Читать книгу Helena Rubinstein - Michele Fitoussi - Страница 11

Helena, Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka and Erna Rubinstein: the litany of their names sounds like a nursery rhyme. They were all pretty dark-haired young women with milky white skin. The eldest and youngest were ten years apart. The atmosphere was always lively in their huge, gas-lit house: they would fight over a ribbon, a scarf; they would prance in front of the mirror. The centre of this den of females was Gitel Rubinstein: model mother and housewife, who performed miracles to make sure her family had everything they needed. Given her husband’s erratic temperament, she was often lacking housekeeping money. Gitel sighed at the thought of her brothers and sisters who lived comfortably in Kraków, Vienna, Antwerp and beyond.

There were the things they had inherited: finely carved furniture, mirrors, silver chandeliers, linen in the wardrobes and an abundance of books. But they had to skimp on everything else – soap, bread, candles, servants. So many mouths to feed were a burden on their meagre income.

Eight daughters. Eight treasures. But also eight dowries.

Each one would have to be married, to a good match, if possible. This occupied Gitel’s thoughts as soon as each was born. She was a good woman, plump with childbirth, and she wore a wig styled in the chignon customary for Orthodox Jewish wives. She scrupulously observed all the commandments of her faith, but that did not mean neglecting appearances, which counted as much as the purity of one’s soul. She taught the little girls to sew their shirts and to knit and embroider, all things Gitel excelled at, and she made the patterns for their dresses and coats herself. Above all, she taught them the art of good grooming. She showed them how to take care of their hair, which they were very proud of. One hundred strokes of the brush every night before bedtime. That way the girls could practise their counting while brushing their hair. In the Rubinstein family, not even time was squandered.

Gitel was convinced that charm and inner beauty would enable her girls to win the love of the men who would marry them. It was out of the question for her to allow her girls to wear make-up. Only low women, or actresses like the great Helena Modjeska, were allowed to wear cosmetics. But it was still possible to protect one’s face from the redness caused by the wind and frost, and remain respectable at the same time. So Gitel brought out her secret weapon.

Face cream.

Gitel’s was made from plants, spermaceti, lanolin, essence of almond and extracts of Carpathian conifer bark. Every night, especially if it had been a bitingly cold day, her daughters would line up in their nightdresses according to height and impatiently lift their little faces like baby chicks seeking their food.

‘Mama, Mama! On me! And me! No, Pauline, get out of the way, it’s my turn!’

They liked to tell stories at home, and Gitel’s story was that the cream had been made originally for Helena Modjeska by the Lykusky brothers, two Hungarian chemists who were customers of Hertzel’s. Modjeska was the most famous actress in Poland. It was highly doubtful she ever visited the Rubinstein family, despite Helena’s claims to the contrary, but the elder Lykusky brother, Jacob, probably came to dinner quite often. And he brought with him a big jar containing the precious mixture, wrapped in newspaper.

Gitel would transfer it into little ceramic pots that she stored in a cool spot in the pantry with the jars of pickles and onions. Her sense of thrift ensured the cream would last until the next delivery. The handful of beauty principles she passed on to her daughters would change the life of the eldest. Before Helena left for Australia, Gitel gave her twelve little jars, like twelve little talismans, to protect her.

Helena’s position among her siblings shaped her personality significantly. ‘When I was very young I already had to help my mother control the rebellious little troop. When you’re the eldest of eight girls, you get into the habit of running things.’1 She didn’t altogether mind this, given her domineering character. She was both a tomboy and an accomplished young lady. A steamroller full of grace.

Control and charm – you could sum Helena up in those two words. At the age of twelve she was in charge of running the household. She became the ‘department head’, buying the food and linen ‘with a spontaneous taste for what was finest and sturdiest’. In all likelihood these precocious duties shaped her talents as an organiser. ‘I was the one who had to intervene and mediate between my younger sisters and our parents, which is the best training I could have had for managing my future employees.’2 But she also had to carry out the other household tasks that their solitary servant could not handle on her own: making the beds, putting the water on to boil, fetching wood for the stove, helping the little girls to wash, overseeing their homework and separating them when they began to fight.

‘Shh, shh, silence! Papa will punish you. And if he doesn’t, I swear that I will!’

And then there was the table to set and clear, and the dishes to put away, keeping the ones for meat and dairy separate. And there were the preparations for the Sabbath and all the religious festivals – Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Passover, Sukkot, Purim, Shavuot. She had to get out the tablecloths, iron them, polish the silverware, light the candles, lay out the prayer books, keep an eye on the dinner in the kitchen – the chicken broth where the kneidels or the gefilte fish were cooking – then knead the challah bread with her mother. Gitel’s sole ambition was for her daughters to become good balaboostas, accomplished homemakers. Because it wasn’t enough just to catch a man: you had to know how to keep him.

That was clearly not Helena’s ambition: she hated being stuck at home. From early adolescence she would hurry to join her father in the store to evade the chores her mother sought to burden her with. When she left school, she quickly found her place behind the counter. She would have preferred to continue her studies, but that was not an option.

Besides, she liked going to the store. She managed much better with the customers than her father did, she could count faster than he could, and she knew the inventory, orders and amounts owed or due down to the last zloty. Hertzel was better suited for reading holy texts than for commerce, so he appreciated her energy and skill with the bookkeeping. But he also got annoyed with her natural authoritarianism. They would have to marry her off quickly, but to do that they needed a dowry, and Hertzel never managed to put aside even the tiniest amount – not for Helena or any of the other sisters. The mere thought of it made him sigh. Then he would return his attention to his old books, submitting to the will of the Almighty, who was bound to help him sooner or later.

Helena was frequently irritated by her father’s feebleness. Books, nothing but books … what was the point of all that studying if he couldn’t feed his family? On two occasions she got him out of a tight spot. The first time, she went to bargain over the purchase of 20 litres of kerosene from a supplier who lived in Lemberg, the capital of Galicia. Her father had been stuck in bed with a bad back since the day before, and Gitel had far too much to do at home to go in his place.

Hertzel could not afford to lose the contract. The shipment had been resold at twice the price to a cattle merchant who had already paid a deposit. For once they would be able to finish the month without any debts. All evening long Helena heard her parents quarrelling, her father lamenting, her mother sighing. Always the same reproaches – Gitel bemoaning their poverty, and Hertzel berating her because he was ashamed. The young girl was fed up with their arguing.

As soon as she got up in the morning she announced that she would go to Lemberg on her father’s behalf. He told her she was crazy and that the merchants would laugh in her face. Helena was so adamant that finally, with his wife’s consent, he let her take the train, although he did send the shop boy to escort her. Just before she left for the central station on Lubicz Street, Gitel looked her daughter straight in the eyes.

‘If you really want to be smart, above all you must listen. And don’t say a word more than you have to.’

Helena managed to close the deal as they had hoped, for the price Hertzel had requested. All she’d had to do was stay firm. And no one had made fun of her.

Some time later, Hertzel ordered a huge quantity of eggs from Hungary that would have to be sold off again as quickly as possible. The shipment was running late and was due to arrive at the station in Kraków the day before the feast of the Assumption, which, in devoutly Catholic Poland, meant four days of public holidays with no workers available to unload it.

The city was baking in an August heat wave. No one ventured out into the hot streets until late afternoon. The railway carriages were turning into incubators and several chicks had already hatched. Fearful of his imminent ruin, Hertzel was trying in vain to obtain a special dispensation. Gitel was moaning and wailing. Without consulting her parents, Helena decided to go straight to the stationmaster on her own: she would persuade him to unload the shipment. After half an hour of back and forth discussion, in which he did not have the last word, the stationmaster sent Helena to see the director of the railways, who was shut inside his furnace of an office sweating like a lump of lard.

The moment she came into the room, the director looked this tiny Jewish woman up and down with all the scorn she inspired in him. But Helena was so determined to get her way that she didn’t give a damn what he thought. She sniffed and hiccupped and a stream of words flowed from her lips: eggs, my father, bankrupt. Then she started all over again, until the man became dizzy.

Exhausted, the director gave the order to unload the eggs onto the platform and waved her away. Helena ran all the way across Kraków as if she had a dybbuk on her heels and arrived home dishevelled, breathless, and flushed. Without pausing to catch her breath she gave the good news to her parents, who cursed her audacity but also thanked her for it. Hertzel was saved.

Much later, she would say that she owed her early accomplishments to her youth, her inexperience and the wise advice she received from her mother. ‘My sense of triumph was a foretaste of what achievement in business could mean to me.’3

None of her efforts to change the course of their monotonous life found favour with Hertzel. Among other youthful scandals, there was an incident in which she sold the furniture from the bedroom she shared with Pauline, who was a year younger. Helena hated their huge rosewood bed: it reminded her of a catafalque and gave her nightmares. In the small hours she thought she could see ghosts, and she would grab Pauline’s hand to calm her terror. In her opinion the termite-infested bedside tables were hopelessly old-fashioned. Her parents had inherited the furniture from their parents. As children were born and the family moved from house to house they added beds, wardrobes or dressers rescued from family attics or bought for a few zloty at the flea market. And everything was arranged haphazardly, without rhyme or reason, to Helena’s despair.

She knew nearly every shop window in Stradom Street by heart, and a new furniture store had just opened. At first she just glimpsed inside, then she grew bolder and went in. There she saw a big, sober, modern bed with two matching bedside tables. ‘This is the Biedermeier style,’ the salesman told her. ‘You need look no further, miss, this is as good as any you’ll find in Vienna,’ he added, in an affected tone.

Helena ran her hand over the polished wood. She liked the texture. She knew instinctively, without ever having been taught, how to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the refined from the vulgar. Throughout her life she would demonstrate this taste for beauty that seemed to have come out of nowhere. But she did not have the means to pay for the furniture; the price was exorbitant. To persuade her, the salesman suggested she pay on credit and even offered to take her old furniture. ‘And since you seem to be in the know, I’ll sell you this armchair half price. And I’ll throw in that big standing mirror as a bonus.’

It was far too tempting. Helena haggled, something she was very good at, and managed to get an even better price. She would find a way to pay back the instalments. She picked a moment when her parents would be absent to have the furniture delivered. That way the surprise would be even greater. Luckily, Helena’s maternal grandparents, Salomon and Rebecca, had invited the entire family to spend the Sabbath in their old house on the outskirts of Kazimierz. To avoid having to go along, Helena pleaded a headache, an ailment she frequently suffered from.

Gitel was worried. Normally her daughter never missed these visits. She was Rebecca’s favourite granddaughter and the old woman always showered her with presents, such as embroidered handkerchiefs or lace collars. When Helena turned fifteen, her grandmother even gave her a string of pearls. Her sisters thought they would die of jealousy. Helena kept that necklace her entire life, and that precious gift was the beginning of her passion for jewellery. At her grandparents’ there was also Stass, the handyman. He was very gifted with his hands, and he made miniature furniture for the little girls that were perfect imitations of the real thing. Helena never tired of discovering what new treasures he had created and this fascination would lead Helena to collect doll’s houses all her life.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Gitel.

‘I’m sure,’ replied Helena. She needed peace and quiet and she would be able to rest in her room. Hertzel was calling irritably to his wife to hurry up, as she rushed to and fro, unable to bring herself to leave. ‘We’re going to be late,’ he shouted; if his daughter wanted to sulk that was her business. Gitel gave in and went to join the rest of the family already crowded into the carriage.

All these interruptions made them late. Helena went to the window several times, filled with anxiety. The cart with its load of furniture was due to arrive any minute. Luckily, her family turned the corner at the very moment the shopkeeper came to unload his delivery. Helena spent the entire day arranging everything to her taste, making the bed and covering it with the counterpane she had just embroidered. Like her mother, she was very good at needlework.

Then she sat down to wait for her parents, confident that they would be pleased.

She had underestimated her father: Hertzel stood stock still at the threshold to the room. There could no longer be any doubt: his daughter was meshuggah, stark, raving mad. A dybbuk must have turned her head. To go selling the family furniture! What sort of behaviour was that! Who did she deal with? A store on Stradom Street? Who did she think she was! It must have cost an arm and a leg! Hertzel ordered her to follow him and rushed off to the store to return the furniture before it was too late.

Once again she had to obey her father. How long would this last? ‘Until you get married,’ replied Gitel firmly. ‘And after that, you will have to obey your husband.’

‘Yes, but who’s going to want her?’ said Hertzel bitterly when Helena had her back turned. ‘Everyone knows how rebellious she can be. She’s already turned down four suitors. And she is well over twenty!’

‘Without a substantial dowry, she won’t find a good match,’ retorted Gitel. ‘At her age she’ll only find other women’s cast-offs. And don’t forget there are seven more after her who are waiting their turn.’

Hertzel pretended he hadn’t heard. Gitel went to see the matchmakers, appealed to friends of friends, alerted all of Kazimierz and the immediate surroundings, Podgorze and Dukla, where she had been born, and in her agitation wondered if she shouldn’t send emissaries to Lemberg. Finally, someone found her the one. Schmuel, a well-to-do old widower who lived in Kraków, in the Christian neighbourhood, agreed to marry their daughter without a dowry. He had seen her several times at the synagogue and found her very much to his liking.

Hertzel was relieved when his wife told him the news. Schmuel seemed an excellent match. The man would take their daughter off their hands and give her two or three children to start with. Thanks to him the she-devil would calm down. Now all that remained was to convince her.

The young woman listened first to her father and then to her mother. She looked at the two of them; for once she was speechless. She wasn’t saying anything; that was a good sign, thought Hertzel. Gitel was more circumspect. She knew her daughter: this stillness did not bode well. Besides, hadn’t she just shaken her head? And what’s that she was murmuring? It was out of the question? That she would never marry that … that what? Not him, nor anyone else for that matter?

‘But what do you want?’ asked Hertzel, exasperated.

‘Stanislaw.’

Astonished, Hertzel turned to his wife, who shrugged, as much in the dark as he was.

Stanislaw was a medical student who Helena claimed to have met outside the university. She went there from time to time, to wander around and daydream that she belonged to these groups of laughing, talking students who never paid her the slightest attention. They all had presence, but none could compare with Stanislaw. Curly hair and eyes like the skies of a Kraków summer – if only they could see him, in his frock coat with gold buttons … a real prince.

She had probably never even spoken to him. How could she go near him, with a father who was so particular about who she met? But one of her girlfriends who knew the young man had pointed him out to Helena one day when they were walking together. So eager was Helena for romance that she was sure that it was love at first sight. But that was not something she was prepared to tell her parents. On the contrary, she made things up, implying there was already something quite serious between her and Stanislaw. Anything rather than marry Schmuel.

At that point Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein got extremely angry. He paced back and forth in the living room, shouting, ranting and raving against his daughter.

‘Shoyn gening, that’s enough! You will obey me!’

Gitel sat on the worn taffeta sofa wringing her hands. Her round face bobbed up and down to the rhythm of her husband’s steps. ‘Oy gevald, what are we going to do with you?’ she said over and over again through her tears.

‘She spends much too much time away from home, how many times do I have to tell you?’ said Hertzel reproachfully, overlooking the fact that he was usually the one who kept his daughter out of the house.

Helena was silent, but her mind was racing. She couldn’t bear the idea of a life trapped in Kraków, where she was in love with an unattainable young man but was threatened with the prospect of marrying another. She would be condemned to the same deathly boring fate as her mother, her aunts, her grandmothers, and all those generations of women before her: countless children, monotonously repetitive Sabbaths, endless prayers and nothing but submission.

Tradition could not be changed. Particularly not to please young women. ‘She’s the eldest, she must be the first to marry. Otherwise, how will we find husbands for the others?’ shouted Hertzel. ‘You have already turned down so many good matches! Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a pretentious nuisance!’

Helena could hear her sisters whispering behind the parlour door. Not one of them would come to her rescue, for they were all terrified by their father’s shouting. Besides, Helena had gone too far. She wouldn’t get out of it this time.

Helena lifted her chin and stood tall like a rooster preparing for battle. Maybe she couldn’t have Stanislaw, but she wasn’t about to have old, bald Schmuel, either. At the age of twenty-one she was no longer a little girl. No one else had the right to make up her mind for her. Helena ran out of the room, hurtled past her sisters, slammed the door and locked herself in her room. She collapsed on her bed, sobbing with rage. I hate them. I want to leave. Everything here is old and ugly and poor, and nothing ever changes. If I stay here I’ll die.

So Helena left.

She was amazed she found the courage. She sought refuge in Kraków with her aunt Rosa Silberfeld Beckman, one of Gitel’s sisters, who agreed to take her in for a few months. Not more than that, she warned; just time enough for Helena to find her bearings.

Helena had no intention of living in Rosa’s dreary little house, or sharing a bedroom with her cousin Lola, for long. She had other ambitions. One of her mother’s sisters, Chaja Silberfeld, lived in Vienna, where she was married to Liebisch Splitter, a furrier who ran a huge store with his three brothers. The magnificent Chaja invited young Helena to come and stay with her.4 Helena would help her aunt to look after the house and work at her uncle’s business.

The Splitters lived more comfortably than her parents. Their house was more spacious, their furniture more modern. Liebisch had a keen business sense; he was not a dreamer like Hertzel, and didn’t spend his days with his nose in a book. He was making his fortune. Her cousins were kind to her, and Vienna was a real capital, with a wealth of museums, theatres, cafés and concert halls. Kraków was provincial in comparison.

Helena improved her knowledge of German and learned the basics of the luxury retail trade. There was no one like her for latching on to a customer, keeping her there and selling her the most expensive fur. She liked wearing them too. There is a photograph from those early years showing Helena posing in a black astrakhan coat.

Two years sped by. Helena had no time for leisure. She was working.

Her only entertainment was a ritual stroll along the banks of the Danube or in the Prater Gardens on the Sabbath. In response to Gitel’s pleas, her aunt had introduced her to a few young men, but Helena turned them all down. Chaja Splitter did not insist. Her niece had made herself indispensable at the shop.

Helena wouldn’t speak to her father, but continued to write to her mother. In all her letters Gitel asked the same question: When do you plan to get married? Helena invariably evaded the question; marriage wasn’t a woman’s only fate. Her sisters’ letters brought some consolation, but what they told her gave her no desire to return to Kraków. Nothing ever seemed to change there.

Selling furs was no life either. Not for her in any case. It was time to move on. Her cousin Eva, the daughter of her uncle Bernhard Silberfeld, Gitel’s brother, had begun to write to her on a regular basis. Eva’s mother had died young, and she had lived for a long time with Helena’s family, like a ninth sister. When they were children they had been very close.

Eva had joined her father in Australia and had married Louis Levy, a violent alcoholic who raped and beat her and on two occasions nearly killed her. Somehow Eva found the strength to file for divorce. In her letters she asked Helena for help in looking after her three small children. Theodore, the youngest, was still an infant.

Australia? Helena had thought about it from time to time without really dwelling on it. She knew very little about that huge colonial country, but it definitely seemed an attractive option. When Eva described the vast amounts of space, the unending wilderness, the modern cities, Helena dreamed of freedom.

She gave it some thought, then confided in her aunt, who in turn spoke to her husband about it. They considered it to be an excellent plan. The Splitters were going to move to Antwerp, and would have no room for Helena, which meant that before long they would be leaving their niece without a job or a roof over her head. She didn’t want to go with them anyway.

So Chaja wrote to Gitel, and everyone agreed: Helena should emigrate. As usual, later in life she would embellish the reasons for her departure: ‘For a long time, since I was a child, it had been one of my dreams to go to Australia. My uncles had settled there before and our imaginations had been fed on letters from this remote land.’5 Her decision to go into exile so far away would allow her to shape the legend of her adventurous life as she saw fit. If she was leaving, it was because she wanted to. She didn’t want to owe anything to anyone.

It was out of the question to let anyone suspect that it was her family who wanted to get rid of her by sending her thousands of miles away. Everyone viewed the Australian solution as an honourable way out for an unmarriageable young rebel. Alteh moid, old maid: that was the fate in store for her. But perhaps in the outback she might still meet a gvir, a rich husband, who would be willing to take her on despite her age, as Gitel never stopped hoping.

Helena let them say what they liked for fear they might change their mind. Once she was in Australia she would be too far away for them to come pestering her with that marriage business.

Gitel sold a piece of jewellery, one of the few she had left, and sent Helena the money with twelve jars of her precious face cream. Helena packed them in her suitcase beneath her dresses of pleated silk. The Splitters and other members of her family contributed to her purse.

Helena was able to buy a ticket in cabin class without dipping into her savings. And one day, more alone and more determined than ever, she boarded the train for the port of Genoa in Italy.