Give Us This Day: A Memoir of Family and Exile

Hafiz

Prologue

Neither of them is looking at the camera.

Hela, my father’s sister, stands behind the makeshift wooden crucifix, a cotton scarf tied under her chin. In Mary Jane shoes and white ankle socks, she doesn’t look her 19 years. Next to her, my father, 14-year-old Stefan, is bare-kneed and in oversized shorts. His eyes, lowered, are fixed on the fresh and dusty grave at his feet.

It’s June 1944, and the grave is my grandmother’s. A week before this photograph was taken, 49-year-old Stefania Wiśniewska was buried without ceremony in the Polish corner of Tehran’s Catholic cemetery. These two children, the only family members then aware of her death, had travelled north from the Iranian city of Esfahan in the back of a canvas-topped army truck to say a belated goodbye. For Stefan, who’d had no idea his adored mother was so sick, no idea she’d even come to Tehran for surgery, this evidence, a heaped mound of recently turned rubble, is scarcely believable.

The photograph of their visit is a black-and-white souvenir of his bewilderment. Today it sits in an album with yellowed pages, some of them empty, that my father keeps in an old-fashioned suitcase with flick-up clips. He has few photographs of his early years, certainly none from before the war, so this is perhaps the youngest image of him I will see, probably the saddest.

Here is the end of your mother, it says. Here is the end of your world.

Dad has to bend to put his case of photographs away, his square fingers fumbling with the low cupboard handle. It seems I’m interested in the kind of detail that he either can’t or won’t recall. Who arranged the truck for them? Who took the photo? How long did they stay in Tehran? He can’t remember any of those things, he says.

‘You know, I ended up in hospital the day after this photo. I had malaria,’ he tells me. ‘When I got off the truck back in Esfahan I didn’t know where I was. I hardly remember being at the cemetery that day.’

I’m asking because I’ve never seen this image before. Not much more than a year ago, I stood with him at that same grave in Tehran’s eastern suburbs, just as his older sister once did. The cemetery looked different when I was there, of course. The dust and rubble had been tidied away under blankets of concrete and strips of grass. The old brick walls that still lined the cemetery’s perimeter, separating its Catholic foreignness from the rest of that Muslim city, were hidden behind veils of green foliage. Maybe that’s the way my father prefers to remember his mother’s death, I think: the rawness gone, a loss smoothed by time. Maybe it’s just me who sees it as a terrible turning point in the movie of his life, time rewinding like a clacking reel of film, frame by frame, back to that graveside vignette. My grandmother’s death sent the lives of her children, lives already way off course, spinning in an even less familiar direction. For my father it was a trajectory that would end here, 70 years later, in a country on the wrong side of the world, in a carpeted townhouse in a city of foreigners.

My father puts his glasses back on his nose, sits down in the tub chair under the window, sighs and looks at me.

‘So, where to next do you think?’ he asks. ‘We haven’t been to Siberia yet. After Iran, Siberia will be easy.’

There’s a pause as he studies my face.

‘Okay, I’m keen if you are,’ I say. ‘That would be great.’

He looks tired today. His skin is as rough as his fleecy top; his eyelids are puffy. He’s well enough, though, for a man who’s about to turn 84. We both know he would clear his almost empty calendar for a journey to Siberia, the only stretch of his story that we haven’t yet retraced.

‘What would that one be?’ he asks. ‘Our fifth?’

I’ve never counted. I know our first trip together was in 1988, when he was only a few years older than I am now. Since then we’ve been to Poland a number of times, to Belarus, and now to Iran. Each journey has started the same way: retracing roads that he remembers and people whom he mourns. I’ve followed his lead, attempting to make sense of the tangled snatches of stories I heard as a child. But I’m not sure what our shared journeys have achieved. They’ve simplified nothing and clarified very little; they have created new stories of ours to add to old stories of his. We have to reminisce about our changing travelling companions because everything else is so muddled. Do you remember 1997, we’ll say, when Mum came to Poland with James and Anna? When we put five candles on Anna’s cake in our Warsaw hotel room? And what about 2009, when the Canadian schoolteacher with the glasses was so kind to us in Gdansk? What happened to him?

A trip to Siberia’s vast wastelands may be overdue—I’m not sure why that place has always felt so out of reach for me—but I know there are no easy answers waiting there for us. And I find it difficult to believe, even now, that my father would willingly revisit his first place of exile. So we take measure of each other’s seriousness: he knows I am unsure; I know he is too. We are also both aware, but don’t say aloud, that a trip to Siberia would take months to set in motion, maybe longer. Would he be strong enough to cope with the rigours of even a post-Stalin Russia? There’s Mum to think about: she couldn’t come with us, but could we leave her? And how would I get away again? Would James want to come? My sister? The children? I’m surprised by how panicked this thinking suddenly makes me feel, the understanding that perhaps we are reaching the end of our travelling, my father and I. I’m surprised at the way my throat tightens.

‘Let’s do it,’ I say. ‘Let’s go to Siberia next year.’

But then Mum comes downstairs to say goodbye, descending slowly and almost sideways on the narrow stairs. She places one hand and then the next on the wooden bannister, each movement a small, deliberate act of bravery. My white-haired father and I watch in silence. Time is running out for the stories—his, hers and ours. They are racing, too fast, to their conclusions.

1

I’m a poor audience for my memory.

She wants me to attend to her voice non-stop,

But I fidget, fuss,

Listen and don’t,

Step out, come back, then leave again.

Wisława Szymborska, ‘Hard Life with Memory’

In May 1988, I stood on a Polish riverbank with my father and my uncle, looking at the Soviet Union. The grassy banks opposite stretched away in either direction, ending in lazy curves, one turning left, the other right, before disappearing from view. There was nothing to see beyond the murky water and the tree-covered banks: only an open early summer sky, white lumps of cloud.

‘So this is it? The Bug River?’ I asked.

‘No, the Bug River,’ my father said. ‘Bug like in boogie.’ He stretched the vowel, exaggerating it with pursed lips. ‘It’s the border. Just over there, that’s Brześć, where we lived, that way, not far. If we could get across, we could walk from here.’

I know that, I was ready to say. I know all about this town, about this river; I grew up with these names lodged in my head like unwelcome visitors. I was teasing with my silly English joke. But my father wasn’t looking at me. He’d turned to his brother.

‘Why didn’t we get a visa, Kazik?’ he said. ‘We should have got a visa, so we could go home and look. I can’t believe we didn’t get a visa.’

I stared at them. What did he mean? We had travelled as far east as we could and this sleepy river was the end of the line. Behind us was our car, its doors open to the afternoon heat and buzzing midges. I could hear my Polish uncle Wacek and his wife Jasia chatting in its back seat, waiting for us. But my father’s aquiline profile was still fixed eastwards, his eyes scanning the Russian riverbank as if willing the past to emerge from behind a clump of reed. Kazik, a darker, rounder version of his middle-aged brother, was staring too, shading his face with his hands as he looked. Somewhere out of sight and out of reach was Brześć, the pre-war Polish town that had once been their childhood home and that was now the Russian town of Brest.

The Poland we had been visiting, Poland in 1988, was a country desperately kicking its way out of the Soviet Union’s grip. Its faded cities, empty shops and sad, drab population were more than the slow-burning legacy of 50 years of Soviet domination. In the early 80s, Poland had also suffered three years of martial law; the crippled economy those years produced had sent hundreds of thousands of Poles fleeing for the west. I thought it was depressing. The rural charm of these open borderlands with their endless horizons and swaying birch trees was lost on me. Our shiny leased Renault had marked us out as strangers and the novelty of being stared at and chased by excited children when we slowed through narrow village lanes had long worn off. I’d had enough of visiting bathroom-less cottages owned by distant relatives wearing headscarves. I was tired of feeling out of place. I wanted to go home.

Home for me at the time was London. I’d been there almost two years, happily employed in the cramped Fleet Street office of the New Zealand Press Association, writing stories for the newspapers at home on football hooligans, Antipodean businessmen, retail trends and royalty gossip. It was fun. I was 25 years old and—I had to keep pinching myself—making a living doing something I liked in a city that I had once only dreamed of visiting.

‘Things always fall into place for you,’ my Wellington flatmate had said to me with surprising bitterness when I told him I’d been offered the job. ‘You’re just a lucky person.’ I knew it was a great opportunity for a rookie journalist. But there was something about being reminded aloud of my good fortune that had made me uncomfortable. I’d carried his words to London with me in my suitcase like a bad omen. So far, everything had been fine, but standing there on the banks of a river in eastern Poland, I felt them work their way into my head again. I was lucky I didn’t have a Russian visa, I thought. I was lucky that I didn’t have to go there.

Waiting for me in London was also the boyfriend who’d encouraged me to do this trip with my father. ‘You might not get another chance,’ he had said. ‘You should go.’ James and I shared a room in an attic flat near Wandsworth Common and when we weren’t working took cheap and romantic long weekends in European capitals and went to country pubs for lunches on winter Sundays. We partied as often as we could with other noisy Kiwis in bars and restaurants in the King’s Road and Covent Garden. Our aim (wasn’t it everyone’s?) was to have as much fun as possible. So I can only just remember my middle-aged father arriving at Heathrow airport from Auckland with his brother, both men still slim and brown-haired, years stretching ahead of them. I can’t remember clearly what tempted me to join them on a four-week, figure-eight loop of Poland. I recall only my fears. How would I cope with my first taste of Soviet-style communism? More scarily, how would I cope with these aged travelling companions?

Maybe it helped that my father had held his tongue about my new domestic arrangements in London. Unsurprisingly, he’d declined my half-hearted offer of a bed at our flat, booking instead an over-priced Bloomsbury hotel room that he shared with his brother. When he did visit us, climbing the three storeys of staircase to our front door, he seemed impressed. He avoided glancing at the bedroom but chatted happily to James over tea at the kitchen table, admiring the botanic prints inherited from the previous tenant on our cream walls. I knew, of course, that Dad wasn’t as comfortable as he looked. Mum had already warned me. ‘Don’t tell your father I’ve called,’ she’d said. But I hadn’t anticipated his tactful silence. Perhaps my very Catholic father had finally noticed that I’d spent the previous two years creating a new, more grown-up version of myself.

I was wrong. My father’s silence didn’t indicate a shift in the tectonic plates of our relationship. He had simply—perhaps under pressure from my more practical mother—made a decision to hold his tongue. In hindsight, it was a clever move, letting me feel like an adult: I must have decided it was time I paid my father and his story some attention. I’d spent my childhood trying to ignore the past my father obsessed about, a homesickness that he seemed unable to let go. I’d never understood what it was about the comfort and safety of life in New Zealand—and, it seemed by implication, my mother, my sister and me—that had always failed to satisfy him. Maybe, for the first time, I realised there was something I needed to know.

We left London in the rain on 10 May. The grey waters of the English Channel, viewed through the hovercraft ferry’s foggy windows, reflected my gloom. Even the shiny blue Renault my father had leased at bargain rates in Calais, the most up-to-date car I’d ever driven, didn’t cheer me. Later that night, in a hotel room somewhere off the autobahn outside Hanover, I must have opened my journal for the first time. I only just recognise myself in its neat, sloping handwriting. ‘S & K seem a little lost at the moment … I hope they snap out of it!’ I wrote, in text overloaded with exclamation marks and adjectives. In Poland two days later, Wrocław’s cobbled streets and its pastel-coloured architecture fail to get a mention and the tone of my writing is still inexplicably whiny. ‘Something is very wrong here. If it wasn’t for the kids and the sunshine it could be quite depressing! I wonder what we will do for a whole month!’

Wrocław was where we were staying for a while; it was home to Polish relatives I had never met before. I remember the jolt I felt when I met my Uncle Wacek for the first time. He was an older, sharper-featured replica of Dad and his heavily hooded eyes were an eerie blue version of my own. Wacek and Jasia lived in a small but spotless flat on the third floor of an inner-city block. This was the seedy Milan Kundera communist backdrop I’d always imagined and secretly feared: its stairwells, lined with graffiti, smelt of something unpleasant (could it be urine?) and led to streets of empty shops and blank-eyed people. There was little for sale in the supermarkets, certainly nothing familiar or appetising to me, and long quiet queues snaked out of dimly lit shop doorways. But in the evening, generous meals—rich soups, meat, vegetables, fruit compotes and yeasty poppy seed cakes—somehow appeared from Jasia’s cupboard-sized kitchen. The food was delicious.

Wacek and Jasia had three children, all grown, but it was their son, my older cousin Wojtek, who became my unofficial caretaker. He was a secondary school teacher with a scarily Slavic moustache and he spoke—luckily for me in this household of Poles—careful English. Within days my cousin had arranged a clandestine exchange of US dollars for cans of petrol and rolls of Polish złoty in a garage near his apartment. Maybe, I belatedly realised, he was the family member who had arranged the provisions for his mother’s menus. Wojtek and his wife Beata, a doctor, had two blond daughters, the youngest of whom seemed to spend most days in her grandparents’ tiny flat while her mother worked. I played with three-year-old Kasia—my lack of Polish didn’t bother her; she was happy to take my hand and chatter—while Wojtek watched. He seemed amused by our childish interaction, but I found his scrutiny unnerving. I wondered what he thought of me in my London jeans and silly, shiny lipstick.

Benek, another of Dad’s older brothers, was unwell and undergoing treatment for the cancer that would later kill him. We visited him one afternoon in Wrocław’s main hospital. I remember Benek’s grey face and the sadness of the men in the ward who watched our family reunion from their beds. I don’t remember anything else. ‘Was very glad to get out of that hospital,’ my journal tells me now, a permanent and shameful record of my youthful selfishness. ‘It stank of sick people. Six men crammed into a stark square room. And sauerkraut for afternoon tea!!’

From Wrocław, we took the car to Warsaw, with its strange and Disney-like old town, and Krąków, glamorous but drooping. And then we went east, as close as we could get to my father’s birthplace without a visa, to stand on the banks of a river and look across the murky water to where he really wanted to be.

We didn’t go to Russia on that trip. I drove our shiny Renault west, back to the sparkle and safety of London, of my boyfriend and my job. My father and my uncle returned to New Zealand.

I wasn’t aware then that I had visited Poland at a turning point in its history. It would never again be the traumatised and angry place I remembered. Poland had begun its transition from satellite Soviet state to democracy and two years later would hold its first post-communist free presidential election. Many of the people I met in 1988—people who fed me, gave up their beds for me, nudged me to marry, grow my hair, put on weight—would not be there the next time I was. But even as my life resumed, I knew something had shifted. I couldn’t forget my father’s ease in a country that was so foreign to me, his face and his voice finally like everyone else’s. Dad was looking for something in Poland and I didn’t know what. I wanted to be there when he found it.

Every time my birth is discussed, my father tells the same story.

‘When I got to the hospital after work, that’s when I saw you,’ he says, as if this is the only logical place for his story to start. I’ve given up asking how my young father, his fingernails still dirty from the pulp and paper mill, could happily make such a late arrival at Whakatane Maternity Annexe on that afternoon in March 1962. Things were different then, I’m always told.

‘Anyway, this nurse,’ he says, ‘she just put a baby in my arms like a parcel and said, Here you go. And so I take a look at this baby and I get such a fright.’ He has shifted to the present tense. He mimes holding a newborn in the crook of his bent arm, an awkward new father peering at his daughter’s face for the first time. Then he looks up and grins at me, his grown-up daughter, who is still listening because she likes the story and the way it makes her father so animated.

‘I just said to the nurse, Oh no, I’m sorry, but you’ve made a big mistake, this baby’s not mine. And then I tried to give the baby back to her.’ My father always laughs at this point, delighted.

‘Ha! So funny! I thought you were Chinese!’

It may have been as simple as the colour of my eyes: like my mother’s, mine are dark brown. My father had never known a brown-eyed blood relative, and his dark-eyed daughter would have been a shock. Perhaps, though, he saw something else. Perhaps it was a centuries-old genetic echo, a spooky reminder of one of the Crimean Tartar or earlier Mongol invasions of the rich lands that separated Europe and Asia. But all of my family history, maternal or paternal, is untraceable beyond a generation or two. For my father, it’s a history that starts and ends with his parents.

His mother, my grandmother, is spoken of with such respect by those who loved her—my father, his siblings, those who believe they owe their wartime survival to her—that the little that is known about her barely does justice to the scale of her legacy. There’s certainly very little about Stefania that’s tangible to me. Her pleasures, her sense of humour, the way she walked, her habits: all are mysteries. If my father is asked about her he speaks in generalisations, of her admirable qualities. Of course, Stefania must also have once