My Name Is Stramer

Nathan had often promised to take her to the seaside, but that was before the wedding and the children. So far, the furthest she had ever been was to Kraków.

Of course in her youth she’d been offered the chance to leave for America. What girl wasn’t asked if she wanted to go? A pleasant man with greying hair and a signet ring on his little finger had approached her in the street. A Jew, of course. He’d introduced himself as an entrepreneur, the owner of a flourishing factory in Nebraska, and “first and foremost, an inconsolable widower who has come back to Europe in search of love”.

This search had taken him as far as her parents. But Rywka’s father had threatened to go to the police. Not without reason was Galicia known as “Scandalicia” in those days. Everyone knew what these invitations were really about and what sort of girl these men were really looking for. Yet two of her friends from Nisko, Nesa Schnur and Lila Flaum, had decided to go. Or perhaps their parents had encouraged them, and had pushed them out of the house? She’d heard that they ended up in Argentina or Brazil. She never saw them again.

In Nisko the story was that the procurers referred to pretty girls as “silver teaspoons”, “bales of silk”, or “rugs from Smyrna”. The less charming ones were “barrels of flour”, and the ugly ones were “sacks of potatoes”. She hadn’t forgotten those definitions, probably because the girls used to call each other those names. And she’d wondered which category they’d put her in.

She’d realised she was too small to be a silver teaspoon. But she did have dark rims to her light eyes, thick black hair, and a slender waist. So she wasn’t a barrel of flour, and certainly not a sack of potatoes.

Now, on Goldhammer Street, those days seemed unreal. She’d married, moved to Tarnów, and had her children. So much had changed in her life. But had things changed in the outside world, too? She still used to hear about procurers dealing in “tender flesh”. And not that many years had gone by. She still found herself accidentally starting the year on her letters with the number 18, as if she couldn’t quite adapt to the twentieth century.

Maybe that was because she rarely read the newspaper. Who’d have the time with six children?

In fact she had given birth seven times. Their first son, Kuba, had been born too soon, with no eyelashes or fingernails. She’d reproached herself for needlessly helping Nathan to paint and furnish their first flat while she was pregnant, a place even smaller than their home on Goldhammer Street. One time she had even slipped and fallen outside the entrance. She should have stayed in bed. Anyway, it didn’t matter any more.

It had been winter, and they’d wrapped him in the warmest quilt they had, but it was no good. He’d lived less than three weeks. It had felt so unnatural to arrange her own child’s funeral, to walk in the snow behind her own son’s coffin. She’d forced herself to shed tears. She couldn’t do it, and had shielded her face with her hands so others wouldn’t see that she wasn’t weeping.

The little coffin hadn’t been expensive, but even so they’d spent every penny they had on it. They’d buried Kuba below the cemetery wall.

In the night after the funeral she was woken by stifled weeping. She’d cuddled up to Nathan, and only then burst into tears herself.

She didn’t know if Nathan missed their baby too. She didn’t know if he too was afraid Rywka would never fall pregnant again, like her sister-in-law Pepi, who had also given birth prematurely before leaving for America; she and the child had gone to hospital, but Pepi had come home alone. From what Nathan said, this loss had determined their departure. But then it was a known fact that in America they had the best doctors for that sort of thing.

But in their letters in neat script on company paper, Ben and Pepi never mentioned a pregnancy or a child. It was in the letters that sailed in the opposite direction (perhaps they passed each other somewhere in the middle of the ocean, thought Rywka) that in his nervous handwriting Nathan informed his brother of the arrival in the world of each of the Stramer children, and wrote about their siblings. Maybe that was the reason why they had never made the trip to Tarnów, despite being their closest relatives. And yet never once did they forget to put money in the envelope with their letters.

It was easier for Rywka to understand this than for Nathan. Because what if it had been the other way around? What if we had remained childless, and instead of dollars, news of a succession of American nephews and nieces had sailed here from across the ocean? How would we have felt?

So she thought about Ben and Pepi with sympathy. And whenever she thought of them, she was reminded of Kuba.

“The first child is for God,” Nathan had once said.

“Don’t talk like a rabbi,” she’d replied.

Whom would he have been like? Would he have been like their eldest, Rudek, who never sought their advice on anything at all, and spent day after day running around town? What did he actually do, and where did he get the money he furtively gave her for the household?

She could only guess.

*

For a week Rudek had been taking Salek to the army barracks with him after school. Did Rudek look much older, or Salek much younger than he really was? Or perhaps the brothers gave that impression by contrast. The tall, broad-shouldered lad in the flat cap and plus fours leaning over the small, thin boy – squeezed into a tight school uniform with a high collar, really still a child.

Anyway, they were more than thirty centimetres apart in height, and a year-and-a-half in age. Salek didn’t play football, neither on the right wing, in a blue shirt and white shorts, as Rudek did for Samson Tarnów, nor in any other position for any other team. He didn’t play any games at all. He hadn’t learned how to whistle through his fingers or how to spit properly. He got his uniform wet whenever they drank lemonade from the bottle together outside the shop. And worst of all, he still got piss on his trouser legs under the tree, although Rudek had showed him how to avoid that several times.

“You could shake it for two weeks and a drop would still land in your trousers anyway,” he’d lectured him. “But not on your trousers.”

It was the same thing with boxing and wrestling. Rudek told Salek to practice on his younger brothers, Hesio and Nusek, but without much success either. Finally he had just about taught him one single blow – forehead against nose. This resulted in Hesio’s shirt being stained with blood, and a taste of their father’s belt for all three of them.

Anyway, whenever someone picked on him, Salek would just fiercely clench his fists and spin his arms around.

Though he wasn’t in any danger, because everyone knew whose brother he was – that made Rudek feel warm inside. But he did his best to prepare Salek in case someone tried to hit him in another district, where they didn’t know. He was to say he knew Omega, Zachar, or Bänder. There was no one in Tarnów who didn’t shudder at the thought of them.

“Nobody will touch you.”

He didn’t admit to Salek that he didn’t know them either. Did anyone else need to be aware of that?

What everyone did know was that if they weren’t in prison at the time, Omega, Zachar, and Bänder were to be found every night in the company of the prostitutes outside Hotel Polski on Dworcowa Street near the station. But everyone preferred to avoid encountering them. Apparently they weren’t afraid of anyone.

As if accidentally, they’d elbow other people, push pedestrians off the pavement, and knock off their headgear—school caps, flat caps, hats, skull caps, and Hasidic Jews’ fur shtreimels all landed in the mud and puddles, which after even light rain were all over the place at any time of year.

And that was just the start of it. Then these knife-wielding bandits would wait for a reaction. Would the victim dare to make the slightest comment, if only expressed by a mere glance or the tiniest gesture of dissatisfaction, visible in the dark to them alone?

“You’re a tough guy, eh?”

And at once they’d go so close to him that he could tell what they’d had to eat and drink that day in the station’s third-class buffet.

Of the three, only Dawid Bänder didn’t punch his victims immediately. First he played with his knife. And that was what people feared the most, because Bänder was unpredictable. He might let a man go free, and suddenly stick his knife in the next one.

“Want to be circumcised, tough guy?” he reportedly asked the terrified Prince Roman Sanguszko, whose car had broken down at night near the station.

Rudek was aware of the gravity of this encounter. At school they’d been taught that the Sanguszko family were the former owners of Tarnów, and on the street they’d learned that Bänder was the grandson of Idele Muc, the legendary ringleader of Tarnów’s criminals. And as Rudek was one of the most attentive students at both these places, he realised that the descendants of the most powerful men in the city had come face to face with each other.

“Want to be circumcised, tough guy?” Rudek and his brothers had re-enacted this scene over and over again for a laugh in the yard on Goldhammer Street.

“Anything but that! Show mercy to royalty!” Salek would plead in the role of Sanguszko, shielding himself with his hands and fainting against the wall of the wooden outhouse.

*

Anyone who saw the Stramers coming back from the station could guess that something had ended, or at least changed. There was no wind, and the sun was shining, but they were walking home with their heads drooping.

They were plainly having trouble finding their place on the pavement. Should they walk side by side, or one after the other? They couldn’t make up their minds. They were missing the element that generally took away the need to worry about such things.

Salek was trying to walk in the middle, in Rudek’s usual place, but he kept bumping into his father’s shoulder as Nathan battled to regain his old position.

“Don’t get under my feet,” he heard.

How had Rudek always managed to be in front or in the middle from the day he’d started to walk? thought Rywka, who was at the back. If Hesio, Rena, or any of the other siblings had been born first, would they have been like that too? Or was there another reason for it?

It’s a good thing he’s gone, she consoled herself.

He’d been the first in the family to get his school certificate (and with such good results! She was so proud of him), and now he was the first to go to university. And as usual the rest of them would probably follow him. She felt a pang of anguish, and bowed her head even lower to avoid thinking about it.

She tried to imagine that in Kraków Rudek would finally have a break from his siblings. In Tarnów he was always there when they needed him, which was all the time. Going away will be good for him, and it won’t hurt them either.

On the platform, Rudek had shoved some money into her coat pocket, without letting Nathan notice.

He would often come home, he’d said: what’s eighty kilometres nowadays? As well as the trains, which go to Kraków every few hours, there are also going to be buses soon, running from Oak Tree Square.

At the same time, Rywka drove away the thought that eventually they’d all go away, and she and Nathan would be left on their own at 20 Goldhammer Street, an old couple in a two-person apartment.

Only Wela and Nusek were still smaller than her. But even they were a head taller than the metal plaque in the tram with the thick line and the sign saying that children under a metre travelled for free.

But as in the past, Nathan looked like the tallest again, possibly because he was wearing a hat.

When she got home from the station, Rywka stopped to look at the photograph that was standing on the chest of drawers.

A week before his departure, Rudek had taken all his siblings to the newly opened photographic studio at 4 Krakowska Street. He knew the owner, Chaskiel Bronstein, from the Jewish scouts. A few years his senior, Chaskiel had been his team leader.

Now he was proudly standing on the pavement outside his own studio, as Nathan had in the days when he’d run a café.

“Good name,” said Rudek, shaking Chaskiel’s hand and casting an appreciative glance at the shop sign saying Fotografika. “Spot on.”

Chaskiel greeted each of the siblings in turn.

Rudek had told them to dress up that day.

“No holes, no patches on your knees or elbows. No stains or missing buttons. Don’t worry about the colours, they don’t have to match, they won’t show up anyway. But comb your hair for me, and don’t get your shoes dirty on the way.”

The night before he had supervised them to make sure they washed their hair and cut their fingernails. He’d deliberately woken Nusek, who was probably just pretending to be asleep, because as soon as he opened his eyes, wide awake, he’d said: “Why do I always have to bathe in the water everyone else has used?”

Rudek took a comb with him, quite unnecessarily. Rena and Wela had their own hairbrush, and from what he saw in Chaskiel’s shop window, these days the men and boys usually posed in caps and hats.

When Salek asked him why, Rudek briefly wondered whether to say: “Because they want to look taller,” or “They must be hiding something under that headgear.”

Finally he just shrugged.  “It’s the fashion.”

His own choice was to pose with a fob watch on a chain.

“Where did you get that?” asked Hesio.

None of the siblings had ever seen it before.

“I just got it. So what?”

With a grey sheet as the backdrop, Rudek was the only one sitting down. Chaskiel placed the bamboo chair to one side, and positioned Rudek’s right hand on the armrest (“Let it rest casually”), with the chain dangling from his index finger and the watch, in a round case, touching his left hand. Rudek was to hold it still at waist height.

He posed Rena, Salek, and Hesio half a pace behind Rudek (“so you don’t shield your brother”), and Wela and Nusek (“Drop your shoulders, I won’t eat you”) next to Rudek, who was still taller than they were, even though he was sitting down.

With her hair loose, in a white blouse and a black skirt below the knee, Rena looked perfect. Even so, Chaskiel spent the longest time posing her.

She simply had to stand behind Rudek, but the photographer needed to check if her hands were resting the right way on her older brother’s shoulders (“Pity not to show those fingers a pianist would be proud of”), to make sure there was no shadow falling on her face (“It’d be a sin not to capture the profound look in those eyes”) and consider whether to show the pendant she was wearing (“Yes, I just have to straighten it a tiny bit”).

Whatever, Rena could see that today even her brothers had their gaze fixed on her, and kept casting glances at the low neckline of her blouse.

“Here we go,” said Rudek. “Keep your hands still.”

“Just don’t move an inch!” said Chaskiel, and hid behind a large camera on a tripod.

“You shut up and do your job.”

“But you don’t understand. For the models to feel relaxed, I have to talk to them.” Chaskiel pulled the black hood attached to the camera over his head. “Did you know that in the old days the photographic studios had special metal supports? People used to prop the backs of their necks against them to avoid moving while the picture was being taken. It was like being in a vice – those things pinched horribly. That’s why everyone looks so stiff and miserable in the old photographs. But luckily there’s been some progress, and I take much kinder pictures. Now then, pay attention, no breathing and no blinking!”

After taking the picture, Chaskiel removed the case containing the glass negative from the camera.

Three days later Rudek went to collect the photograph and carefully wrote on the back:

In memory of this day,

Rudolf, Rena, Salek, Hesio, Wela, and Nusek Stramer

How many private lessons had he had to give to afford something like that? was Rywka’s first thought when she received the photograph as a present from her son.

“You’d have done better to buy yourself something,” she’d said.

Her eyes had filled with tears.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to cry,” she said now to Rudek in the photograph.

Finally she had time to take a proper look at him. What a handsome, well-built, modern man. Nathan said he was the spitting image of his brother Ben.

Now I’ll have two Rudeks, one in Kraków, and one here on the chest of drawers.

“Mama, when I buy something for someone, two people are happy: they are, and so am I,” Rudek often used to say. “But if I buy something for myself, only one person’s pleased.”