My Two Husbands
Once, when Olek, our small children and I were living in London, a gypsy came to the front door and tried to sell me my fortune. To hasten her departure rather than for want of a destiny revealed, I allowed her to read my palm and the transaction was sealed. She left. I immediately rejected what she told me about my future as a generic fortune that had nothing to do with me.
‘You will have two husbands,' she assured me. ‘And you will be very rich!' Being completely happy with one husband, and seeing no need to get another, I thought little of the prediction. Certainly riches were unlikely to come my way, so why, I thought, should the more sombre part of the prediction carry any weight? I was excused from any serious consideration of the fortune the gypsy told to me. But then it seemed to come true. Years later, I realised there were two husbands, both of them from the same part of the world, Poland.
My first husband Olek, father of three of my children, died suddenly. He left stories half-told, which in their half-telling gathered power when he was no longer here to finish them. One of the stories was his own gypsy fortune, the reading which, when he was only six, foretold his destiny. And in the slipstream of his life I am left looking at receding images, remembering fading conversations that demand to be recorded, so that they and he can keep on living, and so that I can try to work out why it is that things in my life have run the way they have. Is it Olek's death that makes him stand so strong in the lives of me and my children?
My second husband Voy is, hopefully, my last husband.
But why choose - or be chosen by, however it happens - Poles both times? Two very different men from very different lives behind the same Iron Curtain.
After a very contented childhood I was an explorative young thing in my first life, perched precariously on the brink of abandoning my stable existence for the excitement of the unknown. So my second life began a journey into the unknown, when I ejected myself from my comfort zone and entered the territory of the other. I married my first Slav.
Clumsily - but with the good heart that I have - I attempted to negotiate the secrets of my new husband's past and his culture as he led me deep into his territory and away from mine. I tried to temper my strong reactions to these new demands on my sensibilities. Geographically I was on home ground, but that ground had shifted below me. And the strange past of my first husband became, by some process of osmosis, part of my new reality.
I grappled with the shift, trying to maintain balance - to withstand, for instance, the challenge of my first and only mother-in-law, who was intense, demanding, Jewish, and into whose orbit I was spun as she exercised furious, unbridled love for her only son. As I faced the horror of the death of my young husband when I was still too young and protected to understand any sort of loss, let alone death, my mother-in-law was still there with me, and wouldn't stop crying. Her tears became one of the companions of my life.
And then my third life began, as I plunged into marriage with another Pole, and my children had to turn their gaze from the void left by their father and adjust to living with another man who spoke the same language, the same sort of English. Voy took on the job of being their father. And he stayed with me and with them as they gradually left childhood for the more threatening phase of their lives. And he's still here.
With the help of my diary, and by way of much stony ground, I see that the rivers that make up my life have flowed, precariously at times, taking me with them as I have tried to navigate through calm, and through rapids.
When Olek died it felt right to address my diary to him, as a way of keeping him included in our lives. It didn't work as I hoped it might - he seemed to have retreated too far across that mysterious border of death as I continued relentlessly in the opposite direction, into life. But occasionally he would be there in dreams, approaching then retreating. So often my diary entries will appear as an address to Olek. It is with Olek's life that I begin this book, because it explains so much - his wartime childhood was the genesis of a crucial theme of my life and the lives of my children.
The first dream letter I had from him came from a cold place. I felt a tremor of sadness, even in my sleep. It was a letter from him to me and it asked me where I was, where were the children? Why had we become separated, leaving him lonely? There was an address on the back of the envelope, but I couldn't make it out. And when I woke, asleep next to me in place of Olek, the husband of my dream, was my living husband, Voy, oblivious to my nocturnal correspondence.
Looking at Voy that night, I felt enveloped by his warm living presence. But a feeling of desolation lingered, pulling at me gently. How had the passion and love I felt f
