My husband, one of the most talented journalists in Poland, a popular TV personality and an activist of the outlawed Journalists Union, left behind a brilliant career, elderly parents and a closely knit group of friends who also refused to lend their talents to the government controlled media after the December 1981 crackdown on Solidarity.
I was in a better position. My only brother lives in the United States, and since I had worked as an interpreter, I came here with a close-to-perfect command of the English language.
There was something else that we had both left behind: a feeling of belonging and a life that we felt had a deep transcendental meaning under the harsh surface of daily hardships and the constant, nerve-wrecking game of tag with the political police. I do not think we would have left it all if it were not for our children.
If we ever get the chance, we shall leave this doomed land, my husband said on a frosty Sunday morning, Dec. 13. 1981, when the residents of Poland woke up to find their hopes for a better future shattered once again by martial law.
If we don't, our sons will never forgive us.
We did get the chance to leave, and came to the United States. We lived some months in Chicago. They were months of doubts, insecurity, loneliness, Time after time we asked ourselves why we were putting ourselves through this agony. For the sake of freedom? The corner of Pulaski and Irving Park, where we lived, was full of free people. Free, lonely old people sitting outside their run-down apartment building, sadly staring at the passing traffic. A disheveled young man sifting through the garbage. A deranged bag lady on her way to the park. At night I had a recurrent, neverending dream in which I was traveling, losing my way, losing my children, losing all my loved ones traveling on, except I could not remember where I was heading nor where I was coming from.
My husband was depressed. He whom I had always admired for his incurable optimism and joy of life. He drove a cab 15 hours a day in a wealthy Chicago suburb and came home with a new horror story each day. A woman had called the cab to take her 90-year-old, half-conscious father to the hospital.
What if something happens to him on the way? my husband had asked.
Oh, just give me a call she said. She lived in a mansion worth a million dollars and was saving on the ambulance. She did not find it necessary to accompany the old man.
Is this what our children will grow up to be? I wondered.
We had to move out of the west side neighborhood at the end of last summer. We had lived there for free, thanks to a pair of extraordinary people (Evanston residents, of course). They had not only given us a place to live in those first weeks but also a job and the feeling of relative security which comes with a regular paycheck and health coverage for the entire family.
I studied the rental classifieds. They might as well have been printed in Chinese script. I did not understand a thing. The names of the neighborhoods meant nothing to me. North, west, east or south did not make any difference. I knew nothing about transportation. I knew nothing at all. I was lost. All I knew was that in order to retain my sanity I would have to get away from this huge, overwhelming, scary city and settle in a place I could grasp and in time perhaps call home.
Evanston was the only Chicago suburb I had heard about. An American cousin had lived there years ago and had good memories of the town and its school system. (At the time my American relatives had lived in Evanston, they were scarcely immigrants struggling to start a new life: he was Time magazine's bureau chief; she, a law school graduate.)
I found a for rent ad in the paper and drove to Evanston the very next day to see the apartment. There was a European feeling to this southeast part of the town with its old, sometimes run-down apartment buildings that reminded me of home. The childrens' playlots were green and there was no concrete below the swings and ladders. (They care about the childrens' safety here, I thought to myself.)
The school looked cheerful; it did not remind me of a prison or bunker like most of the school buildings in Chicago. The apartment had a little courtyard at the back which, except for the lack of a sandbox, looked a lot like the courtyard where I played as a little girl. It looked and felt safe, and before I knew it I signed the lease. It was $460 for a one bedroom apartment, and I had no idea how we would pay such a sum every month. My husband's friend, from those long-gone days when they ran the hurdles and pole-vaulted in a Warsaw sports club, brought in a couple of mattresses. A friend of a friend donated a table and a couple of ugly vinyl chairs. My boss gave me an old TV set. A couple of garage sales did the rest.
A year had passed. A long year of fighting back tears whenever a wellmeaning woman in the laundry, library or schoolyard asks, Well, how do you like It here? It has been a year, of struggling to make new friends and then coping with the discovery that they do not need my friendship the way I need theirs, a year of frustration over a job for which I have neither the right skills nor the personality to enjoy. A year of feeling displaced.
There have been moments of despair when first my beloved grandmother and then my mother-in-law were dying in that faraway land where, according to the immigration authorities, we cannot yet return. The painful feeling of being In the wrong place, of being cut off from my roots, haunted me for months on end. I cursed the freedom that did not let me be with my loved ones in their last moments.
There have been moments of anger when our landlord sold the building and the rent went up $100. It suddenly dawned on me that I should not get too attached to this town. Sooner or later we might lose our new home because our immigrant earnings could not keep up with the Evanston rent increases.
Several weeks ago on one of those last, bright summer days, I went swimming in the evening with my sons. We watched the moon rise above the lake, and I told them that back home there is a sea that looks just as beautiful at this time of the day.
Back home? asked one son. Isn't our home here?
Home is where the four of us can be together, I responded.
I said so just in case we shall have to move again. Deep in my heart I felt he might be right.
