MARGARET NOWACZYK

Somewhere Better

“You’re wasting your time,” my mother says and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know why you bother with this junk.” Through a magnifying lens, I examine an eighty-year-old postcard I bought at an online auction. A sepia photograph, the cardboard soft with age, it shows a sand road bisecting a pine forest; a man and two women walk away from the camera. On its back, in beautiful penmanship: “Dearest Haneczka, we send best expressions of our fondness and respect.” The signature is illegible. The postage stamp is frayed, but the date stamp is preserved: July 26, 1938, Niemirów, Poland. For years, Niemirów existed only in my mother’s stories and in my imagination. My grandfather’s uncle, a retired customs officer from the time when Austria ruled that part of Poland, lived there; his wife was the housekeeper for the local Roman Catholic rector. They had a house with a garden that my mother was supposed to inherit. When Germany and the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939, Niemirów ended up in the Soviet Union. My mother, Krysia, was born in a church cellar in the middle of the night during an air raid that began Hitler’s invasion in 1941. After the Second World War, the town, the spa village, and their surrounding forests ended up on the Ukrainian side of the freshly carved Central European borders. Niemirów remained mythical until 2002 when, late one night breastfeeding my infant son, I found a postcard from 1938 on an Internet auction. Since then, I have bought over one hundred postcards bearing greetings, weather reports, and health updates from pre-war Niemirów, as well as a collection of private photographs: women in twenties bathing suits, ladies shielded by parasols, officers in dress uniforms, and well-fed priests. Those people wrote on these postcards, licked these stamps, and walked through the forest in the photograph to mail them—it was as if I knew them. To her dismay, since that day I have also attempted to piece together my mother’s family history. “Don’t bother with the past, look to the future,” she repeats. “Only the future matters.” Her discomfort is palpable; she acts as if she thinks I am ferreting for some secrets, that it is all about her. But all I want is to learn about my ancestors, to know where I come from.

I remember what she did when I first started my genealogy research. “I got your grandmother’s death certificate!” I tore open the envelope and pulled out a flimsy mimeographed form filled out by the parish priest in Leżajsk. It was for Helena Obariank née Samojednik. Samojednik? But my mother had told me her maiden name was Jaworska. My mother sat at my cherry dining room table as steam curled from the mug of tea cupped by her hands. A small, mean smile on her lips, she raised her wide-open eyes at me. “Why did you say it was Jaworska?” I asked. “I wanted to shut you up. Your constant questions: Who? What? When?” she aped my voice. “I wanted you off my back.” She looked so proud of herself. I had forgotten how easily she lied, and I shouldn’t have—she’s been doing it for years. I lunged at her. I grabbed the wisps of grey hair at the nape of her neck and smashed her face into the table. The cup flew across the table and crashed on the slate floor. Weeks of staring at parish microfilms, research fees paid to civil archives and church offices in Poland and Ukraine, emails to genealogy researchers—all asking for Helena Jaworska. I shook her and tossed her at arm’s length. She never understood what made me tick; she always acted so superior. She was still smirking, her teeth stained with the blood seeping from her upper gum. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I stared at my mother sipping her tea, whole and unharmed, and said: “With the correct last name I can go further back.” She wasn’t going to stop me. “Good for you.” She shrugged. “Good for you.” “The germs on this!” My mother grimaces as she picks up the cardboard rectangle by a corner, her pinky up in the air. I don’t tell her that bacteria cannot survive on dry surfaces; she doesn’t care for truths that do not fit her worldview. Her mother, Zosia, died of tuberculosis when my mother was eight, after the war ended—antibiotics did not arrive in Poland in time for her. I take the postcard from my mother’s fingers; she is polluting it with her disdain. “I’m going to Poland this summer.” “What? If I had your money, I would go someplace with culture, not visit some shabby villages. Go to Paris, see The Loovr or Centre Poompidoo.” She tries to roll her

rs but fails. “If you want to go to Roma, I’ll tell you exactly where to go—I’ve been there, you know.” Last year she visited Rome for three days on a furniture-buying trip for Sears, and now she fancies herself an expert. My mother has no hobbies or interests, but she’s always loved having things. And, when she doesn’t have something, she envies it. As a child, I remember her rhapsodizing about fox fur coats, diamonds, and gold jewelry, cottages on the lake, trips abroad, colour TVs—a litany of things my father had failed to deliver. She nagged at him, and he drank. For her, passions and hobbies are a waste of time—time better spent earning money—and a waste of money better spent on buying things. A high school dropout, she had always envied my brains and demanded that I study medicine or dentistry, not literature, my dream. She walks toward my bookcases. “Do you have anything interesting to read in here?” She skips her manicured index finger across the spines of my books: Nabokov, Atwood. She doesn’t expect a positive answer—she does not share my taste in books, either. I arrive in Niemirów during a June heat wave. The village meadows are fragrant with dry grasses, bees buzz around irises and poppies drooping from heat, blood-red strawberries burst with sweetness on the tongue. I grew up among grey concrete apartment blocks, but I always loved the countryside: cornflowers winking in yellow wheat fields, fat, lazy rivers snaking across green fields, their banks dotted with weeping willows. I breathe deeply. Red-stockinged storks stalk frogs in the ponds. In the old cemetery, sorrowful stone Madonnas with snails on their heads list between white-skinned birches. In the small country church, the sun, sieved through stained glass, fills the air with coloured dancing motes and warms up the baptismal font where my grandmother was christened. My insides thaw a little. But the forests fill me with dread. The verdant beauty that surrounds me can’t block my thoughts about the human carnage that took place here a few decades ago. Poles and Ukrainians, Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, propelled by age-old hatreds, annihilated each other. The Ukrainians burned sheds, stables, and homes, slaughtered sheep, cows, and children. Married couples were butchered because of their mixed origins. This went on for months after the war.