. He said he had told her all there was to tell about Norman. He didn't 
say the same about Zofia. Was that an ominous omission? Did it mean there was 
something he was not revealing, about Zofia?
'Should we look for a driver with a Mercedes to drive us to Lodz?' Edek said.
'Drive us to Lodz Ruth said. 'I don't want to drive to Lodz. We've got no time, 
anyway. I want to go home. We'll fly to Lodz' 'Are you sure?' said Edek. 'We 
been very comfortable in the cars.' 'I want to fly,' Ruth said. 'I want to get 
there and I want to leave. I don't want to hang around Poland. I've had enough 
of Poles, and enough of the Polish countryside. I've had enough shrines and 
crosses and Virgin Marys and Christs on crosses. I've had enough pastel Madonnas 
to last me a lifetime. I've seen more sweet-faced donkeys and their sour-
expressioned owners than I ever needed to see.' Edek looked alarmed. Ruth's 
voice had been rising and rising. People were staring at them.
'Column down, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'Column down.' 'It's calm, not column,' she 
shouted. 'Okay, colm,' Edek said. 'Colm down." 'I'm sorry,' she said.
'It got too much for you, Ruthie, the whole trip,' Edek said.
'It sure did,' she said.
Several people in the restaurant were still staring at her. One of them was a 
priest. Ruth stared back at him. 'Don't look so sanctimonious,' she said to him. 
'Your crowd doesn't have a wonderful war record." She hoped that he understood 
English.
'Ruthie, Ruthie, what has got into you?' Edek said. There was that question, 
again. Nothing had got into her. All of this had been inside her for a long 
time. 'I hate them,' she said. 'Who?' he said.
'The Polish priests,' Ruth said. 'Especially the older ones. They pretend to be 
so pious.'
'You cannot hate everybody,' Edek said.
'I didn't, before I came to Poland,' she said. What was happening to her? Where 
was her compassion? Her humanity? She hated who she was turning into more than 
she hated the Poles. She had to get out of this spiral of hatred.
'Can we leave this afternoon?' she said to Edek. 'You want to leave today?' Edek 
said. 'Yes,' she said.
'Why not tomorrow?' he said. 'I need to get out of Poland,' Ruth said.
'You was the one who did want to come to Poland,' Edek said. 'Well, I've had 
enough,' she said. 'I want to go home.' 'Okay, okay,' Edek said. 'We can go to 
Lodz today.' 'Thanks, Dad," she said. 'I'll make the airline and hotel 
reservations. I'll see if I can get a flight around six o'clock.' 'That is fine 
with me,' Edek said.
Ruth worried, briefly, that she had wanted to leave Krakow early in order to 
leave Edek little time for Zofia. She dismissed the worry. Edek hadn't mentioned 
Zofia. There were far bigger things on Edek's mind. Bigger things. Like Zofia's 
breasts. She had to stop thinking about Zofia's breasts. Up until now, she had 
considered smaller breasts to be superior.
'I will have to say goodbye to Zofia and Walentyna,' Edek said. Had she 
telegraphed her thoughts about Zofia's breasts to Edek? How absurd, she thought. 
Thoughts couldn't be telegraphed. Zofia's breasts
 


had probably been in Edek's thoughts all morning. They didn't need telegraphing.
'That's a good idea,' Ruth said.
Zofia and Walentyna were both agitated. Ruth could see their agitation, as soon 
as she stepped out of the elevator. The two women were standing in a tense 
huddle, in the lounge, with Edek. Ruth could see the turbulence in the air. 
Zofia was waving her arms and shaking her shoulders. Walentyna was nodding. Ruth 
could see the exclamations and declarations.  Zofia saw Ruth. 'You are going so 
soon?' she called out to Ruth. Ruth walked over to the group. 'You are going so 
soon?' Zofia said, again. Zofia looked hurt. Wounded. As though Ruth had somehow 
plotted this departure.  'We have to go,' Ruth said. 'My father discovered 
something he  needed to do in Lodz.'
'You could go tomorrow,' Zofia said. Walentyna nodded.
'I have to get back to New York,' Ruth said.
'She does,' Edek said. 'She does have a big business what she must  look after."
'A small business,' Ruth said. 'But, a business that needs my attention.' Zofia 
still looked wounded. 'If you are ever in New York,' Ruth said to Zofia, 'please 
feel welcome to call me.' Ruth looked at Walentyna, to make sure she knew she 
too was included in the invitation. Neither of the women answered.  'It is time 
that we have to go,' Edek said to the two women. 'Poland is not so good for my 
daughter. It is not so good for me, too, to tell you the truth.'  'Of course, 
dear Edek, of course,' Zofia said.
'Of course,' Walentyna said.
'It's been nice meeting you,' Ruth said to Walentyna.
'For me it has been a pleasure to get to know you and to get to know Edek,' 
Walentyna said. 'I think you are a brave girl.'  'I'm not a girl," Ruth said. 
'I'm a rapidly ageing woman. I'm exhausted. But, thank you anyway.'
'You are a brave girl,' Walentyna said.
Zofia had taken Edek to one side, and was saying something in a low voice to 
him. Ruth strained to hear her. 'My darling Edek,' Zofia was saying. 'I will 
call you every day until you come to Sopot.' Edek laughed.  'We have to go,' 
Ruth said loudly, and walked over to where Zofia and Edek were standing.
'What is Melbourne like?' Zofia said to Ruth.
'Damp and grey,' Ruth said.
'Like Poland,' Zofia said, nodding her head. 'Maybe I will come to Melbourne,' 
Zofia said to Edek.
'We have to go,' Ruth said again. Zofia threw her arms around Edek. 'I will see 
you very soon, dear Edek.' Edek laughed. Zofia turned to Ruth. 'Goodbye Ruthie,' 
she said. She put her arms around Ruth and gave her a hug. Ruth stiffened in 
mid-hug. She wished she hadn't. She didn't want to hurt Zofia. She was leaving. 
She was sure they would never see Zofia again.  Ruth gave Walentyna a hug. 
'Goodbye,' she said to Walentyna. Walentyna kissed Edek on the cheek. 'You are 
two brave people,' she said to Edek.  'Who?' Zofia said. The and Edek?'
'No,' Walentyna said. 'Edek and Ruthie.' Zofia glared at Walentyna, then she 
turned back to Edek. 'Bye bye, dear Edek,' she said.  Ruth and Edek got into the 
taxi. Zofia stood in the street and blew kisses to Edek. Walentyna stood beside 
her. Ruth could hear Zofia's kisses, in the car. Mwah, mwah, mwah was the sound 
Zofia's kisses were making. Zofia stood in the street and blew kisses until Ruth 
and Edek were out of sight.
 


The Polish Airlines flight from Krakow to Lodz was almost empty There were only 
two other people in first class, and ten or fifteen people in economy. Ruth had 
booked first-class seats to give her and Edek some breathing space. 'I don't 
want Poles breathing down my neck,' she had said to Edek.
She looked at Edek. He looked bright-eyed and buoyant, but he must be tired. She 
was exhausted and she hadn't had a late night. The image of Zofia blowing kisses 
to them all the way down the street, came into her head. It had been a sweet 
image. The two women, one blowing kisses, wildly, and the other standing primly 
beside her. 'You must be tired, Dad,' she said to Edek. 'I am not tired,' he 
said. He looked at Ruth. 'Who would imagine I would go back to Lodz? What would 
Rooshka say?' Ruth was glad that Edek was thinking about her mother. 'Don't be 
frightened, Ruthie,' Edek said. Ruth felt worried. Edek had reassured her one 
time too many. He must be reassuring himself, she thought. She tried to allay 
her worry. Whatever it was that was or wasn't in Lodz, they would be out of 
there, very promptly, and on their way to New York. 'Why don't you have a short 
nap?' Ruth said to Edek. 'I do not need to have a nap,' Edek said. 'I am fine. I 
got my book.' He held up the book he was just starting. As Blood Goes By. 'Oh 
Dad,' she said. 'You choose the worst sounding titles.' 'This is very good,' 
Edek said. 'I can see already it is a good book. It is about a man what one day 
finds-' 'Don't tell me anymore,1 Ruth said. 'Please.' 'We are flying at an 
altitude of twenty-three thousand feet,' the pilot said, in Polish and English. 
'You can move about the cabin if necessary but we recommend that you remain in 
your seat with your seatbelt fastened.' Ruth checked her seatbelt. She checked 
Edek's seatbelt. They were both securely fastened.
She looked back at Edek. He had fallen asleep. Ruth was surprised. Edek never 
slept during the day. As Blood Goes By had dropped to the floor. Edek must be 
exhausted, she thought. She looked at him, again. He was out of it. It must have 
been some night he had, last night, she thought.
 


chapter sixteen
Ruth felt a change in the plane's atmosphere. It startled her. She had been 
daydreaming. Thinking about the Union Square Farmer's Market, and what she would 
buy there. She looked around. Everything looked normal. There had been no 
announcements from the flight deck. No turbulence. No series of beeps from the 
captain to the crew. It had been a smooth, uneventful flight. Still, she felt 
bothered. She felt sure she could sense a movement in the air. The usually 
still, artificial air of airplanes was moving. The normally dormant, stiff air 
of all flights definitely had a ripple. She could even hear a flurry, a flicker 
of wind. She listened, carefully. There was definitely a stirring, a ruffling.
She looked at Edek. He was still asleep. As Blood Goes By was still in his lap. 
The two other passengers in first class were sitting, motionless, in their 
seats. Neither of them looked worried. She listened again. She could hear 
breathing. Laboured breathing. She could also feel jerking and twitching. 'I can 
hear you,' she said, suddenly. 'I can hear your mouth opening and closing. I can 
hear saliva sticking to your gums. Semi-dry suction noises. Are you not well?' 
There was no answer. 'I can hear your bones,' Ruth said. 'I can hear creaks and 
clicks. Are your bones giving you trouble?' There was no reply. The air was 
still shuddering. Still unsteady. 'I know you can hear me,' she said.
She remembered how unnerved she had been when she had first heard those words. 
Now, the words were coming from her. She wasn't unnerved now. She was not even 
nervous. 'I know you can hear me,'
she said, again. There was no answer. She felt uneasy. Why was she summoning 
him? Why was she calling out to him? She wanted to let him know, she thought, 
that she had the upper hand. That he couldn't surprise her anymore. That she 
could detect his presence.
'I know you hear me,' she said with more force. Neither of the other two 
passengers looked up. Edek stayed asleep. 'I know you can hear me,' she shouted. 
'Why are you hiding? What are you frightened of?'
'I am not hiding,' said Hoss.
'Thank God you've emerged,' Ruth said.
'Thank God?' Hoss said. 'I thought that we were in agreement on the subject of 
God.'
'You and I are not in agreement about anything,' Ruth said.
'I do not think you believe this,' Hoss said.
'You're fixated about what we are in agreement about,' Ruth said. 'There is no 
agreement between us.'
'You should not be so sure of this,' Hoss said.
'You can't frighten me anymore,' Ruth said. She paused. 'You're a bit frightened 
yourself, I think,' she said. 'Why were you hiding?'
'I was not hiding,' Hoss said.
'You were hiding from me,' Ruth said. 'Why have you turned into a wallflower? 
You're not known for being shy and retiring. A shrinking violet is not what 
people think of when they think of you.'
'You think people do still think of me?' Hoss said.
'I hope so,' said Ruth. She thought Hoss was pleased with this answer. She could 
feel his pleasure. It displeased her. She wanted to needle him, not please him.
'I know you did not intend your previous remark as a compliment,' Hoss said.
'It isn't a compliment,' Ruth said.
'You and I have a different understanding of where history will place me,' Hoss 
said.
 


'History has already placed you,' said Ruth. 'This is recent history you are 
speaking about,' said Hoss. 'This will change.'
'I don't think you'll ever be seen as a hero,' Ruth said. 'We will see,' Hoss 
said.
'If you're such a big hero, why were you hiding?' Ruth said. Hoss snorted. 'You 
think you can hide from me?' Ruth said. 'I can sense your presence. I can detect 
the smell that accompanies you, too.' 'The smell is faint, no?' Hoss said. 'So 
you know what smell I'm talking about,' Ruth said. 'Of course,' said Hoss.
'The smell of burning flesh,' Ruth said. 'It still adheres to you. It's still 
stuck to your skin.'
'I thought it was still possible to smell it,' Hoss said. He sounded glum.
'I couldn't identify it at first,' Ruth said. 'I thought it was just your 
presence that was making me feel bilious.'
'I cannot remove this smell,' Hoss said. 'Day and night, awake and asleep, I am 
surrounded by it. I am drenched and steeped and congested with that stench.'
'It must have seeped into your soul,' Ruth said. 'Burning flesh can do that.'
'This is why you do not eat meat, yes?' said Hoss. 'Meat being grilled or fried 
or seared reminds me of burning flesh,' Ruth said. How could she be reminded of 
something she'd never seen, never witnessed, never smelled? she thought.
'It is not necessary to have experienced something directly in order for it to 
be part of your memory,' Hoss said. It was easy for him to give her a flip 
answer.
'What do you know?' she said.
'If I knew so little you would not bother with me,' Hoss said.
'You think it's my choice?" Ruth said.
'I know it is your choice,' said Hoss. He made a blowing noise. 'The smell is 
very strong today,' he said.
'Why are you bothered by the smell of burning flesh?' Ruth said. 'It should 
remind you of happier times.'
'It is not so strong, the smell, where you are,' Hoss said. 'If I could come 
closer you would be overwhelmed. Sick to your
stomach.'
'You're absolutely right,' Ruth said. 'If you could come any closer I would be 
sick to my stomach. So you can't come any closer?' Ruth said. 'That's 
interesting. I'm glad there's a limit imposed on how close you can get. I'm glad 
the distance isn't arbitrary.'
'Nobody from Zweites Himmel's Lager is able to come closer than
this,' Hoss said.
'Thank God,' Ruth said. Hoss breathed out in exasperation. 'Why
do you insist on thanking God?' he said.
'I have to thank somebody for the fact that you can't close the gap between us,' 
Ruth said. Ruth was startled by what she had just said. How could she even 
imagine that the gap between her and Hoss was so small it could be closed? The 
thought shocked her. She and Hoss were miles apart. Physically, morally, 
temperamentally. She had to stop speaking as though they were close. The thought 
of being close to Hoss made her feel sick. Clogged and blocked. As though Hoss 
had invaded her. She wished she could go for a walk. Get some
fresh air.
She opened her mouth. A loud burp came out. And then a fart. A large fart. She 
felt better, but embarrassed. The passenger in the seat closest to her had 
looked up. He looked surprised. 'Excuse me,' Ruth said to him. He nodded. She 
felt uncomfortable. Uncouth. People travelling in first class rarely burped or 
farted. She looked at Edek. He was sound asleep. She hoped her fart didn't 
smell.
'You can't smell anything in Auschwitz now,' she said to Hoss. 'That stench of 
bodies burning that spread for miles has all gone.'
 


Hoss didn't say anything. Ruth could feel Hoss's reluctance to discuss her visit 
to his old stamping ground. His former place of employment. His former home. 'I 
thought you would be interested in my trip,' she said. There was silence. 'Is 
this not something that you want to discuss?' she said. Hoss remained silent.
'There is no sign near the gallows, where you were hanged,' Ruth said. 'I 
thought there might be a plaque which said: "Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss, 
Commandant of Auschwitz, was hanged here." But there wasn't.' Ruth thought she 
heard the sound of someone gagging. 'The gallows were quite close to the 
kitchens, weren't they?' she said. A choking noise came from Hoss. It had a 
liquid sound. Like a gurgle or ripple.
'Is this painful for you?' Ruth said. Hoss swallowed. 'It is not an easy 
memory,' he said. 'The hanging?' she said. Hoss started coughing. 'Yes, yes, 
yes,' he said, through a series of coughs. 'You have a sore throat?' Ruth said. 
'I am fine,' Hoss said, and coughed again. 'Something else that surprised me, in 
Auschwitz, was the sign, Arbeit Macht Frei,' Ruth said. 'Jawohl,' said Hoss.
'fawohir said Ruth. 'You mean, yes? We're not back in Nazi Germany. We're only 
discussing Auschwitz.' 'Of course,' said Hoss.
'The Arbeit Macht Frei sign,' Ruth said, 'was small. In photographs it always 
looks so big.' 'Ja, ja,' Hoss said.
'Could we speak English, please?' Ruth said. 'Certainly,' Hoss said, with a 
start. Ruth realised that he hadn't known he had slipped into German.
'I think the sign should have been bigger,' Ruth said. 'It was out of scale with 
its intentions.'
'The intention was to appear harmless,' Hoss said, 'and in this regard the size 
was appropriate.'
'I guess so,' said Ruth.
'Auschwitz today is not what it once was,' Hoss said. His voice had a renewed 
buoyancy. Almost as though he was amused at what Auschwitz had become.
'It's almost a circus today,' Ruth said. 'There's a cafeteria, tourist buses, 
Polish school children thrilled to be getting a day off school. They should have 
built a separate museum and left Auschwitz as it was. Like Birkenau. The 
tourists who go there are kept busy reading the literature around the exhibits. 
They go from one room to another reading. The reading takes the place of 
feeling. They can't feel the place.'
'And they are warm,' Hoss shouted. 'They have put in heating.' He roared with 
laughter. Ruth lifted her heel. Hoss stopped laughing. What was she doing 
talking to Hoss? Part of her couldn't believe she was talking to Rudolf Hoss 
again. She couldn't believe she had encountered him on a plane. On a Polski 
Airways flight between Krakow and Lodz.
'Encounter' wasn't quite the right word, she thought. This meeting wasn't an 
encounter. She wasn't sure it was even a meeting. She could have used several 
other words instead of encounter. She could have used collision, confrontation. 
She could have said she had come across Hoss, run into Hoss, stumbled upon Hoss. 
Everything had a nonsensical ring to it. Was she talking to Hoss? Were they 
really talking? Exchanging thoughts?
Was she exchanging her thoughts for his thoughts? That was absurd. She was over-
tired. She had to stop thoughts like that coming into her head. Was Hoss taking 
any notice of her thoughts? Was he absorbing her thoughts? She didn't like the 
notion of Hoss absorbing her thoughts. It made her feel dizzy. She didn't want 
Hoss absorbing any part of her.
 


'It is a very complicated question is it not?' Hoss said. 'What?' said Ruth.
'Who are we,' Hoss said. 'And who are we not.' 'I know who I am,' said Ruth. 
'And everyone knows who you are' She sat up straight in her seat. Of course she 
knew who she was. She might delude herself about some of her abilities and 
motives, but, essentially, she knew who she was. She was not Rudolf Hoss.  She 
wanted to ask Hoss where he had been since she had last heard from him. But she 
was reluctant to appear curious about his patterns and habits. She assumed that 
he could move around the world.  'I went to Baden-Baden for a few days,' Hoss 
said. So he did know what she was thinking.
'To your birthplace,' she said. 'You've probably still got relatives there.'
'Possibly,' said Hoss.
'Did any of your children settle there?' Ruth said. 'I will not discuss my 
children,' Hoss said. 'I think they must have changed their names,' Ruth said. 
'Whether they were in Baden-Baden or another part of Germany.'  'Please leave my 
children out of this,' Hoss said, his voice rising. 'So you went to Baden-Baden 
for old times' sake?' she said to Hoss.  'Yes,' Hoss said. 'My movements are 
restricted compared to the residents of Himmel,' Hoss said. 'But compared to 
you, I can move anywhere. You are restricted.'  'It's a restriction I can live 
with,' Ruth said. Hoss shrieked. 'This is a pun, is it not?' he shouted. 'You 
are restricted because you live, still.' He roared with laughter. Ruth put her 
hands over her ears. It didn't dim the laughter.  'I really have got you hooked 
on language, haven't I?' she said to Hoss.
'Yes, yes,' he squealed.
'It's better than being hooked on many other things,' Ruth said. 'It's better 
than being hooked up to the gallows.'  Hoss's squeal stiffened. It turned into a 
different squeal altogether. It became a shrill, pointed squeal. The squeal of a 
rodent. You could feel the long thin tail and sharp, whiskered nose of something 
verminous behind that squeal. The squeal gave Ruth goosebumps. She rubbed her 
arms.  'You are not comfortable?' Hoss said. She detected a pleasure in his 
voice, at her discomfort.
'How do you get to the different places?' Ruth said. 'You merely will yourself 
to be there,' he said. 'Really?' said Ruth.  'I can go almost anywhere I wish,' 
Hoss said. 'With the exception of Himmel. Of course. For example I traveled to 
Lodz to be with  you.'
'To be with me?' Ruth said. 'You meant to meet with me. Not to  be with me. I 
may meet you, but you are never with me. Do you  understand that?' She raised 
the heel of her foot.
'I understand,' Hoss said. 'My purpose on that particular journey  was to meet 
with you. After all, who in his right mind would go to
Lodz for no particular reason?' Hoss emitted a conspiratorial guffaw.
It made Ruth feel queasy. A shared view of Lodz didn't make her  and Hoss bosom 
buddies. Why had she used the word 'bosom'?
Bosom conjured up images of Zofia. She and Zofia certainly weren't  bosom 
buddies either.
Why was she thinking about Zofia? She was sure they wouldn't see Zofia again. 
Why was she so hostile to Zofia? she thought. What did she have against her? 
That she was Polish? If that was the reason, it was extremely unfair of her. Was 
she annoyed at Zofia for leaping into bed with her father? Leaping? Why use the 
word 'leap'? It was so judgemental. And how did she know who was doing the 
leaping?
 


It could have been Edek. Although, she decided, it was more likely to be Zofia.
She had to cut these thoughts about leaps. Too many visions of Edek and Zofia in 
various stages of leap were creeping into her head. It didn't matter who 
initiated the leap. It was not something that she should hold against Zofia. 
Young people leapt into bed with strangers all the time. Young people had one-
night stands. Why shouldn't Edek and Zofia have a one-night stand? She felt 
ashamed of her hostility towards Zofia. It was definitely out of line.
'I am on a journey at the moment,' Hoss said, interrupting her thoughts. Ruth 
was annoyed. She would much rather be thinking about Zofia than Hoss. 'This is a 
journey with a higher end in mind,' Hoss said. 'A good cause.'
'What do you mean?' she said. 'I think you know,' Hoss said.
'I have no idea what you are talking about,' Ruth said. A stewardess came by 
with a basket of oranges. She gave Ruth an orange. The stewardess looked at 
Edek. 'I'll take an orange for my father, for when he wakes up,' Ruth said. The 
orange came nestled in a napkin. Why were they passing out oranges? Fifteen 
years ago when she had flown with Polski, they had passed out oranges. She had 
assumed the food shortage, then, had contributed to the small scale of the 
snack. An orange was an absurd thing to serve on a plane. It was impossible to 
peel an orange or prise apart the segments without a mess, when you were sitting 
in an airplane seat. And this was first class. An orange must be the standard 
refreshment served on this flight, she decided. Unless the caviar and the petit 
fours were coming later. 'Why do you not eat your orange?' Hoss said. 'Because I 
can't peel it without making a mess,' she said. 'You should eat it,' he said. 
Ruth was astonished. Now, Hoss and her father were ordering her to eat. 'You 
like fruit,' Hoss said. 'I noticed that you prepared bananas and pears for 
yourself for your
trip to Auschwitz.' So, he could see her even when she couldn't detect his 
presence.
'I am everywhere,' Hoss said. 'That's what I feared,' Ruth said.
'I was in Auschwitz myself, the day you and your father were there,' Hoss said.
'I'm sure you were,' she said. 'Did it make you homesick?' 'I do think about my 
time there much of the time,1 Hoss said. 'Good,' Ruth said.
'I was reluctant to leave Auschwitz,' Hoss said. 'Reluctant to leave my job as 
Camp Commandant. But, in November 1943,1 was offered a promotion. Pohl offered 
me the choice of Commandant of Sachsenhausen or head of the Department D.I., in 
the Economic Administration Head Office.'
'Commandant of Sachsenhausen?' Ruth said. 'That was a promotion?'
'Yes, yes,' Hoss said. 'Of course it was a promotion. Pohl offered me the 
choice. This was highly unusual to allow an officer to make a choice. He didn't 
give me much time at all to make a decision. He gave me twenty-four hours. I 
think Pohl exercised this goodwill towards me in order to compensate me for the 
very difficult job I had been given at Auschwitz.'
'You're talking about Oswald Pohl, Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative 
Department during World War II,' Ruth said. 'Of course,' Hoss said.
'Pohl was very close to Himmler,' Ruth said. 'You know this?' Hoss said. 'Of 
course,' Ruth said. 'Pohl's closeness to Himmler must have
irked you.'
'Pohl did a very good job in the Economic and Administrative
Department,' Hoss said.
'Yes,' said Ruth. 'He saw to it that all valuables, every single skerrick
 


of value that was taken from the gassed Jews, was sent straight to Germany.'
'He was very efficient,' Hoss said.
'Oswald Pohl went into hiding at the end of the war,' Ruth said 'He disguised 
himself as a farmer. A lot of you boys felt an affinity for the land. Was a 
longing to be a farmer a prerequisite of rising through the ranks of the SS?'
'That would be ridiculous,' Hoss said.
'Pohl, eventually, was hanged, like you,' Ruth said. Hoss swallowed hard. 'You 
don't like the word "hanged", do you?' she said. Hoss ignored her.
'As I was saying to you,' Hoss said, 'initially I was extremely unhappy at the 
thought of extracting myself from Auschwitz. The move did not appeal to me. I 
had become totally absorbed with Auschwitz because of the very difficult 
complications of the job. But one cannot refuse a promotion. So I accepted the 
job of head of Department Dl in the Economic Administration Head Office.'
'That made you Inspector of Concentration Camps, didn't it?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' Hoss said. He sighed. 'I really would have preferred to go to the front,' 
he said. 'But the Reichsfuhrer had most firmly forbidden me to do this. Not once 
did he forbid me, but twice.'
'Himmler thwarted you?' said Ruth.
'The Reichsfuhrer was doing what was best for the country,' Hoss said.
'I think it was definitely best for the prisoners that you left Auschwitz,' Ruth 
said. 'Things improved, minimally, for the prisoners after you left.'
Hoss laughed. 'Yes, I heard this,' he said. 'They say things were never quite as 
harsh after I left.'
'It was a minimal difference,' Ruth said. 'But the most minuscule difference in 
Auschwitz could make a difference.'
'I do not believe there was much difference,' Hoss said. 'Liebe-henschel who 
replaced me was a short man, a pudgy type. He had particularly protruding eyes. 
He was a weak type.'
'Short? Pudgy? Protruding eyes?' Ruth said. 'Where were all the Aryan 
prototypes?' Hoss ignored her.
'I was discussing my new job as Inspector of Concentration Camps,' Hoss said. in 
my new job, I was now able, thanks to the aid of an efficient office, to follow 
the development and progress of all of the concentration camps. I was able to 
obtain an overview, which was essential for us.
'I spent much of my time travelling. I travelled from camp to camp and I was 
able to see for myself the reality of the camps. This enabled me to examine the 
situation and isolate the not always visible defects and flaws. The unnoticed 
deficiencies and faults. The shortcomings and the weaknesses.'
Ruth was speechless. Hoss seemed unaware of the irony of trying to iron out the 
defects and flaws of the most flawed and defective of human endeavours.
'You were like a time and motion expert, an efficiency expert,' Ruth said. 'Your 
job was to make sure that the death camps were working at full capacity, with a 
healthy production line and maximum profits.'
'That is correct,' said Hoss. 'It was quite a challenge. Maurer, the deputy 
director, and I were able to correct much of what was wrong. But by 1944, it was 
really too late to make extreme changes.'
'What a shame,' Ruth said. 'If you had been given another year on the job Europe 
could have been truly Judenrein. Free of Jews. There could have been not even 
one Jew left.'
'I think so,' Hoss said, quite matter of factly.
'You had barely been in the job for a year when things began to decline for you, 
didn't they?' Ruth said 



'This is absolutely correct,' Hoss said. 'From the beginning of the
 


intensified air offensive in 1944 not a single day passed without reports of 
casualties.'
'The poor Germans,' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'These persistent air attacks placed great difficulty and 
stress on the civilian population. Especially on women.'
'I nearly forgot your sensitivity to women,' Ruth said. 'Were all Germans as 
sensitive about this as you were?'
'No,' Hoss said. He didn't notice her sarcasm. He was too immersed in his 
recollections, Ruth realised. 'Even Berliners, whose spirits are not so easily 
brought down, were in the end exhausted,' Hoss said. 'Worn out by the 
endlessness of the attacks. Having to spend days and nights in cellars and 
shelters, their nerves came under strain. The psychological torment suffered by 
the German people could not have gone on for much longer without severe 
psychological repercussions.'
'You think it was too much for the Germans trying to dodge bombs, in cellars and 
shelters?' Ruth said. 'Yes,' said Hoss. 'Absolutely.'
'It's hard for me to feel sorry for them,' Ruth said. Hoss didn't say anything.
'Our new jet fighters could not keep back the enemy,' Hoss said. 'The offensive 
continued and increased. Despite this the Fuhrer gave orders to continue to hold 
firmly to our mission and our principles. Goebbels wrote about the necessity to 
believe in miracles and he made several speeches to that effect.'
'They didn't seem like desperate men to you?' Ruth said. 'After all, you were 
being trounced.'
'I had serious and grave misgivings about whether it was possible for us to win 
the war,' Hoss said.
'I should hope so," Ruth said. 'The war was nearly over.' 'But I refused to let 
myself doubt our final victory,' Hoss said. 'Well you knew you had won,' Ruth 
said. 'You knew how many
Jews you had got rid of, how many gypsies, how many others you didn't approve of 
you had murdered. You knew the world was already a different place. And it would 
never be the same. You knew you had definitely won.'
'We had not yet won,' Hoss said sternly. 'Our mission was to be in power. To 
purify Europe and give the German people a world free of disease, and distrust.'
'I understand what you're saying,' Ruth said. 'The disease and distrust came in 
the form of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped people, political 
opponents.'
'Of course,' said Hoss. 'It was necessary for the wellbeing of the German people 
for us to remove the pollutants which were endangering the German way of life. 
My heart, during this difficult time, stayed with the Fuhrer and his ideals. I 
knew that we must not let these ideals perish.
'I am certain that Pohl had similar thoughts to myself. Thoughts that we might 
lose the war. But none of us dared to voice this possibility. Not in fact 
because we feared being accused of spreading a despondent air, but because none 
of us allowed ourselves to think the impossible. That our world could perish.
'Each of us worked with a grim dedication, as though if we as individuals worked 
as hard as possible we could achieve victory. We utilised every means that was 
available to us. Through enormous efforts on our parts we made sure that the 
prisoners who were working in our war factories that had not yet been destroyed, 
were kept working at full pitch. We shared the same attitude to those defeatists 
among us who said that our efforts no longer mattered. We dealt with them 
immediately.'
'When you and Pohl were getting rid of colleagues who were voicing doubts about 
a victory, you really knew it was all over. You knew the enemy was surrounding 
you. You knew it would all be over fairly soon,' Ruth said.
 


'I knew that I had to do everything I could to support the Fuhrer' Hoss said.
'You drove to Auschwitz, didn't you?' Ruth said. 'You left your office, and you 
drove to Auschwitz. You were desperate to do whatever you could to cover your 
tracks, and the tracks of your fellow Nazis.'
'Of course,' Hoss said, with pride in his voice. 'Of course. I hoped to reach 
Auschwitz in time to ensure that the orders to destroy everything in the camp 
were being correctly carried out.'
'You didn't want any evidence left behind, did you?' Ruth said. 'Why? If you 
were so proud of your ideals, why were you worried about others uncovering your 
actions?'
Hoss snorted. 'That is a stupid question,' he said. 'Please do not interrupt me. 
I tried to get to Auschwitz but I was only able to get as far as the Oder River, 
quite close to Ratibor, because the Russians and their tanks were already 
spreading out in great numbers across the other side of the river.' He paused 
for a moment. 'The scenes that I encountered on that chaotic journey will never 
leave me,' he said. 'It was complete chaos everywhere. A chaos that was a result 
of the orders to evacuate all concentration camps.'
'There were Nazis marching streams of half-dead Jews all over Poland and into 
parts of Germany and Czechoslovakia,' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Hoss. 'On every road, and even on tracks, I encountered columns and 
columns of prisoners. These miserable wretched abject prisoners were struggling 
to walk in snow that was often, particularly west of the Oder, very deep. They 
had no food.'
'You noticed?' said Ruth. 'The lack of food didn't bother you in Auschwitz.'
'These columns of starving, emaciated, stumbling corpses were led by non-
commissioned officers who had no idea of where they were supposed to be taking 
their charges,' Hoss said.
'I think the destination was clear,' Ruth said.
'Yes?' said Hoss.
'They were taking them to their death,' Ruth said. 'Death was the destination, 
for these poor young women and young men, these poor sons and daughters and 
mothers and fathers. I think the noncommissioned officers knew exactly where 
they were taking them. They knew enough to shoot anyone who fell, and anyone 
else that they felt like shooting. Rows and rows of straggly prisoners, mostly 
Jews, blindly lurching and pitching, were trying to keep walking. Trying to stay 
upright. Trying to stay awake. Trying to stay alive.'
Ruth felt on the verge of tears. She looked at Edek, asleep, in the seat next to 
her. Edek had been one of those Jews being marched across Europe. He had told 
her how he had fallen once, and had been picked up by another Jew and partly 
carried for over an hour until he got some of his strength back. Some of 
whatever strength was left in the few pounds that made up his skeletal body. He 
had looked like an array of sticks, he said. Propped together by an unsteady 
head. After the war, he was found to have fluid on his brain, among other 
maladies, and was put in hospital, in Czechoslovakia. Ruth looked at Edek again. 
Even asleep, he looked robust. She couldn't imagine him as a bundle of sticks.
'It was not at all hard to follow the routes taken by those wretched columns of 
prisoners,' Hoss said.
'Every one or two hundred yards I would come across the bodies of prisoners who 
had collapsed.'
'Or been shot,' Ruth said.
'That is correct,' Hoss said. 'Collapsed or been shot.'
'My father fell,' Ruth said. 'But he was picked up, quickly, before he could be 
shot.'
'I gave very strict orders to the men who were in charge of the columns of 
prisoners,' Hoss said. 'I told them in no uncertain terms and with the full 
status of the SS ranking, that they were not, under any circumstances, to shoot 
those prisoners who were not capable of marching further.'
 


'Really?' said Ruth. 'Why would you bother to do that? They were helping you by 
shooting Jews. They were keeping up your good work I don't think Hitler or the 
Reichsfuhrer would have approved of that attitude.'
'In one instance,' Hoss said, 'just as I had stopped my car next to a dead body, 
I heard the sound of revolver shots very close to where I was. I ran in the 
direction of the shots and saw a soldier who was about to shoot a prisoner who 
had slumped against a tree.
'The soldier had barely got off his motorcycle and already had his revolver 
drawn. I called out quickly to this soldier. He ignored me. I shouted at him. 
"What on earth do you think you are doing?" 1 shouted. "Has this prisoner caused 
you any harm?" The soldier laughed out loud, at me. "What do you think you can 
do about it?" the soldier said to me in the most impertinent manner.'
'The soldier obviously didn't know who he was dealing with,' Ruth said.
'I drew my pistol and shot him with no further delay,' Hoss said. 'He was a 
sergeant major in the air force.' Hoss breathed out heavily. Ruth could feel 
that he was still flushed. That he was still experiencing the adrenaline rush of 
that memory. That swift response with his pistol.
She could feel a series of small funny movements. A kind of fidgeting. She 
realised, with a start, that Hoss was fingering his pistol. Lovingly running his 
fingers over the handle and the barrel, that he had used so well. The movements 
made Ruth feel sick. She hoped she had some Mylanta tablets left. She took the 
last two.
'Why did you feel you had to save him?' Ruth said. 'It seems totally out of 
character, if you don't mind me saying so.' Hoss didn't answer. 'Where did the 
compassion come from?' Ruth said. 'Where did the compassion come from?' she said 
again. Hoss stayed silent. 'Did the corpses who were being marched across Europe 
look more human to you? Did the skeletal Jews look more human than they did in
Auschwitz? Did they suddenly look like people? I doubt it. You had seen so many 
of them in that condition. I don't think they would have suddenly seemed more 
human.'
'No,' said Hoss. It was a small no. As though he had stepped away
for a moment.
'So what was different?1 Ruth said. 'What had changed?' Hoss didn't answer. She 
knew that he hadn't gone. She could still feel his presence. She could still 
smell that smell of burning flesh. She wished she had some more Mylanta.
'I know what had changed,' Ruth said. 'I know why you were trying to show some 
compassion, some concern.' 'Why?' said Hoss.
'You were trying to save your neck,' Ruth said. 'You knew it was about to snap, 
about to break.' A gurgling noise, followed by a semi-suppressed wet cough, came 
from Hoss. Ruth flinched. It sounded disgusting. 'It still hurts, doesn't it?' 
she said to Hoss. 'The memory of the hanging. The memory of that pull on the 
neck. The memory of the snap. The memory of the fracture and the rupture.' She 
paused. 'That was rupture, not rapture,' she said.
Hoss was quiet. Ruth thought she could hear him trying to swallow. 'Really, 
Rudolf,' she said. She stopped, in surprise. She had never addressed Hoss by his 
name. It felt strange. She looked around the cabin of the plane. No one was 
taking any notice of her. Edek was still asleep. 'Really, Rudolf,' she said, 
again. 'I don't see why you were bothering to appear concerned. It was a bit 
late in the day for you to be trying to save your neck. Do you know this 
expression, a "bit
late in the day"?'
Hoss didn't answer. 'It doesn't refer to the time of day,' Ruth said. 'It refers 
to your life. It was too late for you. You had murdered too many. It was too 
late to defend a Jew. Too late to save a Jew. Too late to shoot a Nazi or an air 
force officer. Or any other German. It was just plain too late. You had murdered 
too many.'
 


'I myself never mistreated or mishandled a prisoner, let alone killed one,' Hoss 
said. 'I was for sure strict and demanding. And possibly gruff, in my manner.'
'Gruff?' Ruth said. 'With your full girlish lips and large eyes? Who'd ever 
believe you were capable of gruffness?' It was true, Ruth thought, Hoss's 
demeanour, his physical appearance, didn't give much of a hint of what was 
underneath. His high forehead and questioning eyes suggested an intelligent and 
sensitive man.
'How do you know what I look like?' Hoss said. 'Few photographs of me have 
remained.'
'I know,' Ruth said. 'I've always known what you looked like.' Hoss was quiet. 
Ruth was bothered by how she knew. It was just one of a large number of things 
that bothered her.
'When I reflect back on it,' Hoss said, 'I was possibly too severe, too 
stringent.'
Ruth was speechless. She couldn't bring herself to reply to this misuse of the 
word 'severe'. 'When I saw this chaos on the road, at the end, I tried with all 
of my power, until the very end, to bring a sort of order to the madness,' Hoss 
said. 'But it was no use, nothing I could do could make any difference. And then 
we ourselves had to flee.'
'There were people looking for you, weren't there?' said Ruth. 'You had to grab 
Hedwig and run.' Hoss didn't answer her. 'You don't want to talk about it, do 
you?' she said. 'Okay, we can drop the subject.' She felt magnanimous. She was 
nearly in Lodi. They would be in Lodz, briefly, and then she would be on her way 
home. Hoss cleared his throat. Ruth wondered if he was clearing lingering 
fragments of the hanging out of his oesophagus.
'You will be angry with your father very soon,' Hoss said. 'I've been angry with 
him lots of times,' Ruth said. 'Don't try to sound like a prophet. I know you 
see yourself as a visionary, but your prophecies don't frighten me. They don't 
even faze me.' She
thought Hoss was probably not fooled by her air of bravado. But, really, what 
did he know? He was just an old Nazi. 'What do you know, anyway?' she said to 
Hoss. 'You're still stuck in Zweites Himmel's Lager.'
'I am not so stuck. I am going on a journey. Quite a journey,' Hoss said, and he 
laughed. It was an eerie laugh. A weird laugh. More like a cackle or a hoarse 
screech. The laugh rang out. Ruth was sure that it could be heard throughout the 
plane. She looked at the stewardess who was offering her some canapes-a pat of 
liver-wurst on a rye biscuit. The stewardess didn't look as though she was 
hearing anything abnormal. Ruth declined the canapes.
She looked at Edek. He was snoring, quietly. He looked peaceful. She wondered 
why she and Edek were going back to Lodz What did Edek expect to find there? 
Something small. Why hadn't he looked for it when they were there? Was it 
something he didn't want to face? Something troubling? Something he thought he 
didn't want? It couldn't be anything essential. He had lived without it for 
fifty-two years. He had lived without even mentioning it.
Edek could have asked her to look for it when she was in Lodz, fifteen years 
ago, if it had been that important to him, she thought. She sighed. She really 
didn't have enough energy to muster up too much anxiety about the buried object. 
That's what she did, she realised. She mustered up anxiety for herself. Conjured 
it up. Wished for it. Searched for it. Sought it out. And when the anxiety hit 
her, she was finally able to relax. To relax in the fear, the dread, the 
tension, and the sense of foreboding. It was all so familiar to her. The 
tension, the apprehension, the uneasiness. It put her in the same hemisphere as 
her mother. The same orbit. It put her in the world of those who suffer.
'The bite on your face is still very enlarged,' Hoss said.
'It was a very large fly,' Ruth said.
'I know,' said Hoss.
 


'I guess you do,' Ruth said.
'By a very strange coincidence,' Hoss said. 'I myself was circled by a large 
fly.'
'There are flies everywhere,' Ruth said. 'Even, I presume, in Zweites Himmel's 
Lager.'
'The fly I was referring to did not circle me in Zweites Himmel's Lager, but in 
Auschwitz,' Hoss said.
'My mother said there were no flies in Auschwitz,' Ruth said.
That was correct during my time, there,' Hoss said. 'But this fly appeared later 
in my life.'
'So what?' said Ruth.
'Everyone was surprised to see a fly in April,' Hoss said. 'It was not even late 
April. It was mid-April. This black fly circled me and circled me.' Ruth 
suddenly realised what day Hoss was talking about.
'It was April 16th, wasn't it?' she said. 'The day you were hanged.' She heard 
Hoss wince. The word clearly hurt him.
'It was April 16th,' Hoss said. 'The day on which I was h, h, h.' He couldn't 
get more than the 'h' to come out of him. Ruth started to laugh.
'The day on which you were hanged,' she said. 'It's not such a hard word to 
enunciate.'
'Yes, that day,' Hoss said quietly.
'The day you were hanged in the very gallows in Auschwitz where errant prisoners 
were hanged,' Ruth said. Hoss winced again. A small, piercing wince. Almost a 
squeak. 'You were hanged on your own home ground. Your own turf. Your own 
territory. Your former kingdom,' Ruth said. She could hear Hoss trying to keep 
his mouth shut. 'You were hanged on that day in April,' she said. Hoss let out a 
bleat. 'Hanged, hanged, hanged,' Ruth said. Hoss yelped. 'If I had known this 
word caused you such difficulties, I would have used it earlier,' Ruth said.
'Are you interested in the coincidence of the fly?' Hoss said. His
voice was hoarse and raspy. He cleared his throat several times. 'Why do you 
think the fly bit you?' Hoss said.
Ruth stiffened. 'No reason,' she said. 'There are no reasons why flies bite you. 
The fact that there was a large black fly buzzing around you the day you were 
executed is just coincidence. And not a very notable coincidence.'
'I would not agree,' Hoss said.
'The fly that bit you has flown closer and closer to me recently. It was 
circling me that day. My face was next to your face. I was watching you, when 
the fly flew between us. It bit you and you moved away. The fly was warning you 
to move out of my orbit.'
Ruth felt sick. A wave of biliousness rose up in her throat. She wished Hoss 
would go back to his conversation about himself and his wife fleeing the allies.
'As you wish,' Hoss said. 'In Wismar, my wife and I heard, by chance, in a 
farmhouse, that the Fuhrer was dead. When we heard this news,' Hoss said, 'my 
wife and I knew exactly what we must do. We must go. With the Fuhrer gone, our 
world would be gone, too. It didn't seem possible to go on living. We knew we 
would be hounded and persecuted wherever we went.
'I had a supply of poison for myself and my wife,' Hoss said. 'We prepared to 
take the poison. But then, we decided for the sake of the children, we should 
try to stay alive.' 'Good parents to the end,' Ruth said.
'It was a big mistake,' Hoss said. 'One which I regret to this day. We all would 
have been spared a large amount of suffering and grief and distress. The pain 
and misery my wife and the children had to endure could have been avoided.
'The Reichsfuhrer was, together with other members of the government, in hiding, 
in Flensburg. I reported there. It was a disheartening meeting. All talk of 
continuing to fight for our ideals was gone. It was truly now 


every man for himself. The Reichsfuhrer was
 


taking things extremely well. His spirits were high and he was in fact beaming. 
Beaming despite the fact that our cherished ideals and visions were being 
destroyed. Our world was crumbling and disintegrating with every passing 
moment.'
'"Well gentlemen, this is the end,'" the Reichsfuhrer said to us,' Hoss said. 
'And then he gave us our final directive. "Hide in the army," he said. Hide in 
the army. Can you believe that? Hide like a coward. After preaching for years 
that we should stand up for our beliefs, die for our beliefs, his orders are to 
hide in the army. To this day I am still filled with disgust at the 
Reichsfuhrer's directive.' 'I sent my son back to his mother, together with my 
driver and my car,' he said.
'A family man to the very end,' Ruth said. 'I am not quite at the end,' Hoss 
said. 'By sheer chance I heard on the radio that Himmler had been arrested and 
had taken his own life, with poison. I had my vial of poison on me, also. I made 
the decision not to take the poison. I would wait and see what eventuated. The 
departmental staff were given false papers. The papers which would enable them 
to disappear into the navy.'
'My papers were those of a boatswain's mate, Franz Lang. I went to the island of 
Sylt, to the Naval Intelligence School, armed with my boatswain's mate's orders 
to report there. I was fortunate in that I had a certain knowledge about naval 
life, and I was able to blend in well. The British then wanted to use the Naval 
School for the SS men they had captured, so the marines, myself included, were 
moved. The move put me quite close to my family. I was thus able to see my wife 
and children quite often. As a matter of fact my eldest boy visited me every few 
days.'
'I bet he has fond memories of his visits with you,' Ruth said. Hoss seemed not 
to notice her irony.
'I think so,' he said. Ruth could hear the warmth of the memories, of those 
visits, in Hoss's voice.
'As my profession was stated as farmer, I was soon released,' Hoss
said.
Another twenty minutes, Ruth thought, and they would be landing in Lodz. She was 
relieved that this wasn't a longer flight. She would be glad to get off this 
plane. Glad to be in Lodz. Who would have predicted that she would be happy to 
be arriving in Lodz?
'I passed through all the British control points with no trouble,' Hoss said. 
'The Labour Office sent me to a farm near Flensburg. I liked the work very much. 
I worked on this farm for eight months. It was a peaceful time. My wife's 
brother worked in Flensburg. He helped me to stay in touch with my wife.'
'You were a close family, obviously,' Ruth said.
'Very close,' Hoss said. 'It was through my brother-in-law that I heard that the 
British Field Security Police were searching for me. I learnt that they were 
keeping my family under surveillance. I knew I could not remain free for much 
longer.'
'And you were right,' Ruth said. 'You were arrested on March
11th, 1946.'
'My vial of poison had broken two days earlier,' Hoss said.
'That was very bad timing,' Ruth said.
'It was very bad luck,' Hoss said. He sounded morose.
'You believe in luck?' Ruth said.
'Of course,' said Hoss, in a flat voice.
'So luck is one of the genuinely random elements?' Ruth said.
'As is bad luck,' said Hoss. 'It was my bad luck to be captured.'
'Of course,' Ruth said.
'I was beaten during my first interrogation,' Hoss said. 'Beaten with my own 
whip. The whip had somehow got into my wife's
luggage.'
'Hedwig was carrying your whip?' Ruth said. 'How interesting. And, of course, 
the British found it when they 


searched the house.' Ruth laughed.
 


'This whip had rarely even touched my horse,' Hoss said, in a plaintive voice, 
'let alone a prisoner.'
'I think it's too late for the plaintive voice,' Ruth said. Hoss ignored her.
'One of the interrogators was completely convinced that I had used this whip on 
prisoners,' Hoss said.
'They didn't know you,' Ruth said. 'They didn't know that you couldn't even 
watch corporal punishment.'
'That is true,' Hoss said. 'The whip proved too much for me. I answered all of 
their questions.'
Ruth felt Hoss twist and shift as though to avoid the flick of a whip. He 
cleared his throat. "There is something that you need to know,' Hoss said.
'Don't start with that, again,' said Ruth. What was Hoss talking about? she 
thought. Something she needed to know? Something that would make her angry? Hoss 
had said that this was something Edek had known for decades. It was not Edek's 
news about Norman's visit to New York. Edek couldn't have known about Norman's 
visit, unless he was psychic.
'No, it is not the particular piece of information you have in mind,' Hoss said, 
startling her. 'Your father is not psychic.' Ruth didn't say anything. How could 
Hoss know who was psychic and who wasn't, if in fact there was anybody at all 
who was psychic? 'Your father is not psychic,' Hoss said. 'Some people possess 
this quality and others do not. Some people are unaware that it is in their 
possession.'
'That is gobbledygook,' Ruth said. 'Gobbledygook?' Hoss said. 'Nonsense,' she 
said. 'Prattle, blabber, gibberish.' 'Gobbledygook,' Hoss said. 'We do not have 
this word in German.' He laughed. 'Gobbledygook,' he said, again, and squealed. 
The squeal hurt Ruth's ears. Hoss squealed even louder. Ruth put her
hands over her ears.
'Why don't you drop dead,' she said.
'Drop dead,' Hoss said, and laughed even harder. 'That was extremely amusing,' 
Hoss said, when he regained his breath.
'Your death was not that amusing, was it?' Ruth said. Hoss stopped laughing.
'It was necessary for me to be destroyed,' he said. 'The world demanded it. 
Without knowing it, I was a cog in the wheel of a large piece of extermination 
machinery. The machinery was not created by me. It was manufactured by the Third 
Reich. When the machinery was smashed to pieces and all its parts disassembled, 
it was necessary for me, too, to be destroyed.'
'How can you say that with a straight face?' Ruth said. 'How can you say you 
were an innocent cog in the wheel?' Surely Hoss couldn't believe what he was 
saying.
'Let the public continue to regard me as a cruel, pitiless, heartless 
persecutor,' Hoss said. 'Let them see me as a mass murderer. An inhuman, 
barbarous, bestial being. They could never understand that I, too, had a heart, 
and I was not evil.
'I can see, now that I have had much time to reflect upon the facts,' Hoss said, 
'that the leaders of the Third Reich, because of a policy of force, must bear 
the guilt of causing this vast war and all the consequences thereof.' He cleared 
his throat. 'It is my opinion that the necessary extension of living space that 
the German people desired could have been procured by peaceful means. On the 
other hand, however, it is my firm belief that wars can never be avoided. And in 
war, it is necessary to use propaganda for the people, and terrorism with the 
enemy. Terrorism from the outset ensures that all doubt and opposition will be 
stifled.'
'Jesus,' Ruth said. 'I can see why you're still in Zweites Himmel's Lager. You 
don't even know how to disguise your beliefs.'
'Disguises do not work in Zweites Himmel's Lager,' Hoss said. 


Ruth looked at her watch. Not long to go. They would soon be 
Lodz.
'I see, also, now, from a perspective of time,' Hoss said, 'that the
extermination of Jews was fundamentally wrong.' 'Really?' said Ruth, sitting up.
'Of course,' said Hoss. 'Precisely because of these mass exterminations, Germany 
drew upon herself the are and anger of the whole world.' Ruth slumped back into 
her seat. 'There was a hatred of Germany for many years,' Hoss said. 'It took 
quite a few years for the hostility towards Germany to evaporate.'
'Do you think it has completely disappeared?' Ruth said. 'Of course,' Hoss said. 
'Don't you?'
'Yes,' she said.
'You are approaching your death again, aren't you?' she said to Hoss suddenly. 
He didn't reply. 'You have to live through it all again, don't you?' Ruth said. 
'They're trying to make you get it right, aren't they?' she said. 'Who?' Hoss 
said.
'I don't know," she said. 'But I'm right, aren't I? They're going to make you 
relive every unpleasant moment, every unsavoury aspect of your existence, every 
ill, until you get it right?'
'Only those moments I myself find difficult to endure,' Hoss said
quietly.
She was right, she thought. Hoss was about to die, again. He had said he was 
going on a journey. A journey with a higher end in mind. Hoss had thought she 
had known where he was heading. 'Heading was a tasteless choice of a word to use 
in the case of someone who was about to be hanged, Ruth thought to herself.
Ruth heard Hoss clearing his throat. She knew he was preparing himself. She knew 
that Hoss knew that his death was close. She heard another sound. A quiet sound. 
It was the sound of a noose being slipped around Hoss's neck. Hoss swallowed a 
few times. She could
feel his nervousness. She could feel the tension in the air. 'Mein Gott,' Hoss 
cried. Ruth looked in the direction of the cry. 'Please do not watch,'
Hoss said.
'I can't see,' Ruth said.
'Yes you can,' Hoss said. 'If you look, you will be a witness to this. I would 
very much prefer it if I could be on my own.'
'It's out of my control,' Ruth said.
'Go away,' Hoss pleaded.
'I don't know how to,' she said. It was true, she thought. She would have left 
if she could. Or would she? Was she staying voluntarily? She didn't know.
Some bubbles of air escaped from somewhere. Ruth realised, with horror, that 
Hoss was losing control of his bowels. She felt sick. She was sure she could 
smell the shit. She could hear Hoss panting. She could hear his shame. She could 
hear him trying to retain control. Trying to tighten his grip on his sphincter. 
He groaned as he failed. The groan was followed by the sound of flooding. Ruth 
gripped the sides of her seat. Hoss seemed to have let go. 'Mein Gott,' Hoss 
cried
out again.
He was calling to God, Ruth thought. He wasn't calling out to his wife. Ruth 
wondered if Hoss was going to have to start at the very beginning again. To live 
through his adolescence and his early adulthood. And how many times did you have 
to die before you were finally dead? Ruth thought. Before you ceased to exist? 
Did that time ever arrive?
(I thought you could help me to avoid this,' Hoss said, in a strained voice.
The?' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'I thought you would be my salvation. 



Me, your salvation?' Ruth said. She was stunned. She could still smell Hoss. The 
smell was terrible. She put her hand over her nose.   


Ruth's body suddenly felt very hot. She could feel Hoss tense himself. She could 
feel that he was holding his breath. Something was moving. She knew what it was. 
The noose was tightening. There was a brisk sound. A snap. Ruth had thought that 
it would be a louder sound. The sound of a man being hanged. She could feel him 
twitching. A gurgling noise came from Hoss.
Ruth dug her heel into the floor of the plane. Hoss spluttered She dug her heel 
in again. His body began to twitch again. Small involuntary jerks. There were 
some more trickles and several gulping sounds. Ruth kept her heel on the ground. 
She could feel she was covered in sweat. She heard a thud. A loud thud. She knew 
that Hoss
was gone.
She picked up her bag and got out her lipstick. She felt much much better. 
Almost refreshed. Clear-headed. She lifted her heel up. It had remained pressed 
into the floor. She crossed her legs. She knew Hoss was gone. She smiled. She 
didn't think she would be hearing from him, again. She hoped she was right.
chapter   seventeen
Ruth and Edek had been standing in the baggage collection area for twenty 
minutes. There was no luggage in sight. The carousel hadn't even begun to move. 
The other passengers were just standing there. Mute. Resigned. There was no 
movement among the people waiting for luggage. No agitation. In America, Ruth 
thought, there would have been consternation, irritation, complaints, and 
accusations. Here in Lodz, the passengers stood and waited. In silence.
'What is happening?' Edek said.
'Nothing is happening,' Ruth said. 'The baggage isn't arriving,' Ruth said.
'What is wrong with them?' Edek said. 'Everything does take two times as long as 
necessary.' He asked a couple of passengers, in Polish, if they knew why the 
luggage was delayed. Both men shrugged their shoulders.
'I hope the luggage isn't lost,' Ruth said. Edek asked another passenger, if it 
was common for luggage to be lost. 'Not common, but not unheard of,' the man 
said.
'Great,' said Ruth. 'I'll have to live in these clothes and use the shit shampoo 
at the hotel.'
'It is not necessary to speak like this, Ruthie,' Edek said. Ruth wondered why 
he was so bothered by the word 'shit', or any other of the mild obscenities she 
occasionally used. They must sound more profound to him, than they did to native 
English speakers.
If the luggage is lost we will buy new everything," Edek said. 'We can afford 
it.'   "I'm not that bothered,' Ruth said. It was true, she thought she would be 
home, soon. She could replace everything. She could buy new face creams, new 
cleansers, a new running outfit. She could buy another pedometer, another 
cassette recorder, another headset with a microphone attachment. There was no 
need to panic. Everything could be replaced.
The lost luggage really didn't bother her. She didn't care, she thought, if the 
airline employees or someone else had stolen the luggage. Then, she thought of 
the coat. Israel Rothwax's coat was in her suitcase.
'The coat,1 she said to Edek. 'You will buy another coat," Edek said.
'No, it's your father's coat," Ruth said. Edek was quiet for a minute. 'This 
coat, to tell you the truth, was going to look a bit funny on you Ruthie,' he 
said.
'I want the coat,' she said. 'I'm not going to lose the coat.' 'The luggage will 
come,' Edek said.
They stood and waited. It was lucky she had kept the photographs in her bag, 
Ruth thought. She opened her bag. The photographs were still there. After ten 
minutes Edek turned to Ruth. 'You stay here and watch for the suitcases. I will 
be back in a couple of minutes.'
'Where are you going?' Ruth said. But he was already off. 'I'll be back,' he 
called out, to Ruth, as he ran towards the exit.
I'll be back, Ruth thought. Did Edek think he was Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 
Terminator? Edek had used exactly the same intonation as Arnold, and an almost 
identical accent. An intonation of urgency. And remedy. What was Edek up to, 
Ruth wondered. What was he going to do? Rush out on to the tarmac? Talk to the 
ground staff? Ruth felt agitated. Why did Edek always have to do something 
unexpected? Why couldn't he have waited, quietly? like the Poles. Not one of the 
assembled passengers had moved. No one
was looking at their watch, or speaking into mobile phones. They were all 
immobile.
There was the sound of machinery starting up. And a loud series of shudders. The 
carousel began moving. The crowd remained static. Ruth moved closer to the 
carousel. A few pieces of luggage came out. After several circuits, Ruth's 
suitcase emerged. It was followed by Edek's. Ruth pulled both cases off the 
carousel. The bright yellow masking tape was still wound around Edek's case. But 
he had added some more tape. Now, bright yellow tape was taped along the length 
of the case as well as across the middle. Ruth had meant to ask Edek in the 
taxi, in Krakow, when he had added the extra tape. But Zofia's kisses had 
sidetracked her.
Ruth could still hear the sound of those kisses Zofia had begun blowing as they 
were getting into the car. Mwah, mwah, mwah. She remembered Edek smiling at the 
kisses. Ruth looked at Edek's suitcase. What was the purpose of the second round 
of bright yellow 


masking
, tape? The suitcase was already easily identifiable with the initial strips.
[ Who knew what was behind Edek's thinking? And where was Edek?
1 She looked around the airport. Was he calling Norman, she thought? No, why 
would he call Norman from the airport? He could call Norman from his room at the 
hotel. She had no idea what Edek could be doing. His movements and thoughts were 
impossible to track or predict. She looked at her own suitcase. It was so 
subdued. All black, with black leather, neatly filled-in luggage labels. She 
didn't think she could travel with wild yellow bands of plastic tape wound 
around her case. Although she wasn't sure why she had to be so Pristine and 
prissy.
'Ruthie,' she heard. She looked up. It was Edek. He was running across the 
baggage collection area towards her. She wished he didn't have to run 
everywhere. As far as she could see, most of the emergencies in Edek's life were 
over with. He didn't have to run. It was dangerous to run at his age. He could 
easily slip.   


'I did get a driver to take us to the hotel,' Edek said, puffing a bit. Ruth was 
relieved. Edek had only been getting a taxi.
'That's good,' she said. 'Is it a Mercedes?'
'Yes,' said Edek. 'Of course.'
'Why not?' Ruth said. 'When I go back to New York I'll probably have Mercedes 
withdrawal.'
Edek laughed. 'You could buy a Mercedes for yourself," he said
'I don't need a car,' said Ruth.
'You can afford a car,' Edek said.
'The parking in New York is exorbitant,' Ruth said.
'What is the good of earning big money,' Edek said, 'if you worry about 
parking?'
'I've told you before,' Ruth said. 'I don't need a car in New York.'
She wished she had never mentioned the subject of Mercedes withdrawal. It was 
meant to be a joke. A throwaway line. And Edek had laughed. 'I thought we 
weren't buying German, anyway,' she said to Edek.
'Ach,' he said. 'I do not care anymore. It is not such a big deal. Who cares if 
we buy some German things or we don't buy German things? The Germans do not 
care. And I do not care, anymore.'
'Neither do I,' said Ruth. 'I'm too tired to boycott anything German.'
'Maybe we will look together at a Mercedes, in New York,' Edek
said.
'Dad,' she said. 'Drop it.'
'Maybe I will come to live in New York,' Edek said. 'With Norman.'
'You're going to move to New York and live with Norman?' Ruth
said.
'Are you crazy?" Edek said. 'I am thinking of moving to New York
,
to live next to you. You will be the one what lives with Norman. 'Oh,' she said. 
'Thanks for letting me in on the decision.' 'A car would be good for me, in New 
York,' Edek said.
Ruth was speechless. What was this new plan Edek was hatching? At least it 
didn't seem to involve Zofia, she thought. They were almost at the entrance of 
the terminal.
'The Mercedes cars are cheaper in America,' Edek said. 'In Australia they cost a 
fortune.'
'They're not that cheap in America,' Ruth said.
'I did not say they was cheap,' Edek said. 'I did say they was cheaper than the 
Mercedes cars in Australia. A Mercedes is a very expensive car. Everybody knows 
that.' He paused. 'Why should I not have a Mercedes if I live in New York?' he 
said. 'I cannot walk so much like I used to. I am getting old.'
'You can walk faster than I can,' Ruth said. 'I'm not buying you a Mercedes 
until you're much older.' Edek started to laugh. His laughter almost unbalanced 
him. He put his suitcase down for a moment.
'Sometimes, Ruthie, you are a very funny girl.'
'You mean sometimes I am very funny,' she said. 'I'm not really a girl anymore.'
'I mean sometimes you are a very funny girl,' he said.
They had reached the front entrance of the airport. Ruth could see the Mercedes 
waiting, outside. It was a large Mercedes. The driver, when he saw Edek, leaped 
out of the car to help them with their luggage. He opened the trunk of the car. 
Ruth lifted her suitcase up and put it in the trunk. The driver looked appalled. 
'Please madam,' he said. 'I am here to help you.'
'I'm fine,' she said to the driver. She liked showing Poles, particularly the 
men, that she had muscles and strength. Edek was annoyed. 'Why not to let him 
put in the suitcase in the car?' he said to Ruth.
I like lifting suitcases,' Ruth said.
'You are crazy,' said Edek. Ruth got into the backseat. ' I will sit in front 
with the driver,'   'Edek said. 'Sit in the back with me, for a change,' Ruth 
said. looked at her. 'It is not such a bad feeling,' he said, 'to have a 
daughter what still wants to sit next to her father.' Ruth moved over in the 
seat. Edek got in. 'I'll always want to sit next to you,' she said to him. The 
remark took Edek by surprise. Tears came into his eyes. 'We'll soon be out of 
here, Dad,' she said. 'We'll soon be in my apartment, in New York.'
Ruth looked around at the interior of the car. Everything was a subdued shade of 
brown. A tasteful, elegant yet comfortable colour.
'By the time we leave Poland,' Ruth said to Edek, 'we will have seen every model 
of Mercedes on the market.' Edek laughed.
'We have seen only those models what was made a few years ago,' he said. 'None 
of the Mercedes what we was in was a new Mercedes.'
'Really?' she said. 'Since when did you become an expert on Mercedes?'
'Everybody knows what is a new Mercedes and what is not a new Mercedes,' Edek 
said.
'I don't,' Ruth said.
'Everybody except my daughter,' said Edek. 'This Mercedes is not a new one. This 
Mercedes is maybe three years old.' He leaned forward. 'How old is this 
Mercedes?' he said to the driver.
'Three years old, sir,' said the driver.
'What did I tell you?' Edek said to Ruth.
'I'm impressed,' said Ruth.
 


'If I buy a Mercedes, I will buy a new one,' Edek said.
'Of course,' said Ruth. 'Why not?'
'My daughter is thinking of buying me a new Mercedes,' Edek said to the driver. 
Ruth shook her head. Why did Edek have to do this? 'It is a very comfortable 
car, sir,' the driver said. This particular driver was very polite, Ruth 
thought. Almost excessive in his use of sirs and madams.
'My daughter is very rich,' Edek said. 'She owns her own business.
She is a clever girl.' Ruth wanted to tell Edek to keep quiet. That sort of talk 
almost invited anti-Semitism.
'You are lucky, sir, to have a good daughter,' the driver said to Edek.
'You are right, brother,' Edek said. 'I am lucky.'
Ruth almost started to laugh. There was something surreal in this conversation 
between the two men. The words they were using to address each other clashed and 
clanged with contradiction. Edek was calling the driver 'brother'. The driver 
was calling her father 'sir'. Ruth suppressed her desire to laugh.
'I don't have children myself,' the driver said to Edek. 'We wanted children 
very much, but my wife was unable to bear children.' Edek looked disturbed. He 
sat up in his seat and leaned towards the driver.
'I am very sorry,' he said.
'Thank you,' said the driver. 'I have accepted our position. I am lucky to have 
a wife I love.'
'That is the main thing,' Edek said. 'To have a wife what you love. I did have a 
wife what I loved very much. She did die.'
'I'm sorry, sir,' the driver said.
'We was very very sorry when our beloved Rooshka did die,' Edek said. 'My 
daughter did not look like the same girl what she was before her mother did 
die.'
Ruth was surprised. So Edek had noticed the impact on her of her mother's death. 
She thought that she had hidden it from him. She had also thought that Edek had 
been too engrossed in his own grief to notice how bowled over she was.
'It is a tragedy to lose someone you love,' the driver said.
'Of course,' said Edek.
Edek looked at Ruth. 'He is a very nice man,' he said, lowering his voice, and 
gesturing, with his head, towards the driver. Ruth nodded.
'My daughter does not have a husband what does love her,' Edek said to the 
driver. 'My daughter does not have a husband.'   "I am sure she will soon,' the 
driver said to Edek.
'You think he knows what will happen with Norman?' Edek said to Ruth with his 
eyebrows raised and a smile on his face.
'Your daughter is too attractive to remain single,' the driver said.
'I don't think he knows anything about Norman,' Ruth said to Edek.
'My daughter is very stubborn,' Edek said.
'But she is a good daughter,' the driver said.
'That is true,' said Edek.
This driver was a real charmer, Ruth thought. The most charming Polish person 
they had met. Maybe with the exception of Zofia and Walentyna. Ruth surprised 
herself with that thought. She hadn't known that she thought Zofia and Walentyna 
were charming. Of course they were charming, she thought. And entertaining. Two 
qualities scarce on the ground, in Poland.
'Can I escort you anywhere in the coming days?' the driver said. Ruth wondered 
where he had learnt his English. It was almost Etonian. Ruth was about to say 
no, when Edek said, 'Yes, as a matter of fact.'
'Where would you like to go, sir?' the driver said.
'Tomorrow morning, is it possible for you to take us to Kamedulska Street,' Edek 
said. 'And then to wait there for us maybe a half an hour, maybe a bit more?'
'Certainly sir,' the driver said. 'What time would you like me to pick you up?'
Edek looked at Ruth. 'What do you think?' she said to Edek. 'Ten o'clock? It 
will be Sunday morning and it's probably not a good idea to wake the old couple 
up by arriving too early.'
'What for do we need to see this couple at all?' Edek said.
'Because we can't just turn up with a spade and start digging in somebody's 
yard,' Ruth said.
'It is not somebody's yard,' Edek said. 'It is my yard.'
'The old couple could call the police,' Ruth said, 'and it would
be hard to explain, then and there on the spot, that this is really your yard.'
'Maybe,' Edek said. 'But why should they call the police?'
'How do I know?' said Ruth. 'In the old couple's eyes we're trespassers. 
Trespassing on their property.'
'We are very profitable trespassers,' Edek said.
Ruth laughed. 'I think it's a good idea to tell the old couple what we plan to 
do,' she said. 'I think I'll pay them, too.'
'Pay them, so I can dig in my own yard?' Edek said. 'What for?'
'So things will go as smoothly as possible,' Ruth said.
'You did already pay them a lot of money,' Edek said.
'It's not a lot for what I got,' Ruth said.
'I would like to say something to this old couple,' Edek said.
 


'There's no point,' said Ruth. 'Anyway, they have to live with their own 
miserable selves. I can't think of a worse punishment.'
This old couple is not so old,' Edek said. 'I think this old couple is much 
younger than what I am.'
'You're probably right,' Ruth said.
'Let us go at nine o'clock and get it over with,' Edek said.
'Okay,' she said.
'Could you pick us up, please, at nine o'clock?' Edek said to the driver.
'Certainly, sir,' he said.
'Nine o'clock is a good idea,' Ruth said to Edek. 'That way we'll catch them 
before they go to church.'
'You think these people do go to church?' Edek said.
'Probably,' said Ruth. 'Most Poles seem to.'
'I will pick you up at nine o'clock sharp,' the driver said.
At least this driver hadn't offered to drive them to a death camp disguised as a 
museum, Ruth thought. There wasn't one close by, she realised. They passed some 
graffiti painted, in white, on a large brown wall. Juden Raus. the graffiti 
screamed. Whoever had painted   


it knew enough German to paint in an exclamation mark. Ruth pointed the graffiti 
out to Edek. The driver looked at what they were looking at. 'It is just 
children,' Edek said, quickly, to the driver. Edek looked at Ruth and raised his 
eyebrows. Ruth understood that Edek had wanted to preempt the driver's response. 
'It's just children,' Ruth said. Edek laughed. 'It is just children,' Edek 
repeated. 'Just children,' said the driver.
Edek looked at Ruth, again. 'You do look much better,' he said to her.
'Better?' she said. 'Better than what?'
'Better than you did look since you did come to Poland,' Edek said. 'You was not 
looking so good. Now, you do look much better.'
'I think it's because we're on our way home,' Ruth said. 'I've had enough of 
Poland.'
'More than enough,' I think,' said Edek.
'More than enough,' she said.
She was glad she was looking better. She felt better. More alert, more 
optimistic. She couldn't wait to be in her own apartment.
'So it is not such a bad thing I did what I did arrange with Norman?' Edek said.
'Next to a lot of other bad things, inviting Norman to New York doesn't seem so 
bad,' Ruth said.
'You will try?' Edek said.
'Try what?' said Ruth.
'Try to get together with Norman,' Edek said.
'Dad,' Ruth said, 'I've only just agreed that inviting Norman to New York 
without asking me was not an evil act. Can't we leave it at that?'
'My daughter is very stubborn,' Edek said to Ruth, and shook his head.
Lodz didn't look any better. It was still grim. Still smoke-ridden. What had she 
expected, Ruth thought, a transformation? It was exactly
a week since she and Edek had last arrived in the city. A week since they had 
arrived in the city of Edek's birth and youth, together. The taxi turned into 
Piotrkowska Street. This Saturday night in Piotrkowska was no different from the 
previous Saturday night. There was the same sparse crowd out for the evening. 
Ruth looked out of the car window. Surely there had to be more people who went 
out on a Saturday night? There had to be lots of people in Lodz who were 
relaxing and celebrating. Or maybe there weren't? Maybe there was not much to 
celebrate in Lodz, Ruth thought.
'This is a far cry from the old Saturday nights in Piotrkowska Street, isn't 
it?' she said to Edek.
Edek shook his head. 'It is not the same place,' he said.
'You can say that, again,' Ruth said. She looked at the few people who were 
walking along the street. 'They got what they wanted,' she said to Edek. 'They 
got rid of the Jews. You would think they would look happier.'
'Shsh, shsh,' Edek said. 'Do not speak like this, Ruthie. Why do you have to 
speak like this? It upsets people,' he said, nodding in the direction of the 
driver.
'Okay,' Ruth said. 'I'll try not to upset anyone in the very short time we've 
got left.'
'Thank you very much,' Edek said, in an exaggerated tone of graciousness, at her 
agreement to try to be more civilised.
Ruth looked away. She felt Edek's gaze still on her. 'You do not look so bad,' 
Edek said. 'For the first time since we did come to Poland you look like you did 
used to look.'
'I look like I used to look?' said Ruth.
'Like you was normally,' Edek said. 'Not always tired with such black near your 
eyes.'
'I feel less tired,' she said.
'You do look like your old self,' Edek said.
'Oh, good,' Ruth said. She was pleased that Edek thought she looked   


like her old self. Her old self, she thought. Which self was that? Th self that 
ran a business? The self that updated files at night, after everyone had left 
the office? Would she ever be that old self again? Or was she someone else? 
Someone who knew that no amount of order could clear or clarify certain 
uncertainties?
'I'm glad I look better,' Ruth said. She looked at Edek. He looked tired. 'You 
look tired, Dad,' she said.
'I am a bit tired to tell you the truth,' he said. Ruth knew that if Edek was 
admitting to tiredness, he must be very tired. It must have been quite a night 
he had had, with Zofia.
'You'll be able to have an early night tonight,' Ruth said to him. 'And you'll 
feel better tomorrow.' 'Of course I will,' Edek said.
They had arrived at the Grand Victoria. Ruth watched the doorman and the porter 
and the driver rush to open the car doors. The taxi driver and the doorman 
almost collided. It was almost comic. And almost predictable. This is how she 
and Edek had arrived at the hotel, last week. At the centre of several 
collisions. Taxi drivers, doormen and porters in Lodz must be covered in 
bruises, Ruth thought. These jobs were obviously more dangerous than they 
seemed.
The doorman beamed at Ruth. Ruth smiled at him. He beamed even more broadly. 
'Please welcome back,' he announced loudly. 'I have plenty of strong boxes if 
you need boxes,' he said.
'No thank you,' Ruth said to the doorman. 'But thank you for offering.' She 
tipped the doorman lavishly. 'I do need to speak to you later,' she said to him. 
'I have a business request.' She stressed the word 'business'.
'I will be here till ten p.m.,' the doorman said, in a businesslike manner. 
Maybe he wasn't quite as revolting as she had originally thought, Ruth thought. 
Maybe she had been a bit harsh in her judgement.
Edek greeted the doorman with gusto. You would have thought
they were old friends. Ruth looked away. Edek's ease with Poles still made her 
uncomfortable. She noticed that Edek had slipped the doorman what she was sure 
was a large tip.
The next time Ruth looked, the porter was embracing Edek. The two men were 
embracing and conversing rapidly, in Polish. It looked like a jovial 
conversation. Ruth shook her head. She knew she would never understand a 
fraction of the complexity that existed between Edek and all the Polish men he 
got on so well with. What history were they sharing? What understanding? What 
strange bonds gave them their ease with each other? She couldn't even begin to 
understand.
Ruth put her own and Edek's passport down on the front desk. The clerk looked 
up, and recognised her. 'I will give you the very best rooms,' he said to Ruth. 
'Thank you,' she said, 'I really appreciate that.' Edek was waiting for her, in 
the lobby. He looked a bit lost. As though he had run out of people to embrace 
and tip, and was feeling mildly bereft. She would be so glad to be leaving 
Poland, she thought, as she walked over to her father.
'They said they've given us the best rooms in the hotel,' she said to Edek.
'Very good,' he said.
'Shall we unpack and meet downstairs in ten minutes?' Ruth said.
'Where is your room?' Edek said.
'Two doors from yours,' Ruth said.
Edek looked relieved. 'Good,' he said. They walked to the elevator. Are we going 
to have a dinner?' Edek said.
'Of course,' Ruth said.
Edek looked more cheerful. 'See you in ten minutes,' he said.
Ruth looked around her room. This room looked as unprepossessing 38 her last 
room. So much for being given the best rooms in the hotel. She hoped that this 
bed was not as lumpy as the last bed. She looked a bit lost.   


pulled back the bedding. Three overlapping single sheets had been used as a 
substitute for a double sheet. She knew that her arms and legs were going to get 
twisted and tangled tonight in all the edges She turned on the shower. It 
dripped and spurted. She had really wanted to have a shower. She would have to 
stand under this one for hours to wash herself. She would shower tomorrow, when 
she got to Warsaw, she decided.
Edek called. 'You was the one what did get the best room?' he said.
'No,' she said. 'Not me.'
'It was not me, too,' he said, and started to laugh. Ruth was glad to hear him 
laugh. You needed to laugh in a place like Lodz.
Edek was still laughing when they met in the foyer. 'My room is even worse than 
the room what I did have last time,' he said.
'Oh no,' said Ruth.
'This bed has got one leg missing,' Edek said. He started to laugh even harder. 
'Where is supposed to be the leg,' he said, 'is six bricks.'
'Six bricks?' Ruth said, laughing.
Edek nodded. He was trying to stop laughing. 'I did count them, myself,' he said 
eventually.                                                          
'You have to laugh, don't you?' Ruth said, wiping her eyes.       
'Ruthie, you do have to laugh,' he said.
'If you can't sleep tonight,' Ruth said to Edek, 'call me and I'll ask them to 
move you to another room.'
'I did try the bed, already,' Edek said. 'I did lie down. It was not too bad.'
'One night here is all we need, and then we can leave,' Ruth said. 'I've booked 
us into the Bristol, in Warsaw, for our last night in Poland,' Ruth said. 'I'm 
ready for some luxury.' 'I think I am too, Ruthie,' Edek said.
'Do you want a big dinner, or something small?' Ruth said. As soon as the words 
came out of her mouth, Ruth knew she shouldn't have
phrased the question that way. Edek could never admit to being hungry or to 
wanting a large meal. 'Let's eat somewhere where we can have more if we're 
hungry, and less if we're not so hungry,' she said.
'I am not so hungry,' Edek said.
'There's a cafe across the road,' Ruth said. 'They serve light meals.'
'I did not get anything to eat on the plane,' Edek said.
'You didn't miss much,' Ruth said. 'Liverwurst on a biscuit, and an orange.'
'I do not like so much an orange,' Edek said.
'I know,' said Ruth. 'So let's choose a restaurant.'
'What about Chinee?' Edek said.
'That Chinese restaurant we went to last time?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek.
'I'm not going back there,' Ruth said.
'That was not such a bad Chinee,' Edek said.
'That was a very Polish Chinese,' Ruth said.
'You did like the worms,' Edek said.
'Not enough to go back,'  she said.  'What about a French restaurant?'
'What about the McDonald's?' Edek said.
'Dad, I don't eat hamburgers in America,' she said. 'Why would I eat a hamburger 
in Lodz?'
'Okay,' he said, looking flat.
'Let's compromise,' Ruth said. 'I'll go to McDonald's with you and then you can 
keep me company while I have a bowl of soup in the hotel.'
'Okay, that is a deal,' Edek said. At McDonald's Edek ordered two cheeseburgers, 
two servings of
[tench fries and two chocolate thickshakes. 'The McDonald's make  a very good 
hamburger,' he said, midway through the second
hamburger. He looked less tired, Ruth thought. The hamburgers had revitalised 
him.   


'Have another one,' Ruth said. 'They're not very big.' Edek ordered another 
cheeseburger. By the time Edek had eaten the last french fry, his colour had 
improved. His cheeks looked rosy. His eyes were shining. 'That was a very good 
dinner,' he said to Ruth. They walked back to the hotel.
'I think I'll have the soup in my room,' Ruth said. 'I'm feeling tired.'
'Okey dokey,' Edek said.
'You go upstairs,' she said to Edek. 'I'll order my soup, and check to see if 
there are any faxes for me.' 'Goodnight, Ruthie,' Edek said.
There were no faxes. Ruth was relieved. She didn't want to think about work at 
the moment. She'd be happy to deal with whatever was happening in the office, as 
soon as she got back. The doorman waved to her. She went up to him. 'Are you 
ready to ask your business request?' he said. 'Yes,' she said.
She wished he would clip the clumps of hair protruding from his nose. They were 
making her feel sick. This man needed a nose and ear-hair clipper. Maybe she 
would send him one from New York. She tried to focus on his eyes. She explained 
that she wanted to know if he could accompany her and her father on an 
expedition they had to make to Kamedulska Street in the morning.
The doorman looked bewildered. 'A taxi can take you there,' he said.
'My father needs to dig something up in the backyard of a house, in Kamedulska 
Street," Ruth said to the doorman. 'What he is looking for was buried over fifty 
years ago.' 'Ah, gold,' said the doorman.
'No,' said Ruth. 'What is buried there has no financial value, only emotional 
value.'
'So what is the problem?" the doorman said, stepping closer. Ruth
stepped back from him.
'The problem is that this object is buried on property that belonged to my 
father before the war,' she said. 'The current residents are disturbed by my 
father's presence. I just want to make sure that my father can look for what is 
buried and then leave, peacefully.'
'I see,' the doorman said. 'You want me for protection.'
'Yes, Ruth said.
'With pleasure,' the doorman said. 'It will be my pleasure to protect
you.'
'To protect me and my father,' Ruth said. 'Of course,' the doorman said. Ruth 
was pleased. She smiled at the doorman. 'I'll pay you well,' she said. He 
nodded. She was glad that he was so thickset. Glad that he had such a thick neck 
and a thick body. His presence would show the old couple that she meant 
business. She hoped that the doorman would leave all of his gold chains on. They 
added a degree of menace.
'Is it possible for you to bring a spade and some plastic gloves?' Ruth said to 
the doorman. He hesitated. 'I'll pay well for them, of course,' she said. 'A 
large spade?' he said.
'A medium spade,' Ruth said. 'The object we are looking for is small.'
'I will have a spade and gloves with me,' the doorman said. 'I've got a car 
booked to pick us up at nine o'clock,' Ruth said. 'You will see me here at nine 
a.m. sharp,' the doorman said. 'Thank you,' said Ruth.
She went up to her room. She rang Tadeusz, the interpreter. She asked him if he 
was free to accompany them to Kamedulska Street. Tadeusz was pleased to hear 
from her. 'Of course I will accompany you,' he said. She told him the doorman 
would also be joining them. Tadeusz laughed. 'I am pleased to see that you will 
be more prepared this time,' he said.   


Ruth felt as though she had assembled a swat team. A guard, an interpreter, a 
driver. What would they be presiding over? What was it that was buried? And was 
it still there? She would know very soon. She would know, tomorrow. She thought 
about ordering some soup to be brought up to her room. She decided against it. 
She wasn't really hungry.
She looked in the mirror. Her father was right. She looked much better. Her 
features weren't flattened and dampened with fatigue and tension. Her complexion 
was clear. She no longer looked pallid. The circles under her eyes had 
disappeared. She fidgeted with her hair. Even her hair seemed revitalised. The 
curls were curling themselves into more aesthetically pleasing loops and rings.
She went to her suitcase and got out a small candle in a filigree silver 
container. She opened the lid. The candle was a gift someone gave her years ago. 
She had travelled with it for years. Ostensibly in case of a power shortage. 
After she had learned that most hotels had their own generators, she had 
continued to take the candle with her on trips. The candle was intact. It was 
not chipped or cracked. She placed the candle, in its holder, on a plate. She 
got out the matches she always packed with the candle. She lit the candle. The 
flame cast a large shadow for such a small candle. Ruth switched the lights in 
the room off. She felt peaceful sitting there with the candle. Very peaceful.
In Jewish tradition, a candle was a symbol of the body and soul. The flame was 
the soul. Always reaching upward. Jews believed that the burning of a candle 
aided the soul of the departed in a journey towards heaven. Centuries ago, Ruth 
had read, it had been a custom to place a towel and a glass of water near a 
memorial candle. This was in order to appease the Angel of Death. To allow him 
to wash his sword in the water and dry it with a towel. Other scholars, at the 
time, believed that man's soul returned to cleanse itself in the water. Ruth 
filled a glass with water. She put the glass next to the candle, along with a 
neatly folded hand towel. She sat in a chair in front of the candle.
Jewish people lit candles on the Sabbath, on holidays, at weddings and 
barmitzvahs. Candles also celebrated joy and life. Ruth watched the candle. The 
flame seemed to have a calm flicker. Some candles were erratic. This candle was 
very steady. Ruth breathed in and out, deeply- A line from an old school prayer 
came into her head. It was a Christian prayer, the only sort they had had at 
Ruth's primary school.'if If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to 
take,'
Ruth said.
That night she slept soundly. She dreamt about the gypsy woman, in Warsaw. In 
Ruth's dream, the gypsy woman's baby was clean and well nourished. Ruth woke up 
feeling peaceful. She showered slowly and got dressed. She put on a pair of 
earrings. They were small gold hearts she had had since she was a child.
Edek was waiting for her at breakfast. He was sitting at a table in the far 
corner of the room. His shoulders were slumped. He was staring down at the 
table. He looked forlorn. Lonely. Alone. Ruth ran up to him. 'Hi, Dad,' she 
said, and kissed him on the cheek. 'How are you?' she said. 'I am okay, as 
usual,' Edek said. 'You don't look quite okay,' Ruth said.
'There is nothing wrong with me,' Edek said. 'I am always okay.' Edek looked at 
Ruth. 'You do look very nice, today, Ruthie,' he said. 'Thanks,' she said. 'It's 
been a big trip, hasn't it?' 'You can say that again, brother,' Edek said. 'It's 
almost over,' Ruth said. 'We'll be out of here, out of Lodz, and out of Poland, 
very soon.'
'Yes,' said Edek. He still looked flat.
I'm so grateful you came to Poland with me,' Ruth said. 'So grate-(tm)1-' Edek 
seemed surprised.
I did think you was not so happy that you did come to Poland,' he said.
You're right,' she said. 'It hasn't been a picnic. It hasn't been one   


fun-filled event after another.' Edek laughed. 'But I'm glad I came,'
she said. 'I needed to do this.'
'You did want to do this for a long time,' Edek said.
'I've wanted to do this for a very long time,' she said. 'Let's eat.'
'Okay,' said Edek. Ruth got up to go to the buffet. Edek stayed
seated. 'I am not so hungry to tell you the truth,' he said. Ruth looked
at him.
'You're always hungry, in the morning,' Ruth said. 'You always eat a good 
breakfast.'
'Today I am not so hungry,' Edek said. 'Come on, Dad,' she said. 'It's important 
to eat breakfast.' 'Ruthie darling,' Edek said. 'A girl what eats bird seeds for 
a breakfast shouldn't talk about it is important to eat breakfast to an old man 
like me who does know what is a breakfast.'
'I don't eat bird seed,' Ruth said. 'And you are definitely not an old man.'
'You go to the buffet, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'I will wait here.' Ruth felt 
alarmed. Edek never lost his appetite. This was not a good sign. 'Have something 
small, Dad,' she said. 'A couple of eggs and some bread.'
'No, thanks,' Edek said.
'Some herring?' said Ruth. Edek shook his head. 'Some ham?' Ruth said. 'Some 
sardines? Some cheese?' Edek said no to everything.
'Are you worried about this morning?' Ruth said. 'Maybe,' said Edek.
'Whatever is buried there or not buried there,' Ruth said, 'it's in the past. 
Whatever it is we will deal with it. You and me.' She looked at Edek. 'There is 
nothing that we can't deal with, Dad,' she said. 'As long as we've got each 
other.' She put her arm around him. 'Do you understand that?' she said. Edek 
looked as though he was about to cry. 'Please have something to eat, Dad,' Ruth 
said. 'What
about a hot chocolate?' Edek straightened his shoulders.
'Okay, I will have a hot chocolate,' he said. 'Just for my daughter.' Ruth 
ordered the hot chocolate. She brought Edek a slice of sponge cake from the 
buffet.
'This will be good with the hot chocolate,' she said.
'You is still going to eat the bird seeds?' Edek said.
'What can I do?' she said. 'I just happen to like bird seed.' Edek laughed.
Ruth was relieved to hear him laugh. Anything that bothered him enough to take 
away his appetite was serious. What was bothering him? The prospect of what were 
they going to find this morning? There was probably nothing there, she thought. 
The Poles would have raked through that earth pretty thoroughly. She wondered 
what it was that Edek was looking for. She had no idea. She also wondered why 
she was so calm. The thought of seeing the old man or his wife was not exactly a 
pleasing prospect. The calm she felt was probably because she knew that this 
trip was almost over, she thought. She knew that she was on her way home.
'They got compote on the buffet,' Edek said. 'You want me to get you some 
compote?'
'Oh, thanks, Dad,' she said. 'I feel like a bit of compote.' Edek got up. He ran 
to the buffet. The buffet was ten feet away. 'A small bowl,' she called out 
after him.
The portion of compote Edek brought back was enough to feed six people. 'Where 
did you get that bowl from?' Ruth said.
'It did have some radishes in it,' Edek said. 'So I did put the radishes on a 
plate with the ham.' Ruth started laughing. 'The bowls what they have for the 
compote are very small,' Edek said.
'I hope the compote doesn't taste of radishes,' Ruth said, still laughing.
'I did ring the lawyer, in Melbourne,' Edek said. 'When?' said Ruth.   


'Last night,' Edek said. He shook his head. 'Before I did come to Poland I did 
want very much to get back what did belong to us.'  he said. 'But now it does 
not seem so important, to me.' 'Now, you just want to get out of Poland,' Ruth 
said. 'That is the truth, Ruthie,' he said. 'I am ready to leave Poland.' 'What 
did the lawyer say?' Ruth said.
'He did say that because they was successful with the Swiss banks what agreed to 
give the Jews back their money, they are now going to sue some big companies,' 
Edek said. 'Big companies who did use slave labour.'
'That's good,' said Ruth.
'You was the one who said to forget about it,' Edek said. 'I only said I didn't 
want to chase the money and I didn't want you to chase it,' Ruth said. 'I think 
it's important that the theft and the exploitation is acknowledged, firstly, and 
then some compensation made.'
'You are right,' Edek said. 'The lawyer did say it could be billions of 
dollars,' Edek said, 'what these firms would have to pay.'
'There are some big companies involved,' Ruth said. 'Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, 
BMW, Siemens.' 'You know all this?' Edek said.
'Yes,' she said. 'I know which of the biggest companies used slave labour. They 
estimate that eight million people were used as slave labour.'
'Eight million. Oh, brother,' Edek said.
'The publicity over the lawsuits wouldn't be good for the companies,' Ruth said. 
'Volkswagen has already capitulated.'
'That is right,' said Edek. 'The lawyer did tell me that, also that a few big 
insurance companies in Europe did agree that an international commission will 
work out the details of what should be pal to Jewish people whose insurance 
policies was never paid.' 'You want some of my compote?" Ruth said.
'Maybe a little bit,' said Edek. Ruth spooned a few spoonfuls onto late. Edek 
took a mouthful. 'This compote is very good,' he said. 'I told you that,' she 
said. 'Poles make very good compote, very good bread, and very good cheesecake.'
'And very good herring and very good ham,' Edek said, taking a few more 
mouthfuls of compote. 'And good pontshkes,' said Ruth. 'Of course,' Edek said. 
'Very, very good pontshkes.' Ruth was very relieved that Edek looked better. 
Relieved he had had something to eat. Relieved that he was talking about 
pontshkes. 'I've hired the interpreter I used before, Tadeusz, to come to 
Kamedulska Street with us,' Ruth said. 'You did hire an interpreter?' Edek said. 
'What for?' 'Because I thought that we needed someone who was not emotionally 
involved,' Ruth said, 'in case we have to negotiate anything.' 'For what would 
we need to negotiate?' Edek said. 'For the right to dig,' said Ruth.
'We do not need an interpreter,' Edek said. 'I speak a perfect Polish. I can 
speak for myself.'
'Of course you can,' said Ruth. 'But I wanted things to go as smoothly as 
possible. You can't underestimate that old Polish couple.' 'Alright, alright,' 
Edek said. 'But it is a bit crazy. You are spending money for nothing.'
'It won't be the first time in my life,' Ruth said. 'That is right,' said Edek. 
'Look what you do pay for shoes and for dresses. This interpreter will probably 
cost you less than one sleeve of the dress what you are wearing.'
'Possibly,'   said  Ruth.   She   laughed.  'My  clothes  aren't  that 
expensive,' she said. 'Not for New York.'
'I do not care,' Edek said. 'You do deserve what dresses and shoes you do buy.'
'I've hired the doorman, too,' Ruth said. Edek opened his mouth   


to reply. 'Don't say anything,' Ruth said. 'I've hired him to intimidate the old 
couple and any other neighbours who happen to be present.'
Edek closed his mouth. 'That,' he said, 'is a good idea. This doorman is a big 
man.'
'And he looks like he means business,' Ruth said. Edek laughed.
'I did tell you not to be rude to this doorman,' Edek said. 'It is always good 
to be on the good side of a doorman like this.'
Edek finished his compote. Ruth had already eaten hers. She felt full. This was 
the biggest breakfast she had had since they had been in Poland.
'Are you ready, Dad?' she said.
'Okay,' he said. 'Let us get it over with.' He stood up. 'It was a very good 
compote,' he said.
'I enjoyed it, too,' Ruth said.
'Oy a brokh,' said Edek, suddenly.
'What's wrong?' said Ruth.
'We have not got with what to dig,' Edek said. 'It is Sunday. All the shops in 
Lodz will be for sure closed.'
'The doorman is getting a spade for me,' Ruth said.
'Thank God,' Edek said. 'It is a very good thing, Ruthie, that you do think of 
such things.'
'I'm going to go to the bathroom before we leave,' Ruth said.
'I will go to see if the doorman is here,' said Edek.
Ruth found Edek, and the doorman, and Tadeusz, and the taxi driver standing in a 
huddle near the front door of the hotel. The sight of them almost made Ruth 
laugh. The doorman was holding a collection of spades and shovels. Out of his 
doorman's uniform, he looked even bigger. More like a thug. More threatening. 
The assembled men with their assorted equipment, Ruth thought, looked like a 
gathering who were preparing to leave for a war zone. Even Tadeusz had tried to
look rugged. He was wearing a plastic jacket and had his hair slicked back.
'I have a very strong box,' the doorman said, when he saw Ruth.
'Thank you,' she said. 'But we won't need it. The object we're looking for is 
small.'
'I will bring the box in case it is necessary,' the doorman said.
'Okay,' said Ruth. She introduced Tadeusz formally to Edek. They shook hands. 
Tadeusz introduced himself to the doorman. There was more handshaking. Edek 
introduced the driver. 'And this is the driver,' he said, with a flourish. 'I am 
Robert,' the driver said. There was a final round of handshakes.
'Robert is not such a Polish name,' Edek said.
'It is also not such an unusual name in Poland,' the driver said.
'That is correct,' said Tadeusz. 'I myself know two Polish Roberts.'
'I also know a Robert,' the doorman said.
Ruth's head began to spin at the surreal turn the conversation had taken. She 
wanted to laugh. There was something utterly Polish about the situation, but she 
wasn't sure what. There was a brief silence. All the men looked at each other. 
The doorman looked at his watch. 'It is 9:01 a.m.' he said. 'Are we ready?'
'We're ready,' Ruth said, trying not to laugh. This really was no time for 
laughter, she told herself sternly. She smiled at the doorman. The comedy of 
this gathering had removed her anxiety. She felt worryingly carefree. She had 
better sober up, she told herself. A degree of tension in these circumstances 
was probably not a bad thing. Edek looked cheerful. He was obviously feeling 
better, Ruth thought.
'I will sit in the front with Robert,' Edek said.
'Where would you like to sit?' the doorman said to Ruth. Not next to you, would 
not be the right reply, Ruth decided. 'Tadeusz,' she said. 'You sit in the 
middle.'
Tadeusz is smaller than you,' Ruth said to the doorman, in an effort to explain 
the seating arrangements. 'I need to sit by a window,   


so it's best if Tadeusz sits in the middle,' she added.
'Of course,' the doorman said.
Ruth was relieved. She really hadn't wanted to sit next to the doorman. And she 
hadn't wanted to offend him. She was surprised that she hadn't anticipated a 
need for a seating strategy. Oh, well, she thought, she couldn't think of 
everything.
'I think,' Ruth said to the doorman, 'it will be better if, when we get there, 
you wait in the car.'
'As you wish,' he said.
'I'll call you when we need you,' Ruth said.
'I will be ready for your call,' he said.
Ruth settled back into the seat. She tried to prepare herself for the sight of 
the old man and, possibly, his wife. She looked out of the car window. Every 
street looked bleak. Bleak and grey. She was glad that she and Edek were only 
here briefly. She couldn't imagine ever wanting to come back to this city. She 
thought that she had finally grasped that what was gone from Lodz was gone. 
Completely gone.
'I know two Roberts, not one,' the doorman said.
'Then I am wrong,' Edek said, from the front seat. 'Robert is not such an 
unusual name in Poland. But I myself did know not one Polish Robert.'
'I know one Polish Robert, too,' Ruth said. 'But there probably weren't that 
many Jewish Polish Roberts, Dad, which would explain why you didn't know any.'
'Probably not,' Robert, the driver, said.
They were in Kamedulska Street. The conversation about the Polish Roberts had 
distracted her. She started to feel nervous. 'Are you alright, Dad?' she said.
'Of course,' said Edek. The car pulled up outside number twenty-three.
'Who would think we would once again be here,' Edek said.
'Not me,' said Ruth.
'Not me, too," said Edek.
Ruth, Edek and Tadeusz got out of the car and walked to the front door of the 
apartment block. 'I will for sure not come back here again,' Edek said to Ruth.
'That makes two of us, Dad,' Ruth said. Edek walked up the stairs in front of 
her. Ruth looked at her father, putting one foot after another, on the stairs he 
must have walked up and down, so many times. He was the lone survivor of so many 
people who had walked up and down these stairs. And here he was, at eighty-one, 
needing a guard and an interpreter, to be in his own building. It was enough to 
make you cry.
'Are you alright?' Ruth said to Edek, again. Edek stopped for a moment.
'I am alright, Ruthie,' he said.
Edek and Ruth stood in front of the door to his old apartment. Tadeusz stood 
behind them.
'Shall we get it over with?' she said.
'Let us get it over with,' Edek said. He knocked, loudly, on the door.
'I hope they're home,' Ruth said.
Almost before she had finished the sentence, the door opened. The old woman 
stood behind the half-open door and stared at Ruth and Edek. Ruth stared back at 
her. It was hard not to stare. The old woman was wearing a blonde wig. A very 
big blonde wig. Ruth looked more closely. The old woman was wearing two wigs. 
The top wig, which covered the top half of her head, was a different colour and 
texture from the blonde synthetic hair that circled the woman's neck.
'I am very surprised to see you,' the old woman said to Edek and Ruth.
'She says she is surprised to see you,' Tadeusz said.
'I can understand perfectly what she does say,' Edek said.   


'I was translating for your daughter,' said Tadeusz. 'I'll ask you to interpret 
when I need it, Tadeusz,' Ruth said. 'Very good,' said Tadeusz.
'My husband told me about the interpreter,' the old woman said. She looked at 
Tadeusz. 'Not a bad looking young man,' she said to Ruth. 'Does he do anything 
else for you?'
'She said-' Edek said.
'I understood,' Ruth said. 'She is as repulsive as her husband.'
'Ruthie, are you starting already?' Edek said.
'It's okay,' Ruth said. 'She can't understand.'
'It is not so okay,' Edek said to Ruth. 'Please behave yourself.'
'Good morning, madam,' Edek said to the old woman.
'Good morning, sir,' she said. 'Come look who is here,' she called out into the 
apartment. 'It was lucky you caught us,' she said, turning back towards Edek. 
The old man came to the door.
'What a surprise,' he said. 'We didn't expect you.'
Looking at the old man made Ruth feel sick. She tried to take some deep breaths 
to counter her nausea.
'It was lucky you caught us,' the old woman said, again. 'We were on our way to 
church.'
'I knew the two of you would be churchgoers,' Ruth said.
'Ruthie,' said Edek.
'They really can't understand what I am saying,' Ruth said to Edek.
'Your father is right,' Tadeusz said. 'It is better not to speak like this. The 
tone of your voice suggests what you are saying.'
'I don't care,' she said.
'Do you wish to accomplish what you came here for?' Tadeusz said.
'Yes,' she said.
'Thank you, Tadeusz,' Edek said.
'To what do we owe this pleasure?' the old woman said.
'Gold,' the old man cried out. 'They came here for the gold.'
'Shut up,' the old woman said to her husband.
'It's not gold,' Ruth said. 'Tell, them, Tadeusz, that it's not gold.'
'I can tell them,' Edek said.
'Dear, kind people,' Edek said. 'We have not come here to look for gold.' Dear 
kind people, Ruth thought. What a joke. Why was Edek addressing the old couple 
so politely? She wanted to say something. She looked at Tadeusz. He shook his 
head.
Ruth decided to hold her tongue. She and Edek were on a mission. Why shouldn't 
Edek address the old couple in whatever form would best get this mission 
accomplished? Mission accomplished. This whole thing was sounding more and more 
like a military manoeuvre.
'We have come here to look for something small,' Edek said. 'Something of no 
value to anyone.'
'Something of value to you,' said the old man.
'That is right,' said Edek. 'We need to dig a small hole in the backyard.'
The old man slapped his thigh and grinned. Ruth had to look away. She couldn't 
bear another viewing of those stained rotted teeth. 'I told you they buried 
something,' the old man said, excitedly, to his wife. He slapped his thigh, 
again. The slap made a thin reedy sound.
'So you want to do some digging on our property?' the old woman said.
'Yes, madam,' Edek said. Ruth kept her mouth shut. They hadn't flown all the way 
back to Lodz for her to argue about who owned the property.
'We are going to pay you for the privilege,' Ruth said. She looked at Tadeusz. 
He translated what she had said.
'Oh,' said the old man.
'Very good,' said his wife.
'Come outside,' Ruth said. 'We'll show you where we think it is buried.'  "My 
daughter would like you to accompany us outside to the backyard, where we will 
show you where we think the small item is buried,' Edek said.
'I think we should discuss the price,' the old man said.
'We can talk outside,' Ruth said. 'I don't feel well. I need some air.' Tadeusz 
relayed this to the old couple.
'She is still not well,' the old man said, to his wife.
'She doesn't look the sickly sort,' the old woman said.
'Trust me,' said the old man, 'she is a sickly type.'
'Anyone would feel sick in his presence,' Ruth said to Edek.
'Ruthie,' Edek said. 'Please. You don't feel so well?'
'I think I'll feel unwell until we're out of the country,' Ruth said. Edek 
looked at Tadeusz.
'She does not mean this as an insult to you, Tadeusz,' he said.
'Tadeusz knows that,' Ruth said.
'You must calm down,' Tadeusz said to Ruth.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'This is what I am always telling her. Column down, Ruthie. 
Column down.' Tadeusz nodded.
 


'Your daughter is not such a calm person,' Tadeusz said to Edek.
'You can say that, again, brother,' Edek said. He turned to the old couple. 'Are 
we going to go downstairs?' The old man looked at his wife. His wife nodded.
'We will talk downstairs,' she said.
The large brown dog was at the bottom of the stairs. The dog saw Ruth. He looked 
at Ruth, and then turned and walked in the opposite direction. Ruth felt hurt by 
the dog's rejection. She didn't want to be rebuffed by an old Polish dog. She 
felt peculiarly deserted by this dog. The dog must be remembering the kick, she 
thought. The dog was clearly brighter than it looked, she thought. Edek walked 
to the far corner of the yard.
'I think it is buried approximately here,' he said.
'We did look here,' the old man said.
'We found nothing in this area,' the old woman said.
'We looked here first, because that is where we saw the Jew digging,' the old 
man said.
'The sight of a Jew digging probably electrified the neighbourhood,' Ruth said 
to Edek. 'Every second Pole was probably in here with a shovel.'
'You want to make this more hard for me, Ruthie?' Edek said.
'No,' she said.
'Then do not say stupid things,' he said.
'They're not stupid things,' she said.
'Your father means that it is not wise to voice these opinions at the moment,' 
Tadeusz said.
'I know what he means,' Ruth said sullenly. It all felt too much to her. She 
could feel her heart pounding. She just wanted to slug the Polish couple, and 
leave.
'There is nothing buried here,' the old woman said.
'Well, let's try anyway,' Ruth said to Edek.
'We will try ourselves,' Edek said to the old couple.
'How much is it worth?' the old man said.
'A hundred dollars,' Ruth said. Edek translated.
'It's not enough,' the old woman said.
'Two hundred,' said Ruth.
'Not enough,' the old woman said.
'I'll pay you more, if we find something,' Ruth said. 'If we find something I'll 
pay you an extra five hundred dollars.'
Edek turned to Ruth. 'What for do you offer them more money if we do find 
something?' he said.
'It's expedient,' she said.
'We want more money than that,' the old man said. 'What's a few dollars to rich 
Jews?' He laughed. All of the brown stumps in   


his mouth were on display, in the laugh. Ruth felt queasy.
'I can stop you from digging,' the old woman said. 'After all, this is not your 
property.'
'Tadeusz, can you get our companion from the car?' Ruth said quietly. 'Tell him 
that this couple are making threats.'
'Certainly,' Tadeusz said. The old man and the old woman looked at Tadeusz 
walking away.
'Are we going to deal directly with each other?' the old man said to Edek. 'Just 
us and you. We can do business together. I did some very good business with your 
daughter.'
'Don't bother answering him,' Ruth said to Edek.
'We will accept five thousand dollars,' the old woman said. Ruth gasped. She 
thought she mustn't have heard the number correctly. She looked at Edek. He 
looked numb.
'How much did she say, Dad?' Ruth said.
'Five thousand dollars,' Edek said, shaking his head.
'What's a few more dollars to you?' the old man said.
'A few more dollars is nothing to her,' the old woman said.
'Tell her I said I'd pay an extra five hundred dollars if we found anything,' 
Ruth said.
'If you really want me to say this, Ruthie, I will say it,' Edek said. 'But I do 
not want to give them any more of our money.' Edek told the couple.
'That is not good enough for us,' the old woman said. 'You Jews need to learn to 
treat Poles with respect.' Ruth could see Edek's face clenching. She felt sorry 
for him.
'Don't let them get to you,' she said. 'We can't let them upset us.'
'I am okay,' Edek said. 'We have a companion with us,' Edek said to the couple.
'A relative?' the old man said. 'The cousin who buried this?'
'The cousin is no longer alive,' Edek said.
'I am very sorry,' said the old woman.
'Our companion is Polish,' Edek said. 'I think we should let him negotiate on 
our behalf.'
'Negotiation is the right attitude,' the old man said, and grinned.
Tadeusz arrived back with the doorman. The doorman was carrying the spades and 
shovels. He nodded to Ruth and Edek. He walked over to the old couple.
'Good morning, good people,' he said in a very loud voice. 'Are we having any 
trouble this morning?' The old man and woman looked at the doorman.
'All of a sudden they're mute,' Ruth said to Edek.
'We are not really having trouble,' Edek said to the doorman. 'This kind couple 
are merely trying to establish a price for allowing us to dig up a small part of 
their yard.'
'A price?' the doorman said. 'Just to dig in a dirty old yard?' He moved closer 
to the old couple. He was three or four times their size, Ruth thought.
'It's okay, it's okay,' the old man said, trying to edge away from the doorman. 
'We have negotiated a price, the rich Jewess and I have agreed on a price.'
'The rich Jewess, did you hear that?' Ruth said to Edek.
'You do understand what he says?' Edek said to Ruth.
'Unfortunately, yes,' said Ruth.
'What is the price?' the doorman said to Ruth.
'Two hundred dollars now and five hundred when the digging is finished,' the old 
man answered.
'Five hundred if we find anything,' Ruth said to the doorman.
'That is very expensive,' the doorman said to Ruth. 'Shall we try to lower the 
price?' he said, in Polish.
'An agreement is an agreement,' the old woman said vehemently. Both of her wigs 
shook.
'I'm happy to stick to that,' Ruth said to the doorman. She got out her purse.   


'Your money is in American dollars, I hope,' the old man said.
'Yes,' said Ruth. She handed the money to the doorman. 'Give it to him, please,' 
she said. The old man counted the money and grinned.
'Do you want to dig?' Ruth said to Edek. 'Or should we ask the doorman to help?'
'I will dig myself,' Edek said. He took one of the spades and looked at the 
ground. He started to push the spade into the earth. No one spoke. The ground 
was hard. Edek pushed and pushed. He was hardly making a dent.
'Let me help you, sir,' Tadeusz said.
'Why should you help?' the doorman said to Tadeusz. 'I can help.'
'Dad, would you like me to try?' Ruth said.
'No,' said Edek. He kept digging. He managed to get through the top layer of 
frozen earth.
'Please,' said the doorman. 'Let me assist you.'
'I am okay,' Edek said. He bent down and ran his fingers through the uncovered 
earth. The old man and his wife peered at Edek's hands fingering the black earth 
he had brought up.
'Anything there?' the old man said, in a high-pitched voice. Ruth looked at the 
old man. His face was stretched and pulled into a large leer. His wife, who was 
next to him, was shrivelled and creased in concentration.
'I cannot see anything,' Edek said. He wiped his brow. Digging had made him hot. 
Ruth could see the sweat on his brow.
'Please, sir, let me,' the doorman said to Edek.
'No thank you,' Edek said. He took off his jacket and handed it to Ruth.
Edek dug the spade into the ground and pushed it in further with his foot. He 
brought out several more spadefuls of earth. Ruth watched her father. He was in 
the middle of a ritual. He didn't want anyone's help. This was his own ritual. 
His own upending and bringing up of something long buried. Something long 
swallowed and covered.
It seemed like a funeral in reverse, Ruth thought. What would that be? A funeral 
in reverse? Rebirth, renewal, redemption? A small object, buried in the ground, 
couldn't possibly cause rebirth, renewal or redemption.
Edek kept digging. He was opening the earth. The earth that his mother and 
father and brothers and sister and nephews and nieces had all walked on. Ruth 
looked at the earth. It was very black. Ruth wanted to dig, too.
'Can I do some digging?' she said to Edek.
'No, Ruthie,' Edek said, standing up. 'There is nothing there.' He had dug a 
large, deep hole. 'There is nothing there,' Edek said, again.
'You're still going to pay for this,' the old man said. 'You have dug a very big 
hole on our property.'
'You've spoiled our garden,' the old woman said. Both of them looked pinched and 
tense.
'Your garden?' Ruth said, and laughed.
'Let me fix the hole up,' the doorman said. 'There will be no mess left,' he 
said to the old couple. They looked grim. Ruth looked at her father. He looked 
flat. Deflated.
'I am sorry, Ruthie,' he said. 'It is not here.'
'It's okay Dad,' she said. 'We tried our best.'
'I am sorry to bring you here, again,' Edek said to Ruth. 'I did drag you all 
the way from Krakow for what? For nothing.'
'I'm fine,' said Ruth. 'And it was good that we looked for whatever it was. Now 
at least you'll know it's not there.'
'Nothing is here,' Edek said. He looked as though he might cry. Ruth walked over 
to her father. She put her arm around him.
'We'll be in New York, soon,' she said. 'We can go to the Carnegie Deli and we 
can take Norman with us.' Edek tried to smile. Ruth felt flat, herself. What had 
she been hoping for? She didn't know. She just knew she had been hoping for 
something.
'We feel we are entitled to more money,' the old woman said,   


adjusting the upper wig. 'We waited for you to do this, and now we have missed 
church.'
'You had a long list of confessions prepared, did you?' Ruth said.
'Do not translate this,' Edek said to Tadeusz.
'These people are the arseholes of the earth,' Ruth said.
'Do not translate this, too,' Edek said.
The doorman laughed. Ruth saw that every one of his back teeth, upper and lower, 
was covered in gold.
'I like your language,' he said. 'Arseholes of the earth.'
'Please,' said Edek. 'Do not speak like this.'
'Forgive me,' the doorman said to Edek. 'You will not pay them any extra?' the 
doorman said to Ruth.
'No,' she said.
'I will fill in the digging,' the doorman said to Edek. 'And I will speak to the 
old couple.' He rolled up his sleeves.
Suddenly, Edek spun around. 'I did just remember something what Herschel did 
say,' he said to Ruth. 'Herschel did say he did bury it very close to the wall 
of the toilet, nearly under the wall.' Edek picked up the spade and walked to 
the wall of the outhouse. He began to dig. Everyone moved closer. Ruth, Tadeusz, 
the doorman, and the old couple, were all now standing only a few feet from 
Edek.
'You will have to pay for this destruction,' the old man said. He was staring at 
Edek. Following the movements of the spade with his eyes. He looked almost 
mesmerised, Ruth thought.
'Destruction?' Ruth said. 'In this place? This is landscaping we're doing. 
Tadeusz, tell them we're doing them a favour.' The old woman glared at Ruth. She 
had clearly understood the tone of the comment if not the content. Ruth smiled 
at her.
'This is not a helpful attitude,' Tadeusz said to Ruth.
'I don't care,' she said.
She looked at Edek. He was still digging. He was glistening with
sweat. She felt worried about the effect of the stress and the physical exertion 
on him. But she knew that she had to let him dig. He dug, for several minutes, 
in silence. No one spoke. Edek had uncovered part of the foundation of one wall 
of the outhouse. What were they doing, she and Edek? Ruth thought. Here they 
were, in Lodz, in this miserable, wretched, industrial city, with coal smoke in 
the air and soot in the souls of its inhabitants. What were they doing? Two Jews 
surrounded by four Poles, all of whom they were shelling out money to.
Ruth looked at the old man. A grimace of excitement filled his face. He was 
hopping from one of his skinny legs to the other. He seemed unable to keep 
still. His wife was scowling. Both of her feet were planted firmly on the 
ground. They were both staring at the spot Edek had now uncovered. Edek kept 
digging. Ruth wished that she could stop looking at the old man. His face was 
shiny. Every now and then a big grin slipped from his grimace.
'I think we are going to find something,' the old man said to his wife.
'Maybe we will,' she said. 'Our luck has been with us lately.' The old man 
roared with laughter. He clutched his crotch in excitement. Ruth felt sick. The 
old woman looked at her husband clutching his crotch, and grinned. A wide, sly 
grin. Ruth felt furious. She wanted to blotch that grin. To muddy it. To smudge 
it right off the old woman's face. The old woman looked at Ruth, and gestured 
with her head, in the direction of the old man's hand firmly gripped around his 
crotch. She grinned at Ruth. Ruth felt sick.
Ruth looked at the doorman. 'Would it be possible for you to come back later?' 
she said to him.
'Yes,' he said.
'Good,' she said. 'Could you come back and beat up this old couple for me?' The 
doorman looked at her. 'I would pay you very well,' she said.   


'I understand,' the doorman said. 'This is not a wise idea,' Tadeusz said.
'I wasn't asking you,' said Ruth. She felt better. She smiled at the doorman. 
The doorman moved closer to Edek.
'Do you know what your daughter has requested of me?' he said to Edek. The 
doorman lowered his voice. Ruth couldn't hear the rest of what was being said. 
Edek stopped digging.
'What has got into you, Ruthie?' he said. Why did Edek keep asking her what had 
got into her?
'Nothing has got into me,' she said. 'I'm still me. The same me. I just want to 
kill the old couple.' 'Ruthie, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'It's okay, I won't do 
anything,' she said. Edek resumed his digging. He dug and dug. Half of the 
outhouse's foundations now seemed to be exposed. Edek got down on his knees, and 
dug a hole at the base of the foundations. Suddenly he stiffened.
'I think I did find something.' Everyone crowded in. 'Step back please,' the 
doorman said to the old couple. 'I thought you looked in this spot,' the old 
woman said to her husband.
'I did,' the old man said. 'But I didn't look under the wall.' 'Idiot,' she 
said, and cuffed him on the back of the head. He cringed. 'We still get five 
hundred dollars from this,' he said to her. 'But who knows what he's got hidden 
under that wall,' she said, in disgust.
'Hit him again,' Ruth said to the old woman. The old woman spat in Ruth's 
direction.
'Ruthie, Ruthie, column down,' said Edek. 'I think I got something.' He reached 
under the foundation and dug around with his fingers. He was lying, stretched 
out on the ground. 'Could I help you?' the doorman said.
'I got it,' Edek said breathlessly. He pulled out a small object, and began 
removing the dirt from its surface. The old man and woman tried to get closer.
'What has he got? What has he got?' the old woman said. 'Step back please,' the 
doorman said. The old couple stepped back, in unison. Like two schoolchildren 
who had been ordered to move by the headmaster. Ruth wanted to hug the doorman.
Edek got up. He had cleaned up the object. Ruth could see it. It was a small, 
rusty, flat tin. 'I did find it,' Edek said, and smiled. He looked pleased with 
himself. Ruth looked up. Two strange men had arrived. They were standing there 
watching Edek. 'Who are you?' the doorman said to the men. 'Neighbours,' one of 
the men replied.
'Did they find gold?' one of the men said to the old woman. She shook her head.
'There was no gold,' she said.
'The Jews took it with them,' the neighbour said. The old woman nodded in 
agreement.
Edek put the tin in his pocket. 'We can fix up the hole and go now,' he said to 
the doorman.
'I will return later and fix this up,' the doorman said. Ruth looked at him. She 
felt hopeful. What did he mean? Was this his way of saying he was accepting her 
invitation to rough up the old couple? The doorman laughed. 'I mean that I will 
come back and replace this earth,' he said. 'Oh,' she said.
'I like you very much,' the doorman said to Ruth. 'Thank you,' she said. He must 
think that she was a thug, like him, she thought. Maybe she was.
'Are you going to open the tin?' Ruth said to Edek. 'Not here,' he said. 'We 
will wait till we are in the hotel.' 'Where's our money?' the old man said. 'You 
said five hundred   


dollars if you found something.' Ruth opened her purse.
'You are going to pay him?' the doorman said.
'I like being honourable,' Ruth said.
'She said that she would pay them,' Edek said.
'Anyhow, what's another few dollars?' Ruth said to Edek. Ruth handed the doorman 
the money.
'Tell her to wait for a minute,' the old woman said to the doorman after taking 
the money from him. 'I have something else I think she will want.' The old woman 
ran inside. Ruth felt sick. What was she going to come up with now?
'We do not need anything more,' Edek said. 'Those bestids did take enough from 
us. I do not want you to give them any more money.'
'Let's see what she's got,' Ruth said. She needed a Mylanta. She wished she 
hadn't run out. The old man smiled at her. The smile made Ruth feel worse. What 
were the old couple doing? What did they have in store for her? What had they 
kept in reserve? What was the old woman going to unearth now?
The old woman came back. She was out of breath. She was carrying a vase. A 
bright green vase, with a crack down one side.
'I think this might interest you,' she said. Edek looked at the vase.
'This was not ours,' he said to Ruth. Ruth shook her head at the old woman. 'We 
are not interested in this vase,' Edek said, in Polish, to the doorman. Ruth 
wanted to grab the vase and break it over the old couple's heads. Instead, she 
walked away. She turned, after a couple of steps, and spat in their direction. 
Edek looked at her.
'What has got into you, Ruthie?' he said.
They drove back to the hotel in silence. Ruth felt exhausted. Edek must be very 
tired, she thought. He sat in the back of the car with her. He didn't speak for 
the whole trip. At the hotel, Edek thanked Robert, the driver. Then he thanked 
Tadeusz and the doorman, lavishly. 'We could not have done this without you,' he 
said to the
doorman. Ruth paid Tadeusz and the doorman. She paid them an excessive amount. 
She didn't care. She was so glad to be out of the old couple's orbit. To be away 
from Kamedulska Street. She knew that the street and the building was no longer 
part of anything that belonged to her or to Edek. She knew that she would never 
be back.
'Give the doorman a bit extra,' Edek said.
'Okay,' said Ruth. The doorman smiled.
'It is a pleasure to do business with you,' he said to Ruth.
'My daughter is a businesswoman,' Edek said. Everybody shook hands.
'Thank you, thank you, thank you,' Edek said, again.
I'm going to tell the front desk that we're checking out at four o'clock,' Ruth 
said to Edek. I'll meet you in the lobby.'
'Shall I order something to eat?' Edek said. Ruth looked at him. He must be 
feeling okay if he was thinking about food. Maybe the contents of the tin 
weren't too troubling.
'Order whatever you want,' Ruth said. 'And get me some soup. Chicken soup."
'You want some rye bread, too?' Edek said.
'Okay,' she said.
Ruth ordered a taxi to pick them up at 3:55 p.m. 'I'll have a Mercedes,' she 
said to the man at the front desk. 'A big Mercedes.' She went to the bathroom. 
She wanted to wash her face. She needed to wash some of the grime of this 
morning away. In the bathroom, she looked in the mirror. She was surprised when 
she saw that she looked quite clean. Her face was clear. Her eyes were bright. 
The curls in her hair were jutting out at joyful angles. She looked at herself 
again. There was no sign of any grubbiness.
Edek was sitting in an armchair, next to a small table, in the lobby. He looked 
quite calm, Ruth thought, when she saw him. She pulled up another chair.
'What a morning,' she said to Edek, as she sat down.   


'What a morning,' Edek said.
'Have you opened the tin?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'I seen already what is inside.'
'Is it what you wanted to find?' Ruth said.
'It is what I did want to find,' Edek said.
'Can I see?' Ruth said.
'Let us eat something first,' Edek said. 'It is good to eat after a morning like 
this.'
'Okay,' Ruth said. 'Anyway, you need something to eat. You did a lot of digging. 
And it was pretty awful being there.'
'It was not so nice,' Edek said. He rubbed his hands together. 'The soup will be 
here soon,' he said. 'And I did order for myself a ham sandwich.'
Ruth laughed. 'You might as well enjoy that Polish ham while you're here. We 
won't be here much longer.'
'I do like the Polish ham very much,' Edek said.
'Weren't that old couple the most revolting people in the world?' Ruth said.
Edek looked at her. 'You was not so wonderful yourself,' he said. 'I did not 
know that my daughter was a criminal.'
'I'm not a criminal,' Ruth said.
'Maybe you would not go through with this idea that the doorman should beat them 
up,' Edek said. 'Maybe you would not do it if the doorman did say yes to your 
suggestion.'
'And maybe I would,' Ruth said.
The food arrived. 'This is very good service,' Edek said to the waiter. 'Give 
him a tip,' Edek said to Ruth. Ruth gave the waiter twenty zlotys.
'Our tips have come to more than our hotel bills and airfares, I think,' Ruth 
said.
'So what?' said Edek.
Ruth took a sip of her soup. 'At least the soup is very good,' she
said. They ate in silence. Ruth felt warmed and nourished by the soup. She 
decided to make some chicken soup, when she got home to New York. She had her 
mother's recipe.
Edek's ham sandwich had come with potato salad, dill pickles, and pickled 
cabbage. Edek was eating mouthful after mouthful. 'I did not eat so much for 
breakfast,' he said, eventually, when he took a break.
'You hardly ate anything,' Ruth said.
This is a very good sandwich,' he said. Ruth was glad that her
father's appetite had returned. She ate the rest of her chicken soup.
She polished off every drop. She felt much better.
'I've never wanted to go home to New York so badly in my life,'
 [     she said to Edek. 'You must be looking forward to leaving Poland,
     too.'
 'That is the truth, Ruthie,' he said. 'I am ready to leave.' He finished off 
the last of the pickled cabbage. He let out a large sigh, and mopped his mouth 
with a napkin. He moved all of the dishes out of the way,
;     and reached into his pocket. Ruth felt scared.
:         'Are you sure you want to show me?' she said.
;         'I am happy that you will see this,' Edek said.
Ruth felt more fearful. A sense of dread was mounting up inside her. She could 
feel the dread in her mouth, in her throat, in her lungs and in her stomach. The 
dread was fuelled by a feeling of imminent change. Big change. A change that had 
been travelling in her direction for years. A change that was part of something 
inevitable. Part of a destiny that had been mapped out long ago. Why was she 
thinking about destiny? She didn't believe in destiny. Was she destined to see 
the contents of this small tin? She didn't think so. Destiny was composed of 
much bigger moments. If, indeed, there was any destiny. There were destinations, 
Ruth decided. Not destinies. She could deal with destinations. She believed in 
destinations. She took a deep breath. There was no need to feel scared, she told 
herself.   


Edek opened the tin. There was no rust on the inside of the lid. It was silver 
and shiny. Ruth marvelled at the condition of the inside of the tin. How could 
it have remained so clean after fifty-two years in the earth? Fifty-two years of 
being buried in Polish earth. Surrounded by Poles looking for Jewish gold. And 
it was still there. Still in pristine condition. Ruth was glad that the tin was 
now with its rightful owner. She realised that she was avoiding looking at what 
was in the tin. The tin held only one thing. Edek removed the object from the 
tin. It was a photograph. A small photograph. He held the small sepia-toned 
photograph in his hand. Ruth looked at the tin. There was definitely nothing 
else in the tin. Was this what they had come to Lodz for?
Edek handed Ruth the photograph. She looked at it. It was a photograph of her 
mother. Rooshka's hair was very short in the photograph. And her face was 
thicker than Ruth had ever seen it. Rooshka was holding a small baby. The small 
baby was Ruth. 'It's a photograph of Mum and me,' she said to Edek. 'No, it 
couldn't be,' she corrected herself, with a start. 'I wasn't born yet. I wasn't 
born when this tin was buried.'
'It does look like you,' Edek said. 'But it is not you.' Ruth felt sick. She 
wished she hadn't eaten the soup. What was this? Who was this?
'It's one of the babies that she lost, isn't it?' Ruth said. 'It's one of the 
babies Mum grieved for, all of her life.'
'That is right,' Edek said. He swallowed hard. Ruth could see that this was not 
easy for him.
She looked at the baby in the photograph. It looked just like her. Just like all 
the baby photographs of her. Large hooded eyes. Fine face. You could see the 
baby's face so clearly in this small photograph. Ruth felt chilled. Was this the 
baby of her dreams, too? The baby she couldn't look after? The baby she always 
lost? Who was this little boy?
'His name was Israel,' Edek said.
'After your father?' said Ruth.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'After my father.' Ruth started crying. 'Do not cry yet, 
Ruthie,' Edek said. 'I want to tell you the whole story.' She looked at Edek. He 
was holding a napkin. His hand was trembling.
'You know when Mum and me did find each other after the war they put us in 
Feldafing,' Edek said.
'The DP camp,' she said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'We was still without enough food. We was living in barracks. 
We did have armed guards and barbed wire around us.'
The American general,' Ruth said, 'General George S. Patton, Jr., insisted that 
every one of the Displaced Persons camps in Germany that were under the 
jurisdiction of the United States was manned by armed guards and enclosed by 
barbed wire. He was treating the displaced people as though they were 
prisoners.'
'We was like prisoners again,' Edek said, 'but not so bad like before.'
'Few things would rival what you and Mum had just experienced,' Ruth said.
'That is true,' Edek said. 'And we was grateful for a place to sleep, and 
grateful to have something to eat.'
'I think the great American general enjoyed the extra difficulties he created,' 
Ruth said. 'He wrote in his diary that others "believe that the Displaced Person 
is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, 
who are lower than animals.'"
'Oy a brokhy' Edek said. 'A big American general did say that?' He looked at 
Ruth. 'And you, Ruthie, poor kindele, do have to remember every word.'
Tears came into Ruth's eyes, again. Her father had not called her kindele, the 
affectionate diminutive of child, in Yiddish, for years, for decades.
'I was trying to get Mum extra food, in Feldafing,' Edek said. 'We   


was both hungry. It was not so easy in Feldafing. People what was prisoners for 
so many years, and treated worse than dogs, sometimes did act like animals. They 
did not want to wash, or to flush the toilet. It was not easy. Mum always did 
say that we did not stay alive to act like animals. She used to wash the whole 
bathroom at Feldafing before she did use it. Many people in Feldafing did also 
hide food. They did hide it so that they would have something to eat when they 
was starving again.' Edek paused. 'Poor Mum,' he said. 'She did hide bread. She 
did put bread in our coats and in our shoes. She was sure every day that it was 
our last bread. We lived like this for a long time.' He looked at Ruth. 
'Sometimes I would look at Mum and me and ask myself, did I live through 
everything what I lived through, in order to watch poor Rooshka, hiding pieces 
of bread.'
'It must have been so awful,' Ruth said, 'because by then you knew that your 
parents, Mum's parents, and all your brothers and sisters were dead.'
Edek nodded. 'Mum did not even know she was pregnant,' he said. 'She was eating 
a lot of bread, and slowly, like quite a few of the women there, she was getting 
a bit fat. If you been starving for six years it is not so easy to stop eating. 
Mum went one day to a doctor what was looking after some of the women in the 
camp and he did tell her she was pregnant. She was not happy, Ruthie. What 
mother does want to bring a baby into a barracks, that has mud and policemen and 
guards. I did make a promise to Rooshka that we would get out of the camp.' Edek 
heaved a big sigh. 'It was not so easy,' he said.
'Poor Mum,' Ruth said.
'Poor Mum,' said Edek. 'I was myself happy to have a child. I did think we would 
get out of the camp and make a life together. I did say to Rooshka, "Rooshka 
this child will be a wonderful child." And Mum did feel better. She did make 
some clothes for the baby. One of the officers did give Mum some parachute silk. 
And she did
sit and cut out and stitch, by hand, very beautiful things for the baby.' Edek 
started to cry. Ruth took his hand. 'I am sorry,' he said. Ruth started to cry, 
too.
'It's okay to cry, Dad,' she said.
'The doctor did arrange with Mum that a midwife would come for the birth,' Edek 
said. 'But Mum did want the doctor himself to be with her. He did say he would 
try.' Edek sniffed, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. 'It was lucky 
that the doctor did come,' he said. 'As soon as the doctor did see the baby he 
did see that something was wrong. The midwife could see it also. When Mum did 
ask what was wrong, the midwife did say the baby was not such a good colour. The 
doctor did say the baby must go to a hospital.'
Edek stopped speaking. He turned away from Ruth. Ruth could see his shoulders 
heaving. He was weeping. She put her arm around him.
'Dad, you don't have to tell me this,' she said. Edek got a handkerchief out of 
his pocket. He blew his nose.
'I want to tell you, Ruthie,' he said. He wiped his eyes. 'Mum did scream and 
scream when they did take the baby away from her,' Edek said. 'Ruthie, she did 
scream like an animal, like a dying person, it was a terrible terrible scream. 
Nobody could stop her. "Where is my baby?" she did scream, in German, until they 
did give her something to make her go to sleep. Even the midwife was crying.'
Ruth was trembling. She didn't want to hear any more of this story. She didn't 
want to think of her mother screaming. Screaming for a baby that had been taken 
from her again.
'The midwife did say to me when Mum was asleep that she did think there was 
something wrong with the baby's heart,' Edek said, and started weeping, again.
'You can tell me the rest of the story later,' Ruth said. 'You don't have to 
tell me right now, Dad.' She was freezing. Her teeth were   


almost knocking into each other. She couldn't bear to see Edek cry like this.
'The midwife did say it was a tragedy,' Edek said. 'The midwife did look at Mum 
and say, "She did bury, already, too many." I said to the midwife, "She did not 
bury any,'" Edek said. 'The midwife said she did understand what I was saying.'
Ruth felt exhausted. Her legs were shaking. She tried to keep them pinned onto 
the floor.
'Mum was still crying when she did wake up,' Edek said. 'The doctor did bring 
the baby back the next day. Mum was so happy. He was a beautiful little baby. 
The doctor did explain to me what he did think was wrong. And I did have to 
explain it to Mum.'
Edek shook his head and blew his nose again. Ruth looked at him. His eyes were 
red. His features were in disarray. He looked broken. Heartbroken. 'The doctor 
did explain to me,' Edek said, 'that there was something wrong with the baby's 
heart. He did explain to me that the job of the heart is to pump the blood 
through the body. The blood does carry the oxygen from the lungs to the tissues 
and it does take carbon dioxide from the tissues back to the lungs. He did 
explain to me that there is two sides to the heart. The left side and the right 
side. The right side is bigger and does get the blood from the lungs, which does 
have a lot of oxygen, and does pump it to the tissues of the body. The left side 
is smaller and does take the blood which is coming back from the tissues and 
does pump it to the lungs. Do you understand what I am saying, Ruthie?'
'I'm following you,' she said.
'The doctor was a nice man,' Edek said. 'He did explain to me that he was not 
sure but he did think that this baby did have a small hole between two places 
what are smaller pumps which pump to the smaller, left side of the heart. He did 
say the baby would not die straight away, but babies with this small hole did 
not usually live to be adults. He did say it did depend on how big was the hole. 
He
did say this baby was not so blue, so maybe the hole was small.'
Edek put his face in his hands. 'The doctor did say to me,' he said, 'that this 
baby should not be living in barracks. Especially as it would be soon winter. He 
said this baby needed to have the best doctors.' Edek stopped. 'Ruthie, I did 
never cry so much in my life. I did cry and cry. And then I did have to tell 
Mum. Before I did tell Mum, the doctor did say to me that he did know about a 
couple who did want to adopt a child. He did say that this couple was very rich. 
He did say the couple was neighbours of his. They did want children for a long 
time. The doctor did say to go to a couple like this, was the only chance for 
the baby.'
Edek started weeping again. Ruth felt as though every part of her body was 
shaking. Her brain, her heart, her fingers, her feet. She couldn't stop shaking. 
'Mum did already breast-feed the baby,' Edek said. 'She was so happy with him. 
"He is a beautiful baby, Edek," she did say to me.' Edek's voice broke, again.
'Do you want to have a break, Dad?' Ruth said. 'Would you like to go for a walk 
or get some fresh air?' Edek shook his head.
'Mum and me we did make the decision together,' Edek said. 'Mum did feel that 
what was wrong with the baby was because of her.'
'How?' said Ruth.
'Because of the things what they did do to her, in the camps,' Edek said. 'She 
did say her insides was not clean.'
'That is terrible,' Ruth said. Tears ran down her face. 'Mum felt it was her 
fault.'
'They did terrible things to your Mum,' Edek said.
'I know,' said Ruth.
'Ruthie, no one, not even me, can know how terrible,' Edek said.
'I know,' she said.
'The doctor did tell us he would organise the adoption,' Edek said. Edek looked 
as though he was unable to continue. He looked down at his lap, and swallowed 
several times. 'Your Mum, Ruthie,' he said,   


'did say that we have to give this baby the best chance to have a life. And she 
did say that the baby's best chance was not to stay with us.' Tears were running 
down Edek's face.
'The doctor did say it was for the best for the baby if Mum did breast-feed the 
baby for two weeks,' Edek said. 'Mum did say she would do everything what was 
best for the baby. The doctor did move us to a little house, in the town of 
Feldafing, for two weeks. Mum did cry for the whole two weeks.' Edek looked at 
Ruth. 'Are you alright, Ruthie?' he said.
'I'm alright,' she said. Her chest felt tight. She tried to undo her bra through 
her shirt. It finally opened. Maybe undoing her bra would help her to breathe, 
she thought.
'We did organise a circumcision,' Edek said. 'There was a moyel in the DP camp 
who was from Poland. On the night before the circumcision we did have a 
vakhnakt, a night of watching. It was such a custom among some Jews to watch the 
baby the night before the circumcision. Mum did want this. She did say we did 
have to do everything what we could. So we did ask people from the camp to come 
and pray for the baby. All night we did sit around the baby and pray. People did 
do this to make sure that no evil spirits did get to the baby on the night 
before the circumcision. My cousin Herschel was there. He did pray all night, 
too.'
Edek looked at Ruth. 'You do not look so good, Ruthie,' he said.
'I'm fine,' she said.
'Do you want me to finish the story?' Edek said. Ruth nodded. 'The doctor did 
bring us all the papers for the adoption,' Edek said. 'Mum and me did sign them 
and Mum did say to the doctor that she would give the baby to him the next day. 
Mum did want to have one last ceremony for her beautiful baby boy,' Edek said. 
He stopped speaking and started to weep again.
'We did have a name changing ceremony for our little boy,' he said, after a 
couple of minutes. 'Some Jews did believe that it was
necessary to change the name of a sick person. They did believe that if you did 
change the name, any evil spirits what did want to do the sick person harm, 
would be confused. Herschel did organise a minyan. Ten men to pray for the baby. 
They did come and pray. They did tell God that this sick baby was no longer 
called Israel. He was now to be known as Chaim.' Edek paused. 'It did make Mum 
feel better. She did say she did not know if there was a God or not, but it was 
for the best to do everything possible for the baby. Of course, the German 
couple would give the baby straight away another name. I do not think a German 
couple would want a son what is called Chaim.'
Edek breathed out deeply. He looked exhausted. Collapsed. 'There are some 
things, Ruthie, it is for the best not to think about,' he said. 'I been trying 
not to think about this, for many years. I been trying not to think about too 
many things for too many years.'
'I know, Dad,' she said. 'I know.' She felt numb. Numbed by the pain of Edek and 
Rooshka's life. Why had it been necessary for them to experience so much pain? 
She shook her head. That was a stupid question. There was no answer to that 
question.
'I knew Rooshka did never forget,' Edek said. 'Every time she did look at me I 
did know that she was thinking about it. I did ask her once when she was looking 
very miserable if she think of the baby. She did say that if I did say one word 
to her about the baby, she would do something that she would regret. This was 
when we was already in Australia. I did not know what she did mean, but I did 
never mention it to her again.'
Ruth looked around her. She was glad that the lobby was empty. This was not a 
time to be shared with anybody else.
'I did take a photograph of the baby,' Edek said. 'Mum was angry. She did say 
that if we are going to give him away, he will be out of our lives, so why 
should we pretend with a photograph that he is part of us.'
'He would always be part of you,' Ruth said. She picked up the   


photograph and looked at it. 'He is a very beautiful baby,' she said.
'He was a very beautiful baby,' Edek said. 'Not he is.'
'He had a lot of hair,' she said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'Like you, he did have a lot of hair.'
Her own birth, Ruth thought, must have been a nightmare for her mother. Another 
baby. Another baby to lose. She wished Rooshka was here, so she could tell her 
that she understood. Understood how difficult Rooshka's life had been. She 
wanted her mother to know that she, Ruth, held nothing against Rooshka. Not the 
haircut, not the diets, not anything.
'Mum did say it would be harder if we did have a photograph of the baby,' Edek 
said. 'Mum did tell me to throw away the photograph. But I did not want to throw 
it away. I had nowhere, in the barracks, to hide it from Mum, so I did give it 
to Herschel. Herschel did want to go back to Kamedulska Street. He did live 
there too, on the top floor.'
'So, he went back?' Ruth said.
'Herschel did say Kamedulska Street was still more his home than the barracks. 
When he did get there, he did see it was no more his home. He did not know what 
to do with the photograph, so he did bury it there. He did tell me when he did 
get back to Feldafing.' Edek started to cry again. Ruth put her arm around him. 
She had stopped trembling. She was still numb. Still in a daze. She hugged Edek.
'I'm sorry you had to relive all of this, for me,' she said.
'It did live with me all the time anyway, Ruthie,' Edek said. 'This is not 
something what a person does forget.' He took another deep breath. 'Mum did 
blame me,' he said. 'I always did feel this. She did blame me. We all do need to 
blame someone. Mum had no one to blame for so many things. So, she did blame me 
for this.' He put his head in his hands. 'I did understand,' he said. 'She did 
have too many people to blame for too many things. But it is too hard to
blame hundreds of people. It is impossible to blame hundreds of people, so she 
did blame me for this one thing. That we did give our baby away. And to tell you 
the truth, I did blame myself too.' Tears ran down his face.
'It wasn't your fault, Dad,' Ruth said.
'I think we did make the wrong decision,' Edek said. 'I did feel ashamed my 
whole life.'
'You did nothing wrong,' Ruth said. 'You were trying to do your best for a child 
who would require a lot of care. You did nothing wrong. You gave him a chance. 
You couldn't look after him. You and Mum were so battered, so powerless, so 
bereaved, so homeless. You loved the baby. You wanted to do the best for him.'
The and Rooshka did cry for a long time for this baby,' Edek said. 'In a way 
this decision to give the baby away did build such a brick between us. Do you 
understand what I mean?'
'You mean the decision created a wedge between you,' Ruth said.
'That is it,' Edek said. 'A wedge. It did build a wedge between us. We did know 
always that we did do this. And it was not a good feeling. Mum did see the love 
she did have for me as a good thing, the only good thing in her life, before 
this. After that, the love she did feel for me was mixed up with the decision 
about the baby. Her love for me did never look so good to Mum, again.'
Edek and Ruth were both weeping now. 'But Mum loved you,' Ruth said.
'She did love me,' Edek said. 'But it was never again in the same way.' Edek 
stopped for a moment. 'I did know, Ruthie,' he said, 'that when I did sign the 
adoption papers, I did sign away part of the rest of all of my time on this 
earth. And I did know,' he said through his tears, 'that for Mum it was the 
same.'
'You did nothing wrong, Dad,' Ruth said. 'And neither did Mum. Nothing wrong at 
all.'
'I did read many years later that there was an operation to fix up   


this thing in the heart,' Edek said. 'In the newspapers they did call it a hole 
in the heart operation. But I think this operation came too late for our baby.'
'Maybe he managed to grow up, and then have the operation,' Ruth said.
'I do not think so,' said Edek.
'Why didn't you tell me about the baby?' Ruth said. 'It would have been good for 
me to know.'
'If I could not speak even with your Mum about the baby," Edek said, 'it would 
have been too hard to speak with you. Some things are too much.'
'I understand,' Ruth said. 'But so much of what happened in your life became 
part of my life. It was impossible to grow up unaffected. The things that 
happened to you and to Mum, became part of my life. Not the original 
experiences, but the effects of the experiences.'
'I understand, Ruthie,' Edek said.
'It's easier for people to think that children born after the war were not 
affected,' Ruth said. 'But they were. They had to be affected. Enormously 
affected. No matter how much everyone wanted to protect them from what happened, 
and to separate them from what happened, they couldn't. It was impossible.'
'I can see this, now,' said Edek.
'You said that what was buried had nothing to do with me,' Ruth said. 'You said 
that, in Krakow.'
'This did happen years before you was born,' Edek said.
'But it does have something to do with me,' she said.
'It is just a picture,' Edek said. 'A photograph.'
'It is still a brother,' she said. 'My brother.' Saying those two words made her 
feel breathless. 'My brother'. What extraordinary words. She started gasping for 
air.
'Are you okay, Ruthie?' Edek said.
'I'm okay,' she said. 'It was just saying those words, "my brother",
made me very tense. Made me unable to breathe.' She took a deep breath.
'This is not your brother,' Edek said. 'This is a picture of your brother. You 
have to column down, Ruthie. This is a picture of a person what is probably not 
alive.'
'I think he is,' Ruth said. As soon as she said the words, a sense of calm 
descended on her. Her heart stopped pounding. She felt curiously still. Edek 
looked shocked.
'You do not know what you are saying, Ruthie,' he said. 'You are too upset. You 
do need a rest.' 'Maybe,' she said. 'Maybe.'
She shouldn't have said that, she thought. The words had flown out of her. 
Propelled by a strange force. A force that seemed separate from the rest of her. 
She had uttered the words without knowing where they had come from. Suddenly she 
thought about Gerhard Schmidt, Martina's husband. Could it be possible that 
Gerhard was the baby Edek and Rooshka gave away? That was absurd, she thought. 
She was clutching at straws. She remembered Martina saying that Gerhard had 
written a play about German parents who adopt a Jewish baby. Adoption was a 
common enough fantasy, Ruth thought. Many children had fantasies about being 
adopted. And Gerhard was a writer. Writers wrote out their fantasies. She 
thought of Martina saying that Gerhard's mother had cried, at the play. Any 
mother would cry at that theme, Ruth thought. Gerhard couldn't possibly be the 
baby. It was too farfetched.
Gerhard tapped his foot, she thought. That was a ridiculous link, Ruth thought. 
Foot tapping couldn't possibly be hereditary. 'His parents treated him like 
glass,' Martina had said. That could be a clue. A clue to what? she thought. A 
clue to something that was not possible. In order to placate herself, she 
decided, she would call Martina Schmidt. With a start, she remembered she didn't 
have Martina's phone number or her address. She would ring the Lodz   


Film School, she thought. Surely the Lodz Film School would have a forwarding 
address.
'What date was the baby born?' Ruth said to Edek.
'He was born on the seventh day of September, 1946,' Edek said. Ruth added up 
the dates. They came to eight. Gerhard Schmidt was told by a numerologist that 
he was looking for a number eight, she remembered Martina Schmidt saying. But 
was Gerhard himself an eight? Why was she even thinking about this? Ruth 
thought. She didn't believe in numerology.
'So my birthday was a day before the baby's birthday, a decade later,' she said.
'Yes,' said Edek. 'Rooshka did not want to have you born on the same day. She 
did walk up and down the house all day. All day, she did say, "This baby will be 
born today." Finally, five minutes before twelve o'clock at night, you was born. 
Mum was so happy. She did think it would bring you bad luck to be born on the 
same day. I did say to her, "Rooshka, days and numbers do not bring bad luck." 
But she would not listen.'
'I'm tired, Dad,' Ruth said. 'I'm going to go to my room for awhile."
The too,' said Edek. 'Maybe I will read a book.'
'Is As Blood Goes By good?' Ruth said.
'It was not bad,' Edek said. 'I did finish it last night.'
'I can't believe you've already finished it,' Ruth said.
'I got a new one,' Edek said. 'It is my last one what I brought with me to 
Poland.'
'What is it called?' said Ruth.
"The Cross-eyed Stranger,' Edek said.
'I hope it's good,' Ruth said.
'It does look good, already,' Edek said. 'It is lucky that we are going to New 
York, I can buy some more books.'
'You'll be able to buy plenty more, in New York,' Ruth said.
Ruth sat in her room. She felt worn out. She had to stop thinking about numbers 
and babies and heart operations. She thought about the fortune-teller at the 
circus. The one who had told her, when she was sixteen, that a man with a scar 
would play a large part in her life. She shook her head. She had to stop 
thinking like this. She didn't believe in fortune-tellers. She didn't believe in 
predictions of any sort. Anyway, if that fortune-teller was so good, Ruth 
thought, why had she had to sell soft drinks as well as predict the future?
The scar was large, the fortune-teller had said. A large scar that ran 
vertically from the top of the rib cage to the waist. Ruth was suddenly seized 
with a need to know what sort of scar a hole-in-the-heart operation would leave. 
She wanted to ring a doctor. She looked at her watch. It was already after 
office hours, in New York.
She thought of Doctor Czarny, in Krakow. She looked for his number. She dialled 
the number. A message said that on Saturdays and Sundays, in cases of emergency, 
the doctor could be reached at home. Of course, it was Sunday, Ruth thought. She 
had forgotten it was Sunday today. Ruth wrote down Dr Czarny's home number. She 
hoped she had understood it correctly. She dialled the number. The doctor 
himself answered. Ruth introduced herself.
'How is your father?' Dr Czarny said.
'He is fine,' Ruth said. 'I'm sorry to disturb you but I had a question which 
seemed urgent to me. Would you know what sort of a scar a hole-in-the-heart 
operation would leave?' Dr Czarny thought for a moment. 'I'm sorry to ring you 
on a Sunday with this question,' Ruth said.
'That is fine,' he said. 'Cardiac surgery is not my specialty. I am afraid I 
cannot help you with this.'
Ruth contemplated asking Dr Czarny if a hole-in-the-heart operation would leave 
a scar on the chest. She decided against it. Dr Czarny clearly did not want to 
answer questions about cardiac surgery.   


Especially on a Sunday. 'Thank you anyway,' Ruth said. 'Please give my best 
wishes to your father,' the doctor said. 'Thank you, I will,' she said.
Ruth hung up the phone. Her heart began pounding. Of course cardiac surgery 
would leave a chest scar. Any lay person could work that out. What did it prove? 
Nothing. It proved nothing. It suggested that there were many coincidences in 
life, Ruth thought. And this was something that she already knew. And even if 
some people had the ability to predict things, it still didn't mean much. It 
didn't mean that the baby had survived. It certainly didn't mean that the baby 
was Martina's husband. It probably meant very little.
Ruth felt frightened. What did it all mean? she thought. Did it mean there was a 
destiny? A guiding force? There couldn't be a guiding force. If there was a 
guiding force all of the Jews who suffered and died wouldn't have died and 
suffered like that. Did some people know what the future held? Did they know 
bits and pieces of the future? Was there a grand plan? She didn't think so.
She decided to write herself out a list. Writing a list would help her to calm 
down. She would list the avenues that she could investigate when she was safely 
at home in New York. When she was back on familiar territory, familiar terrain. 
Back in a place where not everything seemed tilted. She got out a pen and paper. 
She headed the list 'Things to Investigate in New York'. Underneath the heading 
she wrote:
Doctors who worked with DPs in Feldafing.
Midwives who worked in the Feldafing area.
Adoption agencies in Southern Germany.
Ring Lodz Film School.
Place ads in German papers.
The list made her feel much better. There was a knock on her door. She answered 
the door. It was Edek.
'I did just want to see if you was alright,' he said.
'Come in, Dad,' she said. 'I'm okay. I actually feel better than I did before.'
(I do feel much better myself,' Edek said. 'I am happy that I did come back to 
Lodz and get the photograph,' he said. 'I am happy I did tell you the whole 
story.'
'I'm glad, too, Dad,' she said.
Edek looked around the room. 'This room is as bad as mine room,' he said.
'It's pretty awful, isn't it?' Ruth said.
'It is a shocking room,' Edek said. Ruth pulled back the bedding on the bed.
'Look at this, Dad,' she said. 'Three sheets to cover one double bed.' Edek 
looked at the sheets.
'This is really something special. I never seen anything like this.'
'Special to Lodz,' Ruth said.
'Very special to Lodz,' he said. Edek started to laugh. 'This is a very funny 
way to make a bed,' he said. He clutched his stomach, and laughed harder. 'I did 
never see a bed what was made like this,' he said.
Ruth started laughing. 'You have to laugh,' she said.
The phone in the room rang. 'Who could that be?' Ruth said.
'I think it could be for me,' Edek said. He ran towards the phone. He picked it 
up. 'It is for me,' he said to Ruth. He turned away from her. 'Hello, hello,' he 
said into the phone. Ruth wondered who it could be. Maybe it was Edek's lawyer. 
The lawyer from Melbourne. Edek had lowered his voice. She heard him say he was 
in his daughter's room. Ruth stared at him. 'I do not have time to call you 
back,' Edek said, in Polish, into the phone.
Ruth was bewildered. Who was her father talking to? She looked at Edek. 'Yes, 
yes, yes,' he was saying. 'Yes, of course. My daughter did take it fine,' he 
said. She tapped Edek on the shoulder.
'Who is it?' she whispered.   


'My daughter does send you her warmest regards,' Edek said.
'Who is it?' Ruth said.
'Yes,' Edek said. 'She does send you her most warm regards."
'Who is it?' Ruth said, again.
'Yes, yes,' Edek said, into the phone. He laughed. 'I do not have time to talk 
now, my sweetheart,' Edek said. My sweetheart, Ruth thought. Is that what he 
said? My sweetheart. 'My sweetheart, we are leaving very soon for New York,' 
Edek said, into the phone. Moje ukochanie. My sweetheart. My love. Was that what 
Edek had said? The words spun around Ruth's head. My sweetheart. That was 
definitely what Edek had said.
Ruth shook her head. She sat down on the bed. 'I will call you as soon as I get 
to New York,' Edek said into the phone. Ruth was still shaking her head. 'Bye 
bye, my sweetheart,' Edek said. 'I will call you the second I do get to New 
York.' He hung up the phone. 'That was Zofia,' Edek said.