The Sewing Class.

I never knew my grandmother. My mother’s mother died of tuberculosis after World War II when my mother was a little girl. In my mother's stories there was a knitted sweater – “made of lovely blue wool; I waited and waited and watched her make it for me and when she was done I was so happy”; of embroidered tablecloths – “so even and so intricate”; of the perfection of her technique – “her knitting was so even, almost like machine made”, and of her magnificent penmanship. My grandmother was not granted the time needed to teach her daughter to knit or crochet. My mother learnt to crochet and knit from her paternal great aunt who looked after the household after her mother died.

A treasured photo of my grandmother has possessed my thoughts; it clamors for attention. It was kept by a distant relative whom I found after a lengthy search. It is a photo of a group of teenage girls and young women with their teachers. On the back, in my grandmother neat handwriting, there is a date and: “A memento from the course.”

They sit straight backed and unsmiling under the stern eyes of the two teachers flanking their little group. Starched collars, crocheted and lace knitted sweaters, fanciful stitches hanging from their hooks, all visible under the magnifying glass’s scrutiny. There is some single crochet, some knitting, a lace collar – is it hairpin crochet? No, more like chain crochet.

The girls pose with knitting needles and crochet hooks in their hands, but they are not working with them. The yarn is wound around the girls’ left index fingers; the fingers held up straight to provide tension. They were taught the combined method, where the knits are turned around and the purls just fly off the needle. This way of knitting was a direct extension of their education to crochet which was often taught first. The yarn in wrapped on the left index finger and the right knitting needle is held the way a crochet hook is held. And – looking in the mirror I realize that their hands look exactly the way mine do when I knit.

The table in front is covered with fabrics, paper sewing patterns, a filet crochet lace table cloth, a knitted sweater; the black board on the wall behind their heads bears diagrams of a sewing pattern of a blouse. The word “measurements” and some numbers are written beside it. There is a thick legged wooden table laden with fabrics and yarn projects, and some sewing patterns; you could get quite the splinter in your leg, if you were not careful. A treadle sewing machine stands in front of the table: it has the metal legs, wheel and treadle of the ubiquitous Singer. A large piece of velvet is caught in the needle to protect it.

My grandmother sits front row center – just the way I would sit in all my university lectures! Our resemblance is uncanny – I gasped when I first saw the photo. My husband, when asked if he could identify my grandmother, answered: “I do not know which one is your grandmother, but what on earth are you doing in there?!” The same broad and high forehead, a midline step in the hairline, identical wide eyebrows and asymmetrical mouth.

A girl to my grandmother’s right wears a crochet sweater – single crochet neck band and a shell-stitch made from the bottom up; the next girl over is wearing a large crocheted lace collar covering her shoulders – she is holding a crochet hook. The girls are staring straight at the camera, except for three girls on the right who are looking off to the side – whatever caught their eye?

A lone ball of fingering weight yarn sits on top of a bolt of patterned fabric or a striped sweater. They did not use a winder; the hanks held between outstretched arms of one’s friend were wound into balls; if you constantly changed the direction you would get a perfectly round balls, the rounder the better. I look for the other balls – most of the girls have a yarn project in their hands, but only that one ball is visible. Oh! I just spotted my grandmother’s ball hiding behind the arm of the sewing machine! On the left end of the table lies a length of filet crochet lace – folded up it appears to have quite a weight and heft. Is it a bedspread? A window curtain? A tablecloth? Over the other end a thick woolen sweater is draped; it is made entirely in single crochet, the sleeves gathered into 1-1 ribbed cuffs. They knew how to make single crochet ribbing and then they would sew it onto the finished sweater.

Some of the details of the photo are only discernible with a magnifying glass: the lace pattern of the light-coloured sweater of the teacher standing in the back row, the ribbing of garment the first girl sitting on the right is knitting. I cannot make out the knitting pattern of the girl on the right, it actually looks like crocheted basketweave, but she is holding knitting needles! It looks a little like a sampler with 1-1 rib on the bottom, garter stitch in the middle and a two row seed stitch at the top. It has a long-cast on – there is quite a length of yarn hanging from the bottom corner. It was the only knit cast on used.

I have been examining the photo ever since I received it. Every now and then I pull it out of the album, and either stare at it from a distance or scrutinize it with a 8x magnifying lens. When I first saw it I thought that my grandmother was knitting, and that she did not know how to crochet and that here was the proof that she did not know how to crochet. Two years later, when I started to crochet again, I clearly saw that she was holding a crochet hook, but that she held it as if she were knitting. Then I looked at myself in the mirror holding a crochet hook and saw that she held it the same way as I do. My sister commented that I held my hook in strange way – again, until she looked more closely at the her own hand and at the way she held it herself. Recently I looked at the photo again and – it is knitting needles that I see. I see what I want to see.

In this photo, dated March 13, 1935 my grandmother is fifteen. In two more years she will be married. She will give birth to one daughter in 1937 and another – my mother – in 1941. In the meantime, a war will start, her country will first be occupied by Soviets, then two years later by Nazi Germans. Her husband will be taken prisoner and presumed dead. Her frail, elderly father-in-law will die from hunger, then her five year old daughter from meningitis. In 1943 she will escape death in the hands of nationalist thugs by crossing the river border into German-occupied Poland with her daughter. Her husband will find her there at the end of the war, she will travel even farther West to restart her life. She will make at least one lovely blue wool sweater for her surviving daughter. She will have a stillborn son, she will give birth to another daughter that will be taken from her because tuberculosis will ravage her body and turn her into a walking skeleton. She will die three years after the war, alone, quarantined at an infectious ward in a hospital far from her home town.

I know all of that, but the serious girl in the photo does not. She holds her knitting needles stiffly for the photo: this is how you hold the right needle when you are resting between rows or pattern repeats. The girls and their teachers are posing, holding themselves motionless for the long exposure needed. After the click of the camera they relaxed into themselves, dropping their hands, wiggling their backs stiff from sitting motionless, giggling and chattering, exchanging glances, making faces, turning away from the photographer. The life held captive on the film begins to move again.

A Road to the Spa.

A black-and-white postcard turned sepia, the cardboard soft with age. On its back, in a faded old-fashioned handwriting: “To dearest Haneczka, we send best wishes and as always many expressions of our fondness”, the signature illegible. It was mailed on July 26, 1937, in Niemirów, Poland; the postage stamp’s edges are frayed, but the date is decipherable. Nobody I know wrote or received it: I bought it at an internet auction.

Centered in the photo is a straight sandy tract, a tunnel in a pine forest. It is the road leading from the town to a nearby village where the health resort’s villas, pump houses and mineral springs provide water cure. My grandmother lived in the town and worked as a laundress in the spa where she also pushed elderly pensioners for walks in their chairs. My mother was born in the town during the German invasion of Soviet Union in 1941; late at night in the church cellar in the middle of the air raid of June 24th. Some time later, date unknown, her older sister died there of meningitis. After the war the two towns and their surrounding forests ended on the Ukrainian side of the freshly carved borders in Central Europe.

I visit during a summer heat wave. The village meadows are fragrant with dying grasses, storks nest on chimneys and telephone poles, bees buzz around poppies and irises in full bloom in the gardens, blood-red strawberries burst with sweetness on your tongue. Yet even in full sun the forests fill me with cold dread – I cannot stop thinking about what happened there a few decades ago. Poles and Ukrainians, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, blinded by rage and propelled by old hatreds exploded in annihilations of each other’s families and villages. Burnt sheds, stables, and homes, broken cups, dishes and children, slaughtered cows, sheep, and wives. Married couples butchered because they were of mixed origins. It went on for months during and after the war. Here, too, for three years the Nazis proceeded with their programmed murder of the Jews. And in centuries past these trees witnessed the cruelties of the Polish manor lords over Ukrainian peasants, the brutality of the Cossack uprising, the pogroms of Jews.

But in the summer of 1937 a woman is rushing past the tree trunks on the forest road. She is my grandmother. Her front tooth is missing – it fell out last Thursday after weeks of pain. It looked awful, too, all brown and black. No mouthwashes or herbs helped. The gum is healing now, but it still throbs when she bends down or lifts heavy things. And she has to do a lot of lifting in the laundry room.

In the old forest the trees have smooth trunks, straight and tall. Their branches stretch to the sky like arms calling for help. The dusty brown of the bark protects the helpless orangey pinks of the inside layers, visible in the cracks. Crowns of long, dark green needles whisper with each breath of wind – even when it seems calm they shiver, murmur. Orange flowers, sticky with pollen, glow on the grass-green tips. Sunshine fills the road, but between the trees shadows lurk and dusk lingers; in places the darkness creeps to the road’s edge. When she walks in the early morning, with the risen sun on her back and the shadows still long, the forest breathes cool air at her, even in the summer. The air smells of pine resin and new earth, but also something she cannot name – darkness, decay. Death? The primeval forest keeps its secrets and knows its future.

Yesterday she saw Piotr again. Her mother is not so sure about him, but she likes the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. He has blue eyes and blond curls where she is brown-eyed with long dark plaits; her father is Ukrainian. Ukrainians of Cossack ancestry are dark and smoky. Piotr is a carpenter’s apprentice, it’s a good trade. His uncle and godfather, the retired customs officer, will leave him his house and property: he and his wife Helena have no children. It’s probably Helena’s fault – all of Piotr’s aunts and uncles had lots of children, Piotr is one of nine. She would love to have children, yes. Not just one, like her mother did. Two girls, blond and blue-eyed, in pretty yellow dresses in church on Sunday. Yes, she will have many children. She will sew them nice clothes, she is very good at sewing, knitting and crochet, she really liked that sewing course she took a few years ago. She will keep her house nice and tidy, clean and neat. They will probably live with her mother, she will help with the children when she is not working in her store. On Sundays, they will visit Piotr’s family, spend time in Helena’s precious garden, with her roses, peonies and irises, hollyhocks and geraniums. She is so proud of that garden; well, she is proud, that one. And the rector will marry them – Helena is his housekeeper, after all. She will invite her friends from school and from work to her wedding, but who should be her bridesmaid? It has to be somebody special. Piotr’s brother Stefan will be the best man, he is the only one of his brothers and sisters who moved to town with him. And she needs to think about her dress – she will make it herself, white, of course, but simple, with long sleeves and skirt, and a veil. She’ll need to buy some white shoes – satin, may be? She can’t afford silk.

The future and the past echo in these forests. Does she hear them? Does she feel their breath when the breeze chills her bones as she hurries through the pines? Shadows? What shadows? She catches a birdsong – a sparrow, a small black point high above her head, trilling his soul out in alarm to the sun. Branches in the sky, pine resin in the air, birdsong on the breeze. She emerges at the bend in the road. The poppy-filled meadow of the spa walking grounds, drenched in the morning light, stretches before her. She is glad she has arrived.

The next day I fly home. I sit at my desk, I stare at the photo, and I see the ghosts.

The Older Sister.

A photograph, yellowed and faded, softened with age, inexpertly repaired, with fragments missing from the edges.
I am the older one – Elżbieta Maria. I stand next to my baby sister’s carriage. A smudge over my neck blots out a part of me. Or is it a fancy scarf tied in a bow? It is hard to tell, the shape is indistinct and blurred. You can’t see my hands, but I am not holding anything – no teddy, no dolly. You can’t see my feet. I am just a round face with round cheeks, in a round woolen hat tied under my chin, indistinct bangs over my forehead and scrunched up eyebrows.
You think that I am about three years old; my sister’s age places us in the winter of 41’ – 42’ and you know my date of birth: November 11, 1938. I am the first child of Piotr and Zofia. You also know that I died as a young child from meningitis, but you have not found my date of death or my grave; you are not even sure where I died.
I am imprisoned in this sixty-five year old piece of cardboard.
Let me out. Tell my story.