Reckoning

To distract herself from Peter’s health, Margaret got a job at a fruit stand. At first, Magda was afraid she was losing her mother as well as her father. Soon, however, she came to enjoy visiting the market and listening to the banter of the women who worked there. Once, Magda noticed a strange tattoo on one of the woman’s arms. The woman told Magda that the tattoo was “her number” and that she received it from an evil man who wanted to kill her because she was a Jew. The other women lifted their arms to show Magda their numbers. Magda didn’t know what a Jew was or why someone would want to kill these nice ladies.

After leaving her job at the market, Margaret worked at a power tool factory. Margaret enjoyed the company of her coworkers, most of whom were English migrants. After her shift, Margaret would pick Magda up from school, and the two would walk home, cracking jokes. Margaret—an expert at the vast possibilities of the Scottish accent—was very funny. No one could compete with her wit, although once, Magda made her mother laugh with a clever one-liner; it felt like a rite of passage.

Since Margaret, Peter, Barb, and Chris left early in the day, Magda had the house to herself in the morning; she enjoyed doing what she wanted, but the isolation also made her feel like an outsider. At school, the teachers critiqued Magda’s accent. Magda knew that learning to speak with an Aussie accent was the key to acceptance, but it wasn’t until she was in her 20s that she mastered it. Embarrassed that she couldn’t speak Polish despite her Polish name, Magda set about teaching herself Polish from a book she found in the den. Peter hated Magda’s wish to learn this “useless language,” and he lost his temper when Magda asked him for help with pronunciation.

Peter determinedly assimilated to Australian culture; however, he persisted in wearing tiny shorts, which were stylish in Britain. This (and his blunt honesty) embarrassed Magda. Since her father didn’t support her choice to learn about Poland, Magda searched for a Polish role model. She landed on Marie Curie—whose Polish name, Maria Skłodowska, was similar to Magda’s. Bored by school, Magda dedicated herself to private medical study, just as Marie Curie had done; she and Chris once dissected sheep eyes from a local farm. They left the jar of rotting eyes under the bed for Margaret to find.

The Szubanskis loved books; Magda used to think that Peter liked spy novels for the escapism they offered, but it occurs to her now that he must have recognized his own life in the stories. Intent on preparing to be a doctor, Magda pored over the names of organs and bones in Peter’s anatomy book. Autopsies fascinated her; once, she re-enacted a dissection at a party of her parents’ friends.

Peter forbade Magda to read Dni Powstania (Days of Uprising), a book about the Warsaw Uprising that he sometimes looked at with friends. Once, when Magda was home alone, she took the book from its paper wrapping. The pictures confused her; they showed people with machine guns, bombed buildings, kids screaming, and a Swastika flag. Magda couldn’t believe that this ruined land had been her father’s home. However, she also envied the drama and the camaraderie the photos depicted.

While flipping through Dni Powstania, Magda came across a picture of a bundle of clothing with a hand attached; a disembodied head lay nearby. Frightened, Magda slammed the book shut. Periodically, she would will herself to look at the pictures of the strange bodies. When Magda asked Peter why the bodies looked like that, he said that they were dead and rotting. When Peter snapped that it was just a picture, Magda felt ashamed of her fear.

One day, Margaret got a third-degree burn from throwing blazing cooking oil out the door. Excited to witness her first real injury, Magda asked Peter if she could watch while he changed Margaret’s bandage. When Peter pulled back the bandage, however, the rotten smell and the messy look of Margaret’s wound sickened Magda; Peter, meanwhile, remained calm and numb.