Cherbourg 1923
The brisk air carried a salty tang as well as the reek of seaweed floating amongst flecks of dirty foam lapping against the sea wall. Only a scant few of the outside tables at this waterfront bistro by the Quai de Caligny, overlooking the Avant Port, were occupied. At one table was a dark-suited clerk half-hidden behind his morning edition of Le Figaro. Another was table being shared by an old fisherman and his son, both swallowed up by bulky knit jumpers with identical rips at the shoulders.
At a third table sat Mariasse Knyszinski, all of nineteen, sipping her bowl of café-au-lait and savouring the sweet milky taste. The warmth of the porcelain against her palms instilled a sense of well being, playing nicely against the fizzy excitement she felt at this new adventure. She had travelled by train for a day and a half from her native Kraków to this little French seaside town.
After booking passage for steerage class on the steam liner Montmartre, she checked into the nearby Hôtel Maritime, one of the provisional accommodations newly set up for emigrants. Because of the steady rise in middle and eastern European emigration since the end of the war, Mariasse, like all third-class ticket holders, was obliged to undergo a series of medical examinations an infirmary especially set up in the hotel. After a few days, once she had been given a clean bill of health, she wrote a letter to her parents and one to Mrs. Blaustein.
The letter to her parents barely filled one side of a sheet of the hotel’s cheap stationery. It stated that she was safe, how much she loved them and how sorry she was for having hurt them. In her mind she saw her father’s dark glare of reproach and her mother’s tearful, subservient face. An only child, Mariasse knew she would forever be cast as the disobedient daughter who broke their hearts.
As it had been in Kraków, everything she couldn’t express to her parents flowed effortlessly from her pen in a long letter to Mrs. Blaustein. This was the Jewish widow who owned the dress shop in the Kazimierz district where Mariasse used to help out a few times a week. She and Mariasse’s mother (who had grown up on Gertrudy Street between the Old Town and Kazimierz) had known each other as children, sometimes playing together in the Planty Gardens. As they grew older they spoke less frequently but nevertheless took pains to stay in touch. Mrs. Knyszinski even commissioned Mrs. Blaustein to make Mariasse’s confirmation dress, unaware of the “religious irony” until it was pointed out to her by Mariasse’s father. His older brother, Witold, with his cut-and-dried attitude toward the Jews as “Christ killers”, went so far as to declare that it “smacked of sheer blasphemy.”
Even so, when Mariasse turned fifteen she began to help out part-time in the dress shop with her parents’ blessing. During the four years she worked there Mrs. Blaustein had become both a trusted friend and confidant. Under her travelling blouse Mariasse was still wearing the thin chain that held the gold Star of David her former employer had presented to her the morning they’d said their final good-byes. On another chain was her St. Christopher medal, a confirmation gift from her parents.
The tiny hotel room had smelled of lye and Mariasse managed only a few hours sleep before she was up, washed and dressed at the crack of dawn. She decided it was safe enough to leave her suitcase under the bed, but made sure her ticket and the two letters were in her pocketbook, which she tucked under her arm . Now here she sat at the bistro slowly passing the morning away until it was time to board the ship.
She watched gulls wheeling lazily against the crimson-streaked sky. Their wings stretched out like white sails as they descended closer to the pier in search of stray tidbits. Something in their swoop and soar typified for Mariasse the thrum of transiency all about her. No matter how she tried, she found it difficult to imagine that people actually lived here, were born here, settled down and died here. For her Cherbourg was a glorious link between the old life in Kraków and whatever new life was waiting across that huge expanse of glittering blue water. Cherbourg was some kind of mythical place that didn’t quite exist in the world, a sleepy and charming way station between here and there.
Her reverie was interrupted by some sailors who were gathering noisily at one of the tables, talking amongst themselves while stealing furtive glances at her. Having caught her eye, one of them smiled, showing big uneven horse’s teeth. Mariasse turned away without acknowledging the sailor and redirected her gaze toward a point far off in the distance where the sky turned darker and merged with the edge of the sea.
She imagined beyond that edge the sea became a waterfall, powerful with rushing white foam, like the pictures of Niagara Falls Peter had sent her, and somewhere under the rushing white foam was a land where she was going to find all the things that would make her happy. But most of all she would find Peter.
Peter was Cousin Piotr, the youngest son of Uncle Witold. As a teen in Kraków he insisted on calling himself Peter as a result of reading American detective magazines, like Black Mask and the Argosy, borrowed from his friend, Tadeusz, who received them in the post almost every month from a rich uncle in Pittsburgh. By immersing himself in stories such as “The Affair of the Double Thumb Print” and “The Woman with the Velvet Voice” Peter taught himself English by the age of sixteen.
Two years later in 1920, having shown much promise as a pianist, he enrolled in the Kraków Conservatory. At family gatherings, usually held in Uncle Witold’s house, Peter would perform Beethoven and Chopin as well as Paderewski, who happened to be an acquaintance of Uncle Witold’s business partner.
Peter’s great love, however, was the music of Jellyroll Morton and W. C. Handy, as well as many of their contemporaries. In Tadeusz’s bedroom the two boys listened to thick wax disc recordings of this “exotic” music (courtesy of the same uncle in Pittsburgh) on an old Tournaphone model K. Peter stared, mesmerised, into the machine’s red petalled horn - like a giant Venus Flytrap - almost visualizing the earthy rhythms and melodies that magically spilled out. Sometimes shiny as copper and at other times a shadowy blue.
This bold new music didn’t so much touch Peter as it shook awake a corner of his soul which had hitherto lain dormant as a hermit crab. Tadeusz also played the piano and got his uncle in Pittsburgh to stop sending detective novels and wax discs in favour of sheet music for such songs as “St. Louis Blues”, “Tiger Rag”, “Jelly Roll Blues”, “Darktown Strutters Ball” and countless others. But Tadeusz showed less enthusiasm and talent than Peter. By the time he entered the Jagiellonian University to study Mathematics, Tadeusz was more interested in sitting at the card tables in certain backrooms on Wislna Street than at the keyboard. He was only too happy to sell the sheet music to Peter at a favourable price.
Peter was careful to hide the music in his room and played it at the piano in the parlour only when no one was around. Early on his parents, as well as his teachers at the conservatory, made it perfectly clear that they didn’t like this savage Negro jazz. Peter was forbidden to waste his precious talent on such crude and vulgar noise.