The Winter Guest
The Winter Guest
Pam Jenoff
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN'S TALE OUT NOWLove will tear them apart…Helena and Ruth Nowak are like chalk and cheese: one staunchly outspoken and independent, the other gentle and caring. Caught up in the struggle of Nazi occupied Poland, the sisters have bound together and created an enviable bond that can’t be broken. Or so they thought…When Helena discovers a Jewish Allied paratrooper, wounded but alive, she risks the safety of herself and her family to hide him. As her feelings for the solider grow deeper, she finds her loyalties torn.Outraged at this impulsive choice that endangers them all, mild-mannered Ruth finds herself becoming increasingly jealous of Helena.As tensions are sparked, a singular act of betrayal unleashes a chain of events that will endanger them all and reverberate for decades to come.From hardship and heartbreak, this gut-wrenching tale puts to the test the ties of sisterhood in the shadow of WW2.Praise for Pam Jenoff:‘ heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ – Heat‘Must read’ – Daily Express
A stirring novel of first love in a time of war and the unbearable choices that could tear sisters apart, from the celebrated author of Kommandant’s Girl
Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation. The constant threat of arrest has made everyone in their village a spy, and turned neighbor against neighbor. Though rugged, independent Helena and pretty, gentle Ruth couldn’t be more different, they are staunch allies in protecting their family from the threats the war brings closer to their doorstep with each passing day.
Then Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village, wounded, but alive. Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam—a Jew—but Helena’s concern for the American grows into something much deeper. Defying the perils that render a future together all but impossible, Sam and Helena make plans for the family to flee. But Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy her choices have sparked in Ruth, culminating in a singular act of betrayal that endangers them all—and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate across continents and decades.
Praise for PAM JENOFF (#ulink_f43a2fd6-1ec8-54c1-b7d6-45a0b41abbd3)
‘This love story will melt you.’
—Company magazine on The Ambassador’s Daughter
‘This is historical romance at its finest.’
—Publishers Weekly on Kommandant’s Girl
‘In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanising the unfathomable as well as the heroic.’
—Booklist
‘Poignant and intense’
—Good Book Guide on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘Jenoff explores the immediate aftermath of World War II with sensitivity and compassion, shedding light on an often overlooked era of European history. She expertly draws out the tension and illustrates the danger and poverty of Eastern Europe as it falls under communism. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.’
—Library Journal on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘… well constructed and a real page-turner’
—Birmingham Jewish Weekly on The Diplomat’s Wife
PAM JENOFF is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Kommandant’s Girl, which also earned her a Quill Award nomination. Along with a bachelor degree in International Affairs from George Washington University and a Master’s degree in History from Cambridge, she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department in Europe, as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon and as a practising attorney. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.
Visit Pam at www.pamjenoff.com (http://www.pamjenoff.com)
Also by Pam Jenoff (#ulink_2a400dc9-67e7-5dd7-8cc6-c65a243d13b2)
KOMMANDANT’S GIRL
THE DIPLOMAT’S WIFE
THE AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER
For Mom,
who still makes our lives better every single day.
Contents
Cover (#ueb1ba5fd-5a67-59d0-8363-db52061577e1)
Back Cover Text (#ub58f1258-76b3-5531-b897-44034ccccba3)
Praise for PAM JENOFF (#uc5f90ace-f4f3-5cf0-b402-98edf2488884)
About the Author (#ueeb0d8df-431c-5652-af2b-776fd88a878d)
Also by Pam Jenoff (#ulink_1ec4068c-081e-5545-b236-cf36a0eb0ef8)
Title Page (#ub501f937-674f-5468-bc4f-f7ef74dbdf15)
Dedication (#ue513789f-063b-5f98-9a19-393e0542514e)
Prologue (#u983f9064-fb16-5c66-b620-7f33e4e4ee1d)
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Prologue (#ulink_340e6bc5-b0e4-549b-bc5e-ed8a909e9a31)
New York, 2013
“They’re coming around again,” Cookie says in a hushed voice. “Knocking on doors and asking questions.” I do not answer, but nod as a tightness forms in my throat.
I settle into the worn floral chair and tilt my head back, studying the stucco ceiling, the plaster whipped into waves and points like a frothy meringue. Whoever said, “There’s no place like home” has obviously never been to the Westchester Senior Center. One hundred and forty cookie-cutter units over ten floors, each a six hundred and twenty square foot L-shape, interlocking like an enormous dill-scented honeycomb.
Despite my issue with the sameness, it isn’t an awful place to live. The food is fresh, if a little bland, with plenty of the fruit and vegetables I still do not take for granted, even after so many years. Outside there’s a courtyard with a fountain and walking paths along plush green lawns. And the staff, perhaps better paid than others who perform this type of dirty and patience-trying work, are not unkind.
Like the white-haired black woman who has just finished mopping the kitchen floor and is now rinsing her bucket in the bathtub. “Thank you, Cookie,” I say from my seat by the window as she turns off the water and wipes the tub dry. She should be in a place like this with someone caring for her, instead of cleaning for me.
Coming closer, Cookie points to my sturdy brown shoes by the bed. “Walking today?”
“Yes, I am.”
Cookie’s eyes flicker out the window to the gray November sky, darkening with the almost-promise of a storm. I walk almost every day down to the very edge of the path until one of the aides comes to coax me back. As I stroll beneath the timeless canopy of clouds, the noises of the highway and the planes overhead fade. I am no longer shuffling and bent, but a young woman striding upward through the woods, surrounded by those who once walked with me.
And I keep a set of shoes by the bed all of the time, even when snow or rain forces me to stay indoors. Some habits die hard. “How’s Luis?” I ask, shifting topics.
At the mention of her twelve-year-old grandson, Cookie’s eyes widen. Most of the residents do not bother to learn the names of the ever-changing staff, much less their families’. She smiles with pride. As she raises a hand to her breast, the bracelet around her wrist jangles like ancient bones. “He made honor roll again. I’m about to go get him, actually, if you don’t need anything else...”
When she has gone, I look around the apartment at the bland white walls, the venetian blinds a shade yellower with age. Not bad, but not home. Home was a brownstone in Park Slope, bought before the neighborhood had grown trendy. It had interesting cracks in the ceiling, and walls so close I could touch both sides of our bedroom if I stretched my arms straight out. But there had been stairs, narrow and steep, and when my old-lady hips could no longer manage the climb, I knew it was time to go. Kari and Scott invited me to move into their Chappaqua house; they certainly have the room. But I refused—even a place like this is better than being a burden.
I look across the parkway at a strip mall now past its prime and half-vacant, wondering how to spend the day. The rest of my life rushed by in an instant, but time stretches here, demanding to be filled. There are activities, if one is inclined, knitting and Yiddish and aqua fitness and day trips to see shows. But I prefer to keep my own company. Even back then, I never minded the silence.
One drop, then another, comes from the kitchen faucet that Cookie did not manage to shut. I stand with effort, grimacing at the dull pain that shoots through my thigh, the wound that has never quite healed properly over more than a half century. It hurts more intensely now that the days have grown shorter and chilled.
Outside a siren wails and grows closer, coming for someone here. I cringe. Now, it is not death I fear; each of us will get there soon enough. But the sound takes me back to earlier times, when sirens meant only danger and saving ourselves mattered.
As I start across the room, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. My hair has migrated to that short curly style all women my age seem to wear, a fuzzy white football helmet. Ruth would have resisted, I’m sure, keeping hers long and flowing. I smile at the thought. Beauty was always her thing. It was never mine, and certainly not now, though I’m comfortable in my skin in a way that I lacked in my younger years, as if released from an expectation I could never meet. I did feel beautiful once. My eyes travel to the lone photograph on the windowsill of a young man in a crisp army uniform, his dark hair short and expression earnest. It is the only picture I have from that time. But the faces of the others are as fresh in my mind, as though I had seen them yesterday.
A knock at the door jars me from my thoughts. The staff has keys but they do not just walk in, an attempt to maintain the deteriorating charade of autonomy. I’m not expecting anyone, though, and it is too early for lunch. Perhaps Cookie forgot something.
I make my way to the door and look through the peephole, another habit that has never left me. Outside stand a young woman and a uniformed policeman. My stomach tightens. Once the police only meant trouble. But they cannot hurt me here. Do they mean to bring me bad news?
I open the door a few inches. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Nowak?” the policeman asks.
The name slaps me across the cheek like a cold cloth. “No,” I blurt.
“Your maiden name was Nowak, wasn’t it?” the woman presses gently. I try to place how old she might be. Her low, dishwater ponytail is girlish, but there are faint lines at the corners of her eyes, suggesting years behind her. There is a kind of guardedness that I recognize from myself, a haunted look that says she has known grief.
“Yes,” I say finally. There is no reason to hide who I am anymore, nothing that anyone can take from me.
“And you’re from a village in southern Poland called...Biekowice?”
“Biekowice,” I repeat, reflexively correcting her pronunciation so one can hear the short e at the end. The word is as familiar as my own name, though I have not uttered it in decades.
I study the woman’s nondescript navy pantsuit, trying to discern what she might do for a living, why she is asking me about a village half a world away that few people ever heard of in the first place. But no one dresses like what they are anymore, the doctors eschewing white coats, other professionals shedding their suits for something called “business casual.” Is she a writer perhaps, or one of the filmmakers Cookie referenced? Documentary crews and journalists are not an uncommon site in the lobby and hallways. They come for the stories, picking through our memories like rats through the rubble, trying to find a few morsels in the refuse before the rain washes it all away.
No one has ever come to see me, though, and I have never minded or volunteered. They simply do not know who I am. Mine is not the story of the ghettos and the camps, but of a small village in the hills, a chapel in the darkness of the night. I should write it down, I suppose. The younger ones do not remember, and when I am gone there will be no one else. The history and those who lived it will disappear with the wind. But I cannot. It is not that the memories are too painful—I live them over and over each night, a perennial film in my mind. But I cannot find the words to do justice to the people that lived, and the things that had transpired among us.
No, the filmmakers do not come for me—and they do not bring police escorts.
The woman clears her throat. “So Biekowice—you know of it?”
Every step and path, I want to say. “Yes. Why?” I summon up the courage to ask, half suspecting as I do so that I might not want to know the answer. My accent, buried years ago, seems to have suddenly returned.
“Bones,” the policeman interjects.
“I’m sorry...” Though I am uncertain what he means, I grasp the door frame, suddenly light-headed.
The woman shoots the policeman a look, as though she wishes he had not spoken. Then, acknowledging it is too late to turn back, she nods. “Some human bones have been found at a development site near Biekowice,” she says. “And we think you might know something about them.”
1 (#ulink_76e6affc-a1e6-59c2-b022-f10b8a8716d3)
Poland, 1940
The low rumbling did not rouse Helena from her sleep. She had been dreaming of makowiec, the poppy seed rolls Mama used to make, thick and warm with a dusting of sugar. So when the noise grew louder, intruding on her dream and causing her hands to tremble, she clung tighter to the bread, drawing it hurriedly to her mouth. But before she could take a bite, a crash rattled the house and a dish in the kitchen fell and shattered.
She sat bolt upright, trying to see through the darkness. “Ruth!” Helena shook her sister. Ruth, who was curled up in a warm ball with her arms wrapped around the three slumbering children between them, had always slept more soundly. “Bombs!” Immediately awake, Ruth leaped up and grabbed one of their younger sisters under each arm. Helena followed, tugging a groggy Michal by the hand, and they raced toward the cellar as they had rehearsed dozens of times, not bothering to stop for the shoes lined up at the foot of the bed.
Helena scrambled down the ladder first, followed by Michal. Then Ruth passed five-year-old Dorie below before climbing down herself, the baby wrapped around her neck. Helena dropped to the ground and pulled Dorie onto her lap, smelling the sour milk on the child’s breath. She cringed as the inevitable wetness of the muddy earth seeped through her nightclothes, then braced herself for the next explosion. She recalled the horrors she’d heard of the Warsaw bombings and hoped that the cottage could withstand it.
“Is it a storm?” Dorie asked, her voice hushed with apprehension.
“Nie, kochana.” The child’s body relaxed palpably in Helena’s arms. Dorie could not imagine something worse than a storm. If only it were that simple.
Beside her, Ruth trembled. “Jeste´s pewna?” Are you certain there were bombs?
Helena nodded, then realized Ruth could not see her. “Tak.” Ruth would not second-guess her. The sisters trusted each other implicitly and Ruth deferred to her where their safety was concerned. Michal leaned his tangle of curls against her shoulder and she hugged him tightly, feeling his ribs protrude beneath his skin. Twelve years old, he seemed to grow taller every day and their meager rations simply couldn’t keep up.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty, without further noise. “I guess it’s over,” Helena said, feeling foolish.
“Not bombs, then.”
Helena could sense her sister’s lips curling in the darkness. “No.” She waited for Ruth’s rebuke for having dragged them needlessly from bed. When it did not come, Helena stood and helped Dorie up the ladder. Together they all climbed back into the bed that had once belonged to their parents.
Helena thought of the noises early the next morning as she made her way up the tree-covered hill that rose before their house. The early-December air was crisp, the sky heavy with foreboding of the harsher weather that would soon come. It had not been her imagination—she was sure of that. She had heard the drone of the airplane flying too low and the sound that followed had been an explosion. But she could see for miles from this vantage point, and when she peered back over her shoulder, the tiny town and rolling countryside were untouched, the faded rooftops and brown late-autumn brush she had known all her life showing no signs of damage.
She was halfway up the hill when a rooster crowed. Helena smiled smugly, as though she had outplayed the animal at its own game. Pausing, she turned and scanned the horizon again, gazing out at the rolling Małopolska hills. Beyond them to the south sat the High Tatras, their snowcapped peaks obscured by mist. She gazed up at the half crescent moon that lingered against the pale early-morning sky. The wind blew then and the moon seemed to duck behind some silvery gray clouds, casting light around the edges.
Helena bent to untangle the frayed hem of her skirt from the tops of her boots with annoyance. Her eyes dropped once more. Biekowice was just one of a dozen or so villages surrounding the larger town of My´slenice, spokes on a wheel fanning across the countryside. The entire region had been part of the Austrian empire not thirty years earlier and the latticed, red roof houses still gave it a slightly Germanic feel. There was one road into town, feeding into a cluster of streets, which wound claustrophobically around the market square like a noose. Another road led out just as quickly. A patchwork of farms dotted the outskirts, gray smoke wafting from their chimneys to form a halo above.
Shifting the small satchel she carried, Helena continued along the western path, a pebble-strewn route that climbed upward toward the main road. In the stream that ran alongside the path, water gurgled. Her footsteps fell into an easy rhythm. Despite her mother’s admonitions, Helena had escaped to the woods frequently as a child. In the confines of their small cottage, she bounced about restlessly like a rubber ball, with nowhere for her energy to go. But this was the one place she could be by herself and truly feel free.
Pine needles crackled beneath her feet, breaking the stillness, their scent mixing with more than a hint of smoke. What brush or refuse could the farmers be burning now? Everything, even items once discarded, might have some use. Leaves and twigs could, if not fuel a fire, at least make it burn longer, stretch the logs or make them hotter when the wood in the pile was damp. She scoured the ground now as she walked, looking for dropped berries or nuts or even acorns that might be used for tea. But the earth here was picked bare by the animals, as ravenous and desperate as she.
The war had broken out more than fifteen months earlier, and for a while, despite the warnings that crackled nonstop across the radio, first in Polish and later in German, it seemed as though it might not have happened at all. Though their small village was less than twenty kilometers from Kraków, little had changed other than the occasional passing of military trucks on the high road outside town. It was the blessing, Helena reflected, of living in a place so sleepy as to be of no strategic value. But the hardships had come, if not the Germans themselves: herds of cattle and other livestock disappeared in the night, reportedly over the western border. Coal stores were requisitioned and sent to the front to help the war effort. And an unusually cruel summer drought had contributed to the misery, leaving little to be canned for winter storage.
She reached the paved road that led toward the city. It was deserted now, but exhaust hung freshly in the air, suggesting a car or wagon had passed recently. Helena’s skin prickled. She could not afford to encounter anyone now. She looked longingly back toward the trees, but taking the steep, winding forest path would only slow her down.
As she started forward, Helena’s thoughts turned to the previous evening. “Don’t go,” Ruth had begged as they readied the children for bed. They’d worked seamlessly in tandem as they’d completed the familiar grooming chores, like two appendages of the same body. “It’s dangerous.” She accidentally pulled Dorie’s braid too hard, causing her to squeal.
Ruth’s objection was familiar. She had fought Helena since she’d first proposed going to the city, continuing Tata’s weekly pilgrimage after his death. It was not so much that the half-day trek was physically demanding; Helena had navigated the steep, rocky countryside with her father all her life. But the Nazis had forbidden Poles from traveling beyond the borders of their own provinces without work passes. If they noticed Helena and asked questions, she could be arrested.
“What other choice do we have?” Helena had asked practically, pulling the nightdress over Karolina’s hair, savoring her freshly washed smell. They did baths twice a week, Karolina first, then the older children and Ruth and finally Helena, scrubbing as well as she could in the cool, filmy water after the rest had gone to bed. “We have to make sure Mama eats.” And is not mistreated, she added silently. The care at the sanatorium was minimal, the resources scarce. She hadn’t told Ruth of the times she’d turned up to find their mother missing her socks or lying in her own excrement, risking infection of the bedsores she persistently developed from not being turned.
Ruth had not answered, but continued unbraiding Dorie’s hair, lips pursed in conflict. Helena knew that Ruth found the notion of Mama shut away in some city hospital alone unbearable, and that Helena checking on her each week gave her some comfort. Ruth feared the outside world, though. She had responded to everything that had happened by closing off and drawing within.
Helena, on the other hand, wanted to see the world. Her mind reeled back to an earlier trip to the city. It was a fine fall day, some leaves still orange on the trees, others giving a satisfying crunch beneath her feet. She had passed the turnoff for the city and it was a good two kilometers down the road before she realized she was on the path that would lead away from Biekowice for good. Ruth’s face had flashed in her mind then and Helena had stopped, guilt-stricken. She had been distracted, she told herself, and accidentally missed the turn. But she knew it was something more—for a moment she was actually leaving, without looking back. She had not taken that path again, but each trip she stopped and looked longingly down the road, wondering how far she could actually go.
Helena was jolted from her thoughts by a loud noise, a giant’s foot crunching down on a house. Ahead, a German jeep, machine gun mounted on the front, blocked the roadway. Helena leaped back into the roadside brush, catching her hand on something jagged. She stifled a cry as a thorn cut through her worn glove and into her skin.
As blood seeped through the wool, Helena berated herself silently for her carelessness in not clinging to the cover of the trees that lined the road. She crouched low to the ground, not daring to breathe. But it was too late: the gun mounted atop the jeep turned toward her with a creak. A soldier stood behind it, his gaze seeming to focus just above her. He shielded his eyes, searching the forest. This was the closest Helena had come to the war and, despite her terror, she found herself studying the man. He was ruddy faced and ordinary; save for the uniform and gun, he might have been one of the loggers down at the mill.
The soldier’s eyes narrowed, a mountain wolf hunting its prey. A hand seemed to grip Helena’s throat, squeezing. Would he arrest her or shoot her here? She was suddenly desperate to be in the house that an hour ago she had so eagerly escaped. Her heart pounded as she imagined her death. Ruth would be sad, or maybe cross. “I told you so,” her twin might say if she were here now, a smug smile playing about her full lips. Ruth liked to be right more than just about anything and Helena seemed to always give her reason by spilling or breaking something. Helena pictured Michal, wise beyond his years, comforting his sisters. But the little ones were closer to Ruth, depended on her for their care. And they had been so battered by the loss of their parents that they might weather this additional blow without much grief.
Helena felt against her side the cool metal of the knife she’d taken from Tata’s hunting kit and tucked in the waist of her skirt. She carried it in case she encountered a wolf, but now an image seized her of drawing it and slashing the German’s throat.
A minute passed, then another. Finally, the man sat down and started the ignition. As the jeep started in the other direction, Helena slumped against a tree, trying to catch her breath.
When the sound of the engine had faded, Helena stepped out from the bushes and scanned the now-deserted road. She didn’t dare continue this way now. Perhaps Ruth had been right about the danger of the trip and she should return home. But she imagined Mama alone in the hospital and knew that she had no choice. She doubled back to the path where it emerged from the woods. Steeling herself, Helena stepped into the forest and the welcome shelter of the trees that loomed overhead as she started toward the steep pass over the hills.
2 (#ulink_91ef3335-ce18-57f4-965d-343d54e71f6f)
At the sound of the door clicking shut, Ruth snapped her eyes open and tightened her arms around the children. She strained without success to see in the darkness, instantly struck by the sense of emptiness beside her. The bed was a bit cooler and the mattress did not sink as heavily as usual. Helena was gone. She had left for the city, this time without nudging Ruth as she usually did. And she had gone earlier, though perhaps that was not so strange, given the shortening days and the need to get back more quickly before nightfall.
Ruth shifted with effort, weighing the void she always felt in Helena’s absence. Michal’s head was on her shoulder, Dorie holding to her ankle and Karolina flung across her chest. The children seemed to gravitate toward her instinctively, even while sleeping. They were curled around her like puppies now, sweaty fingers clinging to her arm, cold toes pressing against her side. They had slept like this since their parents had gone, not only for warmth and to comfort the little ones, but also to keep everyone near in case of bombs like the ones Helena thought she had heard the previous night, or God only knew what else. Usually she found comfort in their closeness. But now they seemed cloying and heavy, making each breath an effort.
Disentangling herself carefully, Ruth donned her housecoat and slippers. She made her way to the kitchen, savoring the easy movements of her now-free limbs. She pulled back the shutters to watch as her sister climbed the hill. Her stomach fluttered anxiously. She had never quite gotten used to Helena’s absences. They had always been together, and in some hazy memory she could remember looking up from her mother’s breast to see the roundness of her sister’s head, eyes locking as they fed. Being without her was an appendage missing.
“Don’t go,” she wanted to shout as Helena grew smaller. They had sworn to Mama that they would keep the family together, and each time Helena ventured out to Kraków, risking arrest or worse, they were putting that promise in jeopardy. Her mind cascaded, as it always did, to the worst-case scenario: without Helena, Ruth would not be able to sustain the family and the children would have to be placed in an orphanage, where they would surely remain because no one was taking on extra mouths to feed these days.
As Helena disappeared, seemingly swallowed by the thick pine trees, Ruth was struck by an unexpected touch of envy. What was it like to just walk away, escape the house and the children and their needs for a few hours? Generally Ruth liked the comfort of their home with all of its memories and had no interest in venturing beyond the front gate. But now she imagined striding through the brisk morning air, arms free and footsteps light. Did Helena ever want to keep going and not come back?
Pushing away her uneasiness, Ruth walked to the kitchen and began preparing the ersatz coffee, knowing even as she did that the bitter mixture of ground acorns and grain would do little to stave off her exhaustion. She slept so poorly these days, waking at every creak. Helena had always been the one with the vivid dreams, while her own sleep was deep and uninterrupted. Now her nights were shattered with dark images of holding on to a tree, trying not to get blown away by a storm with winds so fierce they lifted her from her feet, seeming to pull her by the ankles and threatening to tear her in two.
She dreamed of the odd things, too—not food dreams like the ones Helena and the children often discussed, describing in mouthwatering detail the cakes and breads as if doing so might cause them to actually appear. Instead, Ruth dreamed of stockings, the smooth silk kind, well-woven without any holes or pulls. Nylons, she’d heard them called on the radio. They talked of German soldiers giving them to the girls. She sniffed. Piotr had not given her any gifts, even when she’d knitted him the scarf. He had talked about making her something for her birthday or Christmas, but their courtship hadn’t lasted that long.
Setting the coffeepot with the rusted handle on the stove, she looked around the house, their one saving grace. Built by their grandfather over the course of a decade, it was made of stone, and sturdy enough to keep out the harshest of weather. There was a large living room with a wide-beam oak floor and fireplace, and the lone bedroom off the back. Beside a faded picture of the Virgin Mary, a ladder climbed to the loft where the children had slept when their family had still been whole. Ruth saw an image like a long-forgotten dream of Tata playing with Helena on the floor, roaring with laughter as she and Mama looked on. They had been too happy to know how poor they were. Ruth had joined in, too, sometimes when the play was not as rough. Other times, she had watched from the side, wishing she could be a part of the game but too timid to play.
Seeing the house clearly now, Ruth began mentally inventorying the cleaning and decorating that needed to be done for Christmas. Once she had looked forward to the holiday so eagerly. Now it felt an effort, the idea of celebrating without their parents inconceivable. But they had to keep to their traditions as much as possible for the little ones’ sake.
There were other things that had to be done before deep winter set in, too: Helena would have to reseal the windows and repair the chimney crack their father had neglected to fix. Tata had promised grander things, too, like plumbing pipes for an indoor toilet. He had always tried so very hard to please Mama, but the basic chores to keep the house running and the odd jobs he took when he could get them seemed to fill every waking hour. Mama did not complain when such extra things did not materialize.
Once Ruth had imagined a home of her own—nothing terribly grand, just a bit bigger than this, with a flower garden. But that vision had walked off over the hill with Piotr, and remembering it now, she felt frivolous. Daydreams were not a luxury she could afford anymore, and wanting too much, well, maybe that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place.
Ruth uncovered the plate of peas that she’d left by the sink the previous evening and began shelling them for the soup she would make for lunch. A year earlier, the broth would have been thick with sour cream and pieces of lard. Now it would be mostly water. There was a bit of beetroot, too; she could shred and mix it with some vinegar and call it salad.
She pulled out the radio that sat hidden beneath the sink, adjusting the volume so as not to wake the children. Radios had been forbidden by the Germans, and keeping it was her one act of defiance, a link with the outside world. Only heavy static came through. Whether the radio was dying or the Germans had jammed the signal, she did not know. She made a note to ask if Helena could fix it. An unintelligible voice crackled then, growing clearer in time for her to hear the announcer warn in a low gravelly voice that Jews were no longer to ride the trolley cars.
Reaching for the coffeepot, Ruth stifled a laugh. There was no trolley in Biekowice, and no Jews, either. She had seen Jews only once in her life on a trip with her parents to the market in My´slenice. “Dorfjuden,” she’d heard them called on the radio recently. Village Jews. Their cluster of dismal, tar-roofed shacks made her family’s own cottage seem luxurious by comparison.
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them, really, with all of the trouble,” Helena had remarked a few weeks earlier over breakfast, in that vague manner of speech they tended to use around the children.
“Better that they stay where they are,” Ruth had replied, her own voice sounding harsh. She did not mean it unkindly, nor did she harbor any special animosity toward the Jews. But while the Germans seldom seemed to trifle with Poles, they had enacted an endless series of laws aimed at the Jews, forbidding them from doing ordinary things and making their already-miserable lives harder. Ruth just didn’t want, as Mama would have said, to borrow trouble by having them around.
But Helena had a point, Ruth reflected now. Why didn’t the Jews scatter and flee the Germans? Though they probably thought there was strength in numbers, staying in their small compact centers just made them an easier target.
There was no mention of the bombing on the radio that Helena had thought she had heard the previous evening. Ruth smiled with satisfaction, glad that her sister, who always accused her of having an overactive imagination, had this time been wrong.
She finished shelling the peas and transferred them to a smaller bowl. From the bedroom came the sound of Michal’s snoring, the girls breathing gently beside him. She sighed. No one saw the work she did, the little things that kept them going. Helena deemed the chores she did outside and in the barn so much harder, scoffing at what she called “woman’s work.” Perhaps that was because Mama had made it look so easy, doing things twice as well and without complaint. To Ruth, though, it sometimes felt like too much.
Ruth washed the plate and dried it carefully, setting it back in its place in the cupboard. She tried to keep everything exactly as Mama had, as though she might walk through the door at any moment and inspect everything with a sweeping eye and issue Ruth a grade. Not like Helena, who blew through a room like a storm, sending things scattering. Borrowed was how the house seemed to Ruth, though she had grown up here herself. Like a sweater she kept carefully because she would one day be expected to return it. To acknowledge anything more would mean that Mama might not come back, and the thought was more than she could bear.
Ruth was suddenly restless. It was not like her. Usually Helena was the one hopping around like a chimpanzee. “Bored?” Ruth had replied incredulously once when her sister remarked upon it. The notion seemed absurd, especially when there was so much work to be done. But now the house felt small and confining. She wanted to go—not into the woods, rough and deep, like Helena, but somewhere else.
Ruth tiptoed back into the bedroom to the washbasin, studying her reflection in the pale early light that just illuminated the cracked mirror. She took in her thick auburn hair and round blue eyes with a twinge of self-admiration, avoiding the scar that marred her neck. She combed her hair and patted a bit of Mama’s old lotion onto her cheeks, fighting the tears that welled up at the familiar, flowery smell. The jar of lotion Mama had given her was one of Ruth’s most prized possessions and she loved the way it soothed her cheeks and eased the redness brought on by the wind and cold. She did not know where the cream had come from or how she would replace it when the last precious drops were gone.
It was important, Mama had said, to always look one’s best, even for the most mundane of occasions. Ruth did not wear the lotion every day, though; she used to save it for Sundays when Piotr came. Her mind reeled back to one of his visits a few months earlier. The weather had been unseasonably warm and he had cajoled her into the shadows of the trees, persuaded her to let his hands wander lower and longer than they had before. But she had pushed him away a minute later and he had not tried again. Her cheeks stung now, remembering.
Turning from the mirror, she looked down at the sleeping children and a wave of affection passed over her. She had been sixteen when Karolina was born, old enough to have a family of her own if things had worked out differently. At the sight of the squiggling bundle in their mother’s arms, she’d felt a longing she could not remember with Dorie or Michal—and more than a twinge of envy as Tata hovered above, glazed eyes proud and happy. Not that Ruth was jealous of his attention—she had long since resigned herself to being the daughter he did not see, his main interest in Helena because she would walk the woods and do rugged things with him. But Ruth wanted to be the center of her own family, an adoring husband standing anxiously above her. Now she had the family, the responsibility of caring for the children, only with none of the love or affection of a husband.
“Watch the others,” she whispered into Michal’s ear, judging by the way the covers shifted that he had heard her. The girls did not move. Let me go with you, Dorie would have pled through the long, uneven fringe of hair that fell into her eyes. Having lost both parents, she was afraid to let Ruth out of her sight, for fear she, too, might not return.
Nearing the front door, Ruth frowned at a brown footprint she had somehow missed when sweeping in the dim light the previous evening. Keeping the house was an endless battle against dirt tracked in under feet, crumbs and milk spilled on the table. But she persisted doggedly in her attempts to keep the house as neat as Mama had. What would happen, she wondered now, if she simply stopped trying?
Ruth donned her coat. It was more of a cape, really, great swaths of billowing fabric where the sleeves should have been. She had found it in the back of her mother’s armoire two years earlier, and had been instantly captivated by the soft, flowing garment, which was more fitting of what she imagined a night at the opera to be than anything in their roughshod farm life. “Where did you get it, Mama?”
Her mother had stared at the cape, as though it was part of another lifetime. “I don’t remember.” It was not just her vague tone that told Ruth she was lying—surely one could not forget acquiring such an extraordinary thing.
“Can I keep it?” Mama shrugged, seemingly divorced from whatever part of her life she had worn it. After that, Ruth wore the cape from October to April.
“So impractical,” Helena chided each winter. “Not very warm. And you’re going to trip.” Ruth’s first impulse was always to take it off to escape Helena’s disdain. But she persisted in wearing it, navigating the extra folds of cloth like a second skin. She pulled the hood high and close around her face now, her own personal coat of armor. Mama’s lavender scent enveloped her like the arms she had not felt in more than a year. It was growing fainter, though, muted by her own smell and the passage of time. She had to burrow deeper, stick her nose in the collar, to really find it anymore.
Ruth stepped outside and breathed in the crisp, coal-tinged air like a drink of water she had not known she needed. She had not realized how much she craved this bit of solitude, a few minutes just for herself. Their wounded goat, Bolek, one of the last two animals still living in the barn, limped hopefully to the fence and she patted his nose in silent apology for the lack of the treat he was seeking. She paused at the gate to arrange some twigs on the ground, pointing in the direction of the barn. It was a game she and Dorie played, Ruth leaving clues that led around the house and yard. Once they might have ended with the discovery of a piece of fruit or hard candy, but with none to be had she would have to come up with another sort of treasure.
Closing the gate, Ruth gazed up at the hill where her sister had traveled a few hours earlier, trying to picture the hospital. They would make Mama well, though how they would go about it, she could not fathom. Helena was always so vague in her descriptions of the nurses and Mama’s treatment, and Ruth did not like to ask too much and admit that she did not know. But there was a plan, she had always believed, and that plan could surely not be to leave the children with neither parent. No, Mama would not be going to the Other Place with Tata. Not now.
“The other place,” Helena repeated, with that one eyebrow arched, after overhearing Ruth using the expression to explain to Michal where their father had gone.
“Heaven, or whatever you would call it, where they go after they die...” Ruth kept speaking, using too many words, spilling them on top of one another like a drink carried too quickly across the room.
“I thought that was something you’d made up just for the children,” Helena replied. Ruth looked over her shoulder to make sure the little ones were out of earshot. “Surely you don’t believe it.”
Ruth faltered. “Don’t you?” Helena had gone to church and sat beside her as the priest talked about heaven each week.
“I believe we put Tata in the ground. And that is where he is.” Stifling a gasp, Ruth crossed herself. She had pushed away the image of the coffin being lowered into the earth, holding Dorie back so she didn’t throw herself in the hole after it. To Helena, dead was dead. They had not spoken of it again.
Ruth continued walking along the narrow band of water that wound along the edge of town like a ribbon. Farther down, it passed between high banks of peat moss under a crude wooden bridge where children played in summer as their mothers washed clothes. It quickly disappeared around the bend where it widened into the gorge. When they were younger, she and Helena would climb the bluff holding hands and watch the logs travel downstream to the mill.
An image flashed through Ruth’s mind of her and Helena standing in this very spot when they were seven. A snowstorm had come suddenly on their way home from school and Helena had been transfixed by the way the forest was suddenly coated in white. “Come,” Ruth had urged, tugging her toward home, but Helena stood still. Ruth’s gaze followed her sister’s upward to where the treetops and sky became one. They remained motionless, for how long Ruth did not know, hand in hand, the two of them alone in that snow globe of a world.
“Dziewczyny!” Girls, a voice called like a sharp wind, blowing her into place. Only then had Ruth noticed the coating of ice on Helena’s face, and the way her own feet had gone numb. A neighboring farmer had found them and carried them home. They might have died, Mama scolded. But together they had not been afraid. How she wished for just another moment like that, the two of them alone in a white, silent world.
At the adjacent Slomir farm, an old man pulled a wagon with both hands, taking the place where his horse had once been. Though his land was ten times the size of theirs, Pan Slomir had always looked enviously across the fence at their plush, fertile patch, which seemed to draw energy from the stream like a child from its mother’s breast. Now he glared at her, not bothering to mask his disdain. Ruth hunched her shoulders slightly to avoid making eye contact. Once she had loved the walk into town, soaking up the approving looks like sunshine warm on her face. She could almost hear him thinking: What would become of the Nowaks? It was a question that Ruth herself did not like to ask.
Closer to town, she focused on the familiar things—the way the houses, set close to the road, slatted at exactly the same angle, the birds seeming to dart from rafter to rafter in identical patterns, as though performing a dance. Twigs and roots poked out persistently between the paving stones. Biekowice was not a place that one ever left. Children grew up and married and raised their families in the same house, or maybe their husband’s house if it had more room. Sons worked at the same jobs their fathers had before them. Marriage just above one’s original station was the best to be hoped for a daughter. Every ten years or so, some headstrong young person would head off to the city never to be heard of again. Rumors of doom and destruction always followed. There had been a story once of a girl who had left and found her fortune, but Ruth didn’t know her personally.
She passed the school, now closed by German decree. A group of girls, twelve or thirteen years old, played around the wide base of a tree. Ruth envied the easy way they laughed and joked. She and Helena had gone to school for a few years when they were younger, before Mama decided to teach them at home. But the village schoolgirls regarded the identical twin sisters, who sat in the back of the classroom together holding hands, as an oddity. Helena had never seemed to mind much, deeming the other girls “silly.” Ruth would have liked to have been included in their secrets and games, though. She had never quite fit in here, felt an outlier from the others. But that couldn’t be right, for she had never been anywhere else. Was it possible simply to belong nowhere?
She approached the main square. Market was a modest affair, a dozen or so canvas-covered tables smelling of carp in stale water and odd bits of too-old meat. Beside the stalls, Gorale women who had come from the sharp mountain peaks to the south sat on the ground, selling crude wool sweaters and salty sheep cheese from burlap sacks, their weather-hardened faces turned upward.
At the dairyman’s stall, Ruth gave her most appreciative smile, hoping that he might move the wire over a bit to make the cut of cheese more generous. But he simply looked down at his work. She turned away, feeling foolish. Once her smiles seemed to buy everything. Now it was as if her prettiness had faded, making her a tarnished coin. It wasn’t just that, of course—the war had taken the men to the front. There were so many more women that even a tired old merchant failed to notice.
She passed the dairyman the ration cards and moved on. Behind the vegetable stall, Pani Kowalska sorted potatoes and did not look up. She had been a contemporary of Mama’s and could not be more than forty-five, but the hair tucked beneath her kerchief was white and she had many chins, making her look much older. What was it about the women in the village who seemed to age overnight? One day they were young and beautiful, with the promise of a future before them, and the next they were crones. Mama had never made the transition—she had not had the chance before taking ill. But Ruth knew that one day she would wake up looking exactly as Pani Kowalska, and then any remaining hope for a future would be gone for good.
She appraised the selection of fruits and vegetables. Even before the war it had not been good, the cool climate and short growing season inhospitable for vegetables like tomatoes and peppers. Now all that remained were a few mottled onions and potatoes already sprouting roots.
“Three apples,” Ruth requested. An unfamiliar police car sat at the edge of the market, engine idling despite the lack of a driver. Ruth shivered uneasily. The fact that the provincial police had come to town had nothing to do with her, but it was different, and change seldom meant anything good.
“Did you hear about the Garzels?” Pani Kowalska asked as she weighed the fruit on the scale. The mole on her nose, which seemed to have doubled in size since Ruth had last visited the stall, bobbed as she spoke.
Ruth shook her head as though the woman were watching. Life in a small village reminded Ruth of what a zoo might be like, though she had only read about such places. Homes transparent, lives exposed to one another. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, almost before it had happened. “Nie.” Ruth suspected that she did not want to hear the answer. She inspected the apples the woman handed her, which were mottled and bruised. She did not protest, knowing the rest in the barrel would be no better.
Pani Kowalska wiped her hands on her skirt. “Gone.”
“Perhaps they went to find Leopold,” Ruth suggested. The elderly couple’s son, just a few years older than Michal, had disappeared ahead of a transport of conscripted men to the front. The call-ups had taken place with alarming frequency of late, young men ordered to report for either military service or other forced labor for the Reich.
“Not if he went to forest they didn’t.” Ruth did not want to admit that she was unfamiliar with the term. “To the woods to fight,” Pani Kowalska clarified unbidden. Ruth had heard the rumors of soldiers from the decimated Polish army who had gone underground to wage war against the Germans.
Ruth searched for another plausible explanation. “Without him to work the farm, they must have decided to go to relatives.”
Pani Kowalska shook her head, chins jiggling. “They left with the door open, all of their belongings still inside. Who on earth does that?”
Who indeed? One would board up the house if truly going for a while and planning it—unless one did not want anyone to know or to attract too much attention.
“And then there are the goings-on in Nowy S˛acz,” Pani Kowalska added, gaining steam even as she returned to sorting potatoes. “They arrested all of the Jews.” How had the woman heard such things? The news on the radio would not have spoken of them. But gossip, even about those they did not know, seemed to travel with the wind like pollen. “Good riddance, I say,” the old woman spat with more bile than Ruth might have thought she could muster. Ruth did not respond, but sadness tugged at her. Why did Pani Kowalska sound so angry about a handful of Jews in another town? Ruth did not have any particular affinity for the Jews, but it was the ugliness of it all that bothered her.
“Christ killing heathens. Always driving down my prices,” Pani Kowalska added, as if answering the unspoken question. So that was the real reason. Her hatred of the Jews stemmed less from purported drinking of baby’s blood than the price of turnips.
The Jews weren’t all hard-charging vegetable merchants, Ruth wanted to point out. “Surely just the men have been taken,” she offered instead.
Pani Kowalska shook her head. “All of them.” What would the Germans want with the women and children? And what could they possibly do with so many people? Ruth’s arms suddenly ached for her brother and sisters. But before she could ask, the old woman looked past Ruth’s shoulder at another customer. “Tak?”
Ruth stepped aside and surveyed the rest of the market. Taking in the flies that swarmed above the meat stand as though it were August, she decided to save the rest of their ration coupons for her next visit.
At the corner, she spied a familiar figure approaching, a sallow, fiftyish women who stared vacantly ahead and carried her empty basket as though it bore rocks. Ruth started quickly in the opposite direction. Her foot caught on the curb and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell to the ground. Piotr’s mother turned toward her, then looked away quickly, no more wanting the encounter than Ruth did. But it was unavoidable. Ruth brushed her hands on her skirt and took a step toward the woman.
A moment of silence passed between them. It was your fault, Ruth wanted to yell, seized with the urge to slap her sagging cheek. Piotr’s mother had welcomed Ruth warmly in her home, professing that Ruth was the daughter that she’d never had. But at the first opportunity, she had turned on Ruth, casting her out.
“Dzie´n dobry,” Ruth greeted instead over the dryness in her throat, cursing her own lack of nerve. She eyed the stitching of the woman’s scarf, tighter and of a better quality wool than her own. Had she knitted it herself or was it a gift from Piotr’s new fiancée? Her pale blue eyes were a mirror of her son’s, but Ruth had not noticed until just now how cold and unfeeling they could be. “How is Piotr?” she asked, in spite of herself. His name stuck in her throat.
A slight wince crossed the woman’s face. “He’s been sent to the front.”
A knife shot through her and she knew in that instant he would not be coming back. Her eyes stung. “I’m sorry,” Ruth said awkwardly, as though she had been personally responsible for his conscription. She stumbled past Piotr’s mother and continued on, struggling to keep her back straight and head high. He was not hers to worry about anymore.
3 (#ulink_6249c553-7d3a-5818-8662-a868d20038af)
Helena reached the top of the forested hills that rose high above the city of Kraków. A fine perspiration coated her skin from the climb, causing the wool collar of her coat to itch unpleasantly. From here, shrouded by the tall clusters of perennially flush pine trees that pointed defiantly toward the sky, she could see whether the winding streets below were clear and it was safe to go down.
The panorama of the city unfurled before her. Wawel Castle sat upon a hill, presiding over the sea of slate roofs and spires below. Months ago, the city had looked untouched from here, the cobblestone passageways timeless, save for a handful of cars. But the war now seemed everywhere. The streets were choked with trucks and soldiers, like the big black ants that appeared in the kitchen at the first sign of spring.
After charting her course to avoid any checkpoints, Helena began the descent into the city. She emerged from the woods onto the path that quickly became a dirt road, trying to walk normally as the trees thinned and the houses grew more clustered. Closer in, the paved streets were speckled with harried pedestrians, darting between the shops, eager to scurry back to the safety of their homes. The air was thick with exhaust from a delivery truck idling at the curbside. Workers in overalls carried their dinner pails, eyes low.
She crossed the bridge and started down ulica Dietla. Once Roma children had played instruments at the corner of the wide thoroughfare, open violin cases turned upward in hope of a few coins. But now only a hapless gray-haired babcia sat propped against the base of a building, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Her eyes were closed and toothless mouth agape, as though she might already be dead.
Helena slipped into the crowd, her skin prickling as she viewed the city with more trepidation than ever. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window. Beneath her faded, nondescript coat, her dress hung like a baggy sack and her reddish-brown hair was hastily pulled back in a knot. Anxiety formed in her stomach. She looked like a girl from the countryside, “na wsi” as she had heard the city dwellers call it derisively—not at all like she fit in. Certainly a passerby would recognize any moment now that she did not belong here and summon the police.
Steeling herself, she pressed onward. Twenty minutes later, she reached Kazimierz, which was the Jewish quarter, or at least what was left of it. There were no Jews in the village back home, and when she had first journeyed to the city, Helena had enjoyed walking through the streets here, smelling the chicken fat and dill from the butcher mix with the aroma of cinnamon and raisins from a nearby bakery. The loud voices, speaking a language she did not understand, had made Kazimierz seem like a foreign country. But the streets were nearly deserted now, as if the population of Kazimierz was dwindling, or simply too afraid to be out on the streets. Many of the shops were boarded up, windows that had not been shattered slashed in yellow paint with the word .Zyd. Jew.
The building that housed the hospital had once been grand, its marble steps and tall columns suggesting a bank or perhaps a government office. Now its stone facade was black with soot and the steps covered with droppings from the pigeons that occupied the eaves. Helena walked through the vacant lobby, past the front desk nobody bothered to man anymore, down the lone gray corridor redolent with old plaster, urine and bile.
When Tata had told them that he’d placed their mother in a Jewish hospital, the only facility with a bed they could afford, Helena had imagined somewhere dark and exotic, with shrouded men performing strange rituals. She had been surprised on her first visit by just how unremarkable it was—the white walls were bare and the nurses wore simple dresses and caps. The gowned patients were undistinguishable by faith, time and illness stripping away all social division. Save for the tarnished ornaments affixed to each doorway (mezuzahs, she’d heard them called on a past visit) and the occasional rabbi or other visitor in religious garb, one would not know it was a Jewish place at all.
Helena crossed the ward. Though it was a dismal affair, there were little touches, light-filled windows and slightly wider-than-average beds that said the people who ran it had once cared. Nearing her mother, Helena’s heart sank. Mama had been a beauty, tall and slender with alabaster skin. Now her green eyes were clouded and her chestnut hair dulled to a lifeless gray. The skin below her cheekbones had caved in, giving her a ghoulish look. “Mama,” Helena said, touching her hand. Her mother did not move or respond, but stared vacantly at the ceiling.
The elderly woman in the next bed listed to one side, her gown hanging open to expose a withered breast. Helena walked over to her and straightened the woman’s head, keeping her own eyes averted as she fixed the woman’s gown. “Excuse me,” Helena said gently, hoping she did not mind the intrusion. The woman blinked, conveying with the simple movement an ocean of gratitude and relief.
A nurse moved swiftly at the other end of the ward, folding blankets, shifting patients from side to side with deft hands as she freshened the beds. Her name was Wanda, Helena recalled. She was more capable than most of the other staff, and kinder when time allowed it.
“Dzie´n dobry,” Helena greeted as Wanda neared. The heavy-boned nurse did not respond, but stared downward at the fresh red wound on Helena’s hand.
As if on cue, the cut from the thorny bush, which Helena had rinsed hurriedly in the icy stream, began to throb. Wanda disappeared into a closet across the room and emerged a moment later with a piece of damp gauze, which she gave to Helena. She closed the closet door swiftly, as though something might escape.
“Thank you.” As Helena cleaned the wound, alcohol stinging the raw skin, she waited for Wanda to ask how she had hurt herself.
“She sat up this morning,” Wanda informed her instead, too busy to take further interest in maladies not her own. “Took a bit of broth and even said hello to me.” The words, offered to make Helena feel better, slammed her in the chest. Her mother had been cognizant for a fleeting moment and Helena had missed it. Had Mama felt all alone, confused about where she was and why no one was there with her?
“Perhaps in the spring when the weather is nicer, I can wheel her outside in one of the chairs,” Helena offered.
A strange look crossed Wanda’s face. Did she not think that Mama would still be here then, or was her concern larger than that? “With so many Jews gone...” Wanda faltered in her explanation.
“Where have they gone?” Helena was glad to have the opportunity to ask.
Wanda lowered her voice. “Some have left the city, or even gone abroad, if they were able. Others have been ordered to the ghetto.”
Helena shook her head. “Ghetto?”
“The walled neighborhood in Podgórze.” Helena had passed by the industrial neighborhood across the river and seen the streets that the Germans had begun to cordon off. She had surmised that some Jews from the villages were to live there. But it seemed odd to relocate the Kazimierz Jews, who already had a neighborhood of their own. And if the Jews were going, what future could the hospital have here? “Will they all go?”
“I doubt it. There are still a good number of Jews living in Kazimierz.”
Mama coughed once, then again. “Is Dr. Ackerman here today?” Helena asked. “I need to speak with him about my mother’s medicine.”
Wanda frowned. “He’s been called away.” Helena sensed that it was better not to ask when he would return. At first the war had seemed a boon to the hospital—the Jewish doctors, forbidden from treating Gentile Poles, had flocked eagerly to work here. But their numbers had diminished ominously in the preceding weeks. “And I’m sorry about the medicine. We haven’t been able to get any new shipments of the laudanum and so we’ve had to dilute what we have left in order to make it last.”
They had decreased Mama’s dosage, Helena reflected, and yet she was no more lucid—further proof that wherever her mind had gone with the illness, it wasn’t coming back. “Then perhaps another medicine,” she suggested. “Something that doesn’t make her so drowsy.”
“I’ll ask.” But Wanda’s tone made clear that there were no other drugs to be had.
“The medicine supply,” Helena persisted, “is there truly nothing to be done?”
Wanda’s forehead crinkled. “I’ve tried the other hospitals, even gone to the Mariacki Cathedral to see if any could be bought.”
She was talking about the black market, Helena realized, caught off guard by the casual way in which the nurse mentioned procuring illegal goods, in a church no less. Helena considered the nurse: Wanda did not wear the yellow star of a Jew. Yet she had chosen to remain working here. Helena was touched by the nurse’s effort, risking her personal safety to help her patients. “Here.” Helena fished in her pocket for a coin. She could ill-afford to give away money now, but in addition to expressing her gratitude, it might buy Mama an extra moment’s care. She watched the conflict that washed over Wanda’s face, wanting to refuse the offering because taking care of Helena’s mother was her job.
But no one could afford to be that proud in times like this. Wanda took the coin and shoved it into her pocket. “Dzi˛eki.” She shuffled past, continuing on her rounds.
Helena settled into the chair beside the bed. Mama had suffered silently for months with what she presumed were just the normal aches and tugs of a body that had borne five children trying to pull itself back into place. But the pain grew worse and her appetite waned and by the time the village’s lone doctor came he could feel the lump in her belly, larger than an apple. She might have stayed at home until the end of her days, had fought for it. But then her mind started to slip, as though the cancer had spread there, or perhaps the fate she was going to face was simply too much to contemplate. One night they’d found her over the baby’s crib holding a pot of hot water and they knew the time had come for her to go.
Helena pulled out the bread wrapped in paper. She tore it into small pieces and held it out. “Look, Mama,” she offered, bringing the dry, flat bread close to her mother’s nose. “Ruth baked this for you yesterday.” Even Ruth’s best efforts could not come close to the bread Mama had once made, but it was hardly a fair comparison, given the lack of good flour these days.
When Mama did not respond, Helena leaned forward and dipped the bread into the glass of tepid water that sat on the table beside the bed. Then she lifted her mother’s head and put a small piece in her mouth, willing her to eat it. But the bread lay between her slack lips. Finally, Helena removed it again, fearful that she would choke. A sour smell came from between her lips, the teeth Mama had maintained with such care beginning to rot. Helena stared at the remaining fistful of bread uncertainly. No one would take the time to feed it to her once Helena was gone; it would just be taken by one of the nurses or other patients. She tucked it back in her bag.
Helena gazed out the window, grateful yet again that the ward in which her mother was located looked into the interior courtyard. From here, Mama could not see the military vehicles that rumbled by or the German soldiers in the streets. A different room would have made the pretense of normalcy impossible.
“You aren’t going to tell her about the war, are you?” Ruth had asked their father the first time he prepared to set out for the city after the invasion. Overhearing, Helena had been surprised. It was a war, for goodness’ sake, and their mother was at the heart of it. But Tata hadn’t said anything. Looking around the sanatorium now, Helena was struck by how little had changed—the machines still hummed and the patients still moaned, trapped in their own private battles. So the fiction had persisted.
Beside Helena, her mother stirred. “Mama?” Helena leaned forward, hope rising in her as she kissed her mother on her papery cheek.
But her mother only looked at her blankly. Did she wonder why her beloved husband no longer came to visit, or had she not noticed? “Ruti?” she asked, using her pet name for Helena’s sister.
Helena blanched. No, it wasn’t Ruth who was sturdy enough to make the journey, or brave enough to try. But if thinking it was so brought their mother comfort, Helena would play along. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.” It should have been Ruth here, Helena reflected. She had always been closer to Mama, sitting at their mother’s side, learning with rapt attention how to cook and sew while thick-fingered Helena followed Tata into the woods, gathering kindling and roots. Sometimes it seemed as though she and Ruth had been cast into those roles at birth. “The pretty one,” she’d heard people remark more than once about Ruth—but how was that possible when they were twins and meant to look just the same? She herself had been deemed sturdy and capable for so long she could not fathom where the idea had first arisen. Had their parents noted these differences in them from the start and nurtured them, or had they grown to play the parts they had been given?
“Jealous, even as a baby,” their mother had remarked of Helena more than once over the years. “You would give me such a look when I held your sister instead of you.” I wasn’t jealous, Helena had wanted to respond later, when she was old enough to understand. I just wanted to be held, too, to be a part of things before you had to set us down and move on to the next task or chore. But it was always that way with twins, never enough time or arms to go around, and the extra always seemed to go to sweet, helpful Ruth.
The sisters had always been a great source of curiosity in the town, the first set of twins seen there in more than a generation. “And after, when the midwife put you both in the cradle, the first thing you did was hold hands,” Mama was fond of recalling. “She’d said she’d never heard of such a thing.”
Whenever they went out, people made sport of trying to guess which one was which. “No, no, don’t tell me!” In fact, the sisters had subtle differences: Ruth had a rounder face and large blue eyes while Helena’s own features were plainer, her skin more ruddy than luminescent. And there was the birthmark, too, heart-shaped just below Ruth’s right ear, which Ruth desperately tried to conceal, that made them impossible to confuse if one looked closely. But to the casual observer, they were indistinguishable.
Helena sat in silence for several minutes. There were things she wanted to ask her mother now, about how to make a good poultice for the goat’s wounded leg, and the way to get the cabinet above the stove to stop sticking. She wanted to tell her mother that Dorie had lost another tooth, how Karolina was starting to speak a bit. But she was never sure if hearing about the children would make Mama happy or more forlorn, or even if she remembered them at all.
She searched her mother’s face, looking for some words that would change it all. But she had stopped believing in magic years ago, and prayers were Ruth’s province. “Come back to us,” she said plaintively, knowing there would be no response.
Helena opened the drawer on the night table and busied herself taking inventory of the scant contents, taking note of the spare sock that was missing. She picked up her mother’s extra housecoat, which someone had shoved in the drawer without bothering to fold. There was blood at the collar. Helena bent hurriedly to check for a wound, and Mama winced, as though accustomed to a rough touch.
“Shh,” Helena soothed, willing herself to move more slowly. But there was no mark on her mother’s neck. Had the blood come from an old wound or had someone else worn the gown? She put it in her knapsack, replacing it with the fresh one she had brought with her.
“I should go,” she said finally. Guilt rose in her then as it always did at the notion that after she left Mama would again be all alone in this sad place. But she had to get home to help Ruth, and if she didn’t leave now she would not make it before dark. She searched her mother’s face for some reaction, but found none. No, the sadness about parting was all hers. Mama was already alone.
Helena left the hospital, retracing her steps through Kazimierz as she made her way from the city. The gray clouds had grown thick and ominous now, the air biting. The earlier dampness under her clothes had dried to an uncomfortable chill. As she wound her way around the base of Wawel Castle, Helena peered over her shoulder, inexplicably fearful that someone might be following her. Spotting nothing unusual, she pressed forward, heart beating just a bit too quickly. Despite her anxiety, she could not help but feel a touch of excitement. For so long it had seemed that everything moved around her while she stood in place like the moon behind the clouds. Now with the explosion she was sure she had heard the previous night and the sighting of the German jeep, the world had shifted slightly and suddenly life felt different.
As she crossed the wide bridge that spanned the river, her thoughts turned to her father. The priest had called Tata a hero for stepping in front of the runaway wagon and blocking it from hitting a child. Helena knew he was the furthest thing from that, though. Tadeusz Nowak was a drunk and he had most likely gotten hit because he was too inebriated to move out of the wagon’s path, even at ten o’clock in the morning. But she said nothing, accepting the neighbors’ gifts of sympathy, the soups and baked goods that flowed much more generously than if he had been found lying in a pile of vodka and vomit.
Helena was the one who had answered the knock the day they came about Tata and followed the constable to the site. There were details she would spare Ruth and the others about the way he had soiled himself, how his neck hung at a funny angle like a broken doll. She had focused instead at the hands and arms that were as familiar as her own.
Tata had been her counterpart, the one most like her, and with his death a part of her had died, too. But after he was gone she discovered a newfound clarity and purpose, slipping into his role, taking charge of the wood and the hunting and their safety. She found she was capable of doing things that she had never been taught, as though a part of Tata had left his body in the moment he was struck down and leaped into hers.
An hour later, Helena reached the edge of the forest. She rubbed at the back of her hand where a bit of pine tar had stuck above the wound, contemplating her route. The road would have been faster, but she would take the high pass over the mountain so as not to risk encountering more Germans. She started forward. The terrain ahead was much more difficult, the rolling hills deceptive. It gave no indication of the steep slope, or the sharp stones that jutted out from the ground, marring the path. Helena navigated through the rocks, finding the familiar footholds. She had come this way every week as a child on walks with Tata. She had loved the springtime best when they would gather mushrooms, father and daughter making their way through the woods in the predawn darkness, the silence only broken by the sloshing of his flask.
The goodwill of the neighbors had evaporated quickly after their father’s death, as people pulled back to whisper about how the Nowak children—now virtually orphans—would survive. Helena did not mind—she preferred their distance to the overkindness she had never quite believed. There was speculation, too, about the lack of a possible suitor for either twin. Ruth had had someone for a time, a big strapping boy called Piotr. He had called on her faithfully each week, bringing the odd bit of candy for the children. But then the business with their father had happened and Piotr had come one last time to speak with Ruth. Helena had not been able to hear their conversation, but when she had peered around the side of the barn she spied them down by the stream, Piotr handing back the brown scarf her sister had knitted for him, Ruth pushing it away so that it dropped to the ground. Helena had rushed out afterward to collect it so the scarce wool could be reused.
When Ruth had come back inside the house, Helena had faltered. She put her arm around Ruth’s shoulder, cringing at her own stiffness. “I’m sorry.”
Ruth shrugged off her arm and stepped away. “You never liked him.” Ruth’s tone was accusing. Helena wanted to deny it, but Ruth was right: she had not liked Piotr, and had resented that Ruth had something beyond their family. She had not wanted him to stay. But now he had hurt Ruth, though, and for that she wanted to kill him.
Though Ruth had not said, Helena knew that it was the children who had caused Piotr to run. No man wanted to take on the responsibility of caring for someone else’s family, especially not one with young mouths needing to be fed for so many years yet. There would be no marriage for her or Ruth now; of that she was sure. So they would go on working and keeping the children alive until they were big enough to fend for themselves. Michal perhaps would support them in a few years or the younger girls might someday marry; they were pretty enough. What else? Helena could plant a good-size garden in the spring and sell the extra bounty in town. She’d heard that the war had opened up jobs for the women left behind by the men forced to go and fight. But even if she could secure a work pass, traveling to the city once a week was hard enough; she could not commute daily and she could not leave Ruth alone with the children for longer than that.
As Helena paused to catch her breath, an unfamiliar scent tickled her nose. It was sweet yet acrid, like when the farmers burned brush in early autumn and something unintended got tossed into the fire, a dead squirrel perhaps. No one was burning this late in the season, though. Looking west, she noticed then a thick finger of dark smoke curling toward the sky. Where was it coming from? There were no factories in that direction and it was too far beyond the trees to be a forest fire.
A sudden rustling noise from the bushes made her jump. Recalling the German she’d encountered earlier, her heart pounded. But the noise had not come from the road. She scanned the side of the path. There had been stories of hungry wolves in these parts, but it was more likely a dog or raccoon. Something she might kill for food, if it was not too wounded or rabid. She heard the noise came again, this time more of a wheeze.
She reached for her knife. A voice not entirely her own told her to run. But instead, she drew closer to the bushes, curious. Beneath a scraggly pine tree there was a lump, too long to be an animal, huddled in a pile of leaves. As she neared, the air grew thick with the metallic smell of blood. She pushed aside the branches, then stopped with surprise. A man lay on his side, almost hidden by the leaves. He didn’t move, but is torso rose and fell with labored breaths.
Helena stared at him. Before today, she had not encountered anyone on her treks through the forest. “Who are you?” she demanded, hoping to sound braver than she felt. He did not respond. Fear rose up in her. No good could come of a meeting with a stranger and she was far from any help. “Who are you?” she repeated. A low, guttural moan escaped his throat. Helena studied the man, whose dark hair was pasted tight to his head by a mixture of blood and sweat. She relaxed slightly; he was in no shape to do her harm.
“Show me where you are hurt,” she said, more gently now. His arm, which had been covering his midsection, flopped in the direction of his right leg, but there was no visible injury. The stranger wore a uniform of some sort, dirt-caked and torn. She recalled the explosion from the previous night that she had taken to be a bomb. The Nazi jeep she’d encountered earlier had not been looking for her. The full danger of the situation crashed down upon her and she turned to flee.
“Please,” he croaked just above a whisper, and somewhere in her mind she registered the word as English. Her mind whirled: what was an American or British soldier doing here?
Freezing, was her first thought as she turned back to him in spite of herself. He lay on the ground and his skin was a shade of blue-gray that she had never seen before. He needed shelter if he was to live. Without thinking, she reached for his arm and pulled as though to lift him, her fingers not quite wrapping around its thick girth. The man was heavier than she expected and did not move, but shrieked with pain, his cry echoing against the bareness of the trees.
“Spokój!” she hissed, and he looked up, his brown eyes meeting hers, long lashes fluttering with fear. But she could tell from his expression that he did not speak Polish or was too disoriented to understand, so she raised her finger to her lips and shook her head to silence him.
The church, she remembered then. There was an old wooden chapel, about fifty meters farther along the path into the woods. But if she could not move him, how could she possibly get him there? “Come.” She knelt and put her arm around his shoulder, close to the stranger in a way that made her shiver. Then she tried to stand, more gently this time. But she stumbled under his weight. He fell forward, and as she went to lift him again he waved her off, dragging himself along the ground in a half crawl.
As he inched forward, she glanced over her shoulder nervously, willing him to move faster. Her skin prickled. A sharp barking cut through the stillness. “Hide,” she whispered frantically, pushing him into the thick bushes. There came a dull thud from the other side, followed by a cry. She crawled through the brush toward him. He had rolled down a steep ravine and into the stream that ran alongside the path. There was another bark, followed by footsteps. She peered out from the bushes, jumping back as a man with a shotgun appeared, an underfed German shepherd on a leash by his side. He did not wear a uniform like the German soldier she had encountered earlier on the road, but the clothes of an ordinary farmer (albeit one she did not recognize from the village). Perhaps he was just hunting or trapping.
A second man appeared from the opposite direction. “Anything?” His Polish was thick and peasantlike.
“A small chapel. But I found nothing there,” the other man replied. Helena’s anger rose. These men were searching for the soldier, doing the Germans’ bidding. Panic quickly overshadowed her fury as the dog sniffed along the edge of the path, drawing closer. Surely the animal would smell the soldier’s wounds.
Her heart raced as the dog stopped, its ugly snout just inches from her own face. “Chocz!” ordered the man holding the leash, tugging at it and forcing the dog to follow. They continued deeper into the forest.
A rasping noise came from behind her. Helena turned back toward the soldier, who lay on his back in the stream, seemingly oblivious to the icy water that trickled around him. Hurriedly she moved to him, pressing her hand to his mouth to muffle the sound. She looked over her shoulder, hoping the men had not heard. She wanted to admonish the man to be quiet once more, but he was too far gone for that. His face was ghostly white and he seemed to be struggling for each breath.
Quickly she reached down with both arms and, using her legs to brace, pulled him from the water onto the incline of the bank. “You have to help me get you to shelter,” she said. But his eyes were half-closed and she had no idea if he understood.
She checked the now-empty path once more. The men knew about the chapel. Did she still dare to take the soldier there? Though the men had already checked it, they could still come back. But she could not take him to her house—even if he could make the journey, the road out of the forest to their cottage was open and exposed. And leaving him out here meant certain death. There was no other choice—the chapel was his only hope.
She wrapped the soldier’s arm around her shoulder, cold water dripping from his hair and seeping into her collar. Bracing herself anew, she maneuvered him back onto the path. The force of his weight brought her to her knees once more. “Help me,” she pleaded, her voice a whisper. She held her breath as he dragged himself slowly the last few meters down the path, certain the men would return to discover them.
At last they reached chapel. It was no bigger than Helena’s cottage, but taller with an elongated knave. A wood-shingled roof overhung the building like a cap drawn close around the brow. The top of the steeple was completely gone, the mounted cross threatening to topple at any second. She had discovered the abandoned chapel as a child and played around it many times despite her mother’s admonishment lest the roof cave in and crush them. She had often wondered who would have cared enough to build a chapel, not big enough for more than a handful of worshippers, here in the woods, instead of just going to the church in town. And why had they stopped coming?
Helena opened the door and peered inside. The air was thick with the scent of moldy wood and damp earth. She had not been here in years and the structure had deteriorated further with time. The floor had rotted to a few remaining planks over dirt and much of the roof had peeled away, revealing the gray sky above.
Helena turned back to help the man through the doorway, propping him against the nearest wall. Her hand brushed against something hard at his waist and she pulled back his shirt to reveal a pistol that had somehow survived his ordeal. She did not know why she was surprised—he was a soldier, after all. For a moment, she considered taking it, then decided to leave him his one defense, if it even still worked. She ran her hands over his torso, feeling for other injuries, not sure what she would do if she found any. Then she pulled her hands back, wondering if he minded the intimacy of her stranger’s touch. But he lay with his eyes closed, still laboring to breathe.
She shivered, not entirely sure it was from the cold. There was something exciting and dangerous about him that made her take a step backward, that made her want to run and yet unable to look away at the same time. She peered in her satchel, pulling out the small loaf of bread she had tried to feed to her mother and placing it on the ground beside him. He needed a fire, but there was no wood and nothing else to burn.
“I’ll get help,” she offered. But even before he shook his head she knew that it was impossible. There was no one to be trusted and telling anyone would only put them both in danger. She looked around desperately. There was nothing more she could do for him here, and if she waited longer it would be dark and she would be unable to make the rest of the trip home.
She started to stand and he clung to the hem of her skirt in a way that might have been improper if he’d had the strength to mean it. Don’t go, the helpless look in his eyes seemed to say. She took his hand from her dress and placed it back on his chest, struck by the warmth of his fingers, and the strong muscle beneath the torn uniform. “I’ll be back,” she promised. And then she turned on her heel and ran.
4 (#ulink_a88c3638-77d7-5305-9ec8-4222b2c861fc)
“I’m going to see Mama again today,” Helena announced two days later as she fed breakfast to Karolina. She held a spoonful of coarse oat cereal suspended midair a few inches short of the baby’s open mouth, watching for Ruth’s reaction.
Ruth stopped dressing Dorie, the skirt stuck awkwardly over the child’s head. “Why? Is she worse?”
“She’s fine.” Helena immediately recognized the lack of truth in her response. “Fine” would have meant Mama recognizing her own daughter or chewing a mouthful of bread. Helena didn’t like to lie.
But Ruth tended to view the world as she wanted to see it. “When Mama comes back...” she would often say. At first Helena had wanted to correct her—how could she possibly believe that would ever happen? Denial was Ruth’s means of survival, though, and there was no harm in pretending as long as she didn’t rely on it. So Helena sometimes spared her from the worst.
“Me!” Karolina squawked, grabbing the spoon. As the child tried to feed herself, Helena considered telling Ruth about the soldier she had found. Ruth was better with salves and bandages and such, and she might have some other ways they could help the man. But something stopped her.
“Her doctor wasn’t there last time and I wanted to ask him about her medicine,” Helena added instead, stretching the story. She had never gone to see Mama more than once a week before. Surely Ruth would see through the lie. But Ruth just yanked the skirt over Dorie’s head, then sat the child in the chair to braid her hair, which had more than a hint of red to it, without reaction.
Helena took the spoon back from Karolina and scraped a last spoonful of cereal for her. “Drink your milk,” she said, more sternly than she intended. Waste could not be tolerated, even by the children.
“Mook,” Karolina offered. She had been a quiet baby for so long they had fretted something might be wrong, a deficit caused perhaps by the trauma of her parents’ disappearance. But she had begun speaking a few months earlier, gathering new words each day and trying them on for size. She took a sip from her cup, then smiled brightly, searching her sister’s face for praise. She was, like Ruth, too dependent on the approval of others—approval that seldom came anymore for any of them.
Helena looked across the crude wooden table at Michal, who had finished eating and now rested his chin on his hands, staring into the space. None of the children played during meals as she and Ruth had in happier times, giggling and whispering until their parents would scold them. Rather, they sat and ate gravely, as though they realized the scarcity of food and were unwilling to take it for granted.
The wind blew more strongly today than it had in months, howling around the house like a wolf looking for an entry point. Helena’s thoughts shifted to the soldier, alone in the cold, damp chapel. She had helped him without thinking, the same instinct that had prompted her to bring home a wounded squirrel she’d found as a child. Though his ripped uniform had not born any markings, she suspected that he was American, or perhaps British. Her heart skipped as she remembered the bit of pale flesh that she had glimpsed through the fabric. Enough, she admonished herself. This was not a schoolgirl’s crush, like Ruth always seemed to have on various boys when they were younger—this was about the soldier’s survival. Was he in pain? Was he even still alive? Helena had wanted to get away sooner to check on him. But Karolina had come down with a brief, soaring fever the night she’d returned, and Ruth couldn’t handle the three children alone when one was sick.
What if she didn’t go back to the chapel? She had brought the soldier to safety, and surely that was as much as anyone could expect from her. Anything else would put their family in danger. But he was already dependent on her, and without her help he would die of cold or starvation or something worse.
Across the table, Michal’s hazel eyes met hers. He had been born with wisdom beyond his years and had never gone through a childish phase. Though she did not believe in such things, it sometimes seemed as though he was an old soul who had seen all of this a thousand times before, and his understanding of the world made him somber. The day she’d almost taken the leaving path, Michal had peered at her deeply when she returned, as if aware of her near-transgression. He was staring at Helena now in a way that made her wonder if he had read her mind and knew about the soldier at the church. But of course, that was impossible.
She reached across the table and put her hand on his. He looked up, surprised at her rare display of affection. Perhaps more so than the girls, it was Michal to whom she was closest and had tried to shield. It had not always been that way—at first, she’d hated him. “A boy,” Tata had announced the day Michal was born, his face beaming with pride. Then six, Helena looked at the tiny infant with a mix of resentment and love. He would grow into the son who would take her place as their father’s favorite. Over the years, she had fought to stay stronger and more useful, always a step ahead, even as Michal grew taller.
One morning when she was twelve, she’d awakened to a squawk of dismay as Tata pulled her six-year-old brother from his bed for his first hunting trip. Jealousy nagged at her—before Michal, it had been she who had accompanied Tata on his dark forays into the cold woods to set traps and shoot deer. Now he had his son. But Michal sat on the floor, skin white and eyes wide as their father tugged at his collar, trying to force him to his feet. Michal looked up at her imploringly. He had always loved animals, had all but stopped eating meat as a child once he’d realized where it came from. Tata loomed over him, unwilling to be dissuaded. “Come,” she said, helping Michal to dress. Tata did not object when she tagged along, holding her brother’s hand as they trudged wordlessly through the dark, still woods.
There was nothing to be caught that day. When they had returned home, Tata stomped into the barn and emerged holding a flailing chicken by the neck. “Kill it,” he instructed Michal, unwilling to be placated until the lesson was complete. The boy stood back, trembling. Several seconds passed. “Do it.” Tears streamed down Michal’s cheeks.
Helena stepped forward and grabbed the chicken from her father, snapping its neck beneath the warm feathers with one swift movement. Her eyes met Tata’s defiantly and for a moment she feared he was going to return to the barn to get another chicken, their last, for Michal to kill. But he had simply walked away. “Come,” she’d said again to her brother. Together they went to clean the bird, Helena gently but persistently showing him how to remove the feathers and separate the bones.
It was perhaps hardest on him now, Helena reflected as the memory cleared. Michal was old enough to remember faint glimpses of the happiness that had once been theirs, not like Dorie and Karolina, who didn’t know what they had missed. But he had been too young to understand why it had all gone away, leaving him alone in a house full of girls.
“Here.” Helena pushed the rest of her bread toward him, trying to ignore her stomach, which grumbled in protest. As she did, she noticed a stain on her sleeve left by spilled milk and cereal.
Michal hesitated, then devoured the bread in two bites, hardly bothering to chew. “May I be excused?”
“No,” said Ruth.
“Yes,” said Helena in near-unison, their voices clashing against each other. They looked at each other uneasily. It was a tacit understanding that, despite their differences, they would not disagree in front of the children. For all of the hard times, she could not recall her parents quarreling, at least not when they thought the children could hear, and she and Ruth had tried to maintain that unified front. But the sisters seemed to differ more of late, their opposition laid bare for the children to see.
“Yes,” Ruth relented quickly. “Check on the animals, will you?”
“Come on, Dorie,” Michal said, holding out his hand.
Dorie followed him, her gait stilted. Her right leg had grown more slowly and was now an inch shorter than her left, causing her to her limp. “It will even out,” Mama had predicted optimistically when Dorie had started walking and the problem first became apparent. But the difference had become more pronounced with time.
Last spring, Helena had cut down a block of wood and affixed it to Dorie’s right shoe to compensate. It worked, and the limp had been all but gone when she had worn it. But a day later, Dorie had pulled the wood from her shoe. “It just doesn’t feel right.” Around the house, her limp had become so much a part of things they scarcely noticed it. As Helena watched Dorie hobble now along Michal’s long, foal-like gait, she seemed so vulnerable.
Michal and Dorie bounded through the door, spurred by the brisk morning air, their two heads bobbing auburn. Helena opened the shutters to let in the light. Ruth kept the children immaculate, Helena conceded inwardly. Their clothes were not torn or stained, the darned bits hidden so well they could scarcely be seen. She brushed their teeth with baking soda each night, insisted that their baths be thorough. Helena sometimes wondered why she bothered when they so seldom saw anyone but one another.
Outside the children ran in circles, Michal pretending to exert himself but really going much slower than he might have, allowing Dorie to catch him and feel that she was doing well. They chased a chipmunk around the yard, nearly colliding into the dwindling woodpile as the animal ducked beneath. Watching them play together, Helena was flooded with pride—despite their thinness and simple clothing, there was a light about them, a kind of strength other children did not possess. And they had a way of instinctively protecting each other, always had, even before they could walk or speak.
Was it different for them somehow because they weren’t twins? Helena wondered. With her and Ruth, it had always been a competition, who had spoken first (Ruth) and walked first (Helena), and later who was prettier, smarter, could sew or cook better. But it wasn’t any easier having older or younger siblings, she supposed, someone always ahead of you in the queue or behind in the scramble for food or attention. It was the plight of being one of many. Big families were the norm in these parts, even families like their own that could ill-afford them.
As the children disappeared into the barn, she smiled at Michal’s awkwardness, the way he had not quite grown into the long legs and broad shoulders he’d inherited from their father. “I heard something at market the other day,” Ruth said in a hushed tone, even though only little Karolina was there to hear them. Helena’s breath caught. Had Ruth learned—or somehow guessed—about the soldier? Guilt nagged at her suddenly. Until now, she always told Ruth everything. Yet this time something had held her back. It was as if, by discovering the man in the woods, she had taken a step apart from her siblings.
Helena licked her lips. “What is it?”
“The Garzels disappeared—Pani Kowalska said maybe they were arrested.”
Helena’s brow arched. “She said that?”
Ruth bristled. “Well, she didn’t exactly say it, but she suggested that was the case.”
Helena waved her hand dismissively. “Just silly gossip from an old woman with too much time on her hands.”
Ruth tried again. “She said that they arrested the Jews in Nowy S˛acz, too. People couldn’t make up such awful things from whole cloth, could they? There must be some truth to it.” She sounded as if she really needed Helena to believe her.
“Perhaps,” Helena said, trying to take the idea seriously. She started to lift Karolina down from the chair before she began to fuss, demanding to climb down herself.
“Here,” Helena said, relenting and letting her do it, but keeping a protective hand close behind. Karolina looked at her in disbelief—it was Ruth, not Helena, who usually gave in. But the child’s smile, so rare these days, was reward enough. Karolina scampered down. She had always shown physical prowess beyond the others, rolling over at three months and walking at nine months, almost as if she knew that the world was testing her, and despite her small size she would need to get around on her own two feet. Helena checked her forehead and noted with relief that her skin was now cool to the touch, then released her to play on the floor.
“People wouldn’t stand for it,” she replied to Ruth, resuming their conversation in that fractured way that happened frequently while they were caring for the children. A lack of confidence eroded her voice. In fact, the war had stripped away so many civilities, given people a license to act on their deeper, baser selves. Many, she suspected with an uneasy feeling, would be only too happy to let the Germans get rid of not just Jews but neighbors they had never really wanted in the first place.
Helena’s eyes traveled to the corner by the fireplace, where the scarf Ruth had knitted for Piotr still lay crumpled in a ball, untouched though months had passed. She kicked it out of the way, hoping Ruth had not seen. Anger rose within her as she thought of the boy who had broken her sister’s heart. “He’s not worth it,” she had wanted to say many times since Piotr last had come. But she held back, knowing such sentiments would only bring Ruth more pain.
Helena gestured to Karolina’s thick hair, which Ruth had cowed earlier into two luminous pigtails. Karolina was the outlier in their auburn-haired cluster—thick locks the color of cornstalks made her shine like the sun. “Do mine next?” she asked.
“Really?” Ruth’s brow lifted. Helena held her breath, wondering if she’d gone too far. She’d never had the patience to sit, instead pulling her hair into a scraggly knot at the back of her neck. She worried that this, coupled with her announcement of an extra visit to their mother, might arouse Ruth’s suspicion. But Ruth just shrugged. “Sit down.” Helena dropped into the chair. Ruth’s touch was gentle, her movements soothing as she coaxed the stubborn wisps into place with deft fingers. Helena fought the urge to fidget—it was all she could do not to leap from the chair and run out the door into the forest.
“Mischa needs shoes,” she announced grimly when Ruth had finished braiding. Ruth’s brow wrinkled. For the girls, there was always an old pair to be handed down, but Michal would not be big enough to wear Tata’s boots for at least another year or two, and there was no money for new ones. “What about your knitting? You could sell some pieces.”
Ruth cocked her head, as if she had not considered that her handiwork would have value to anyone outside of the house. “Perhaps with Christmas coming I can barter something knitted for a pair at market.”
Christmas. The word sounded foreign, as if from another lifetime. “Remember how Mama would decorate the house with mistletoe?”
“Holly,” her sister corrected, her voice crackling with authority. With Ruth, there was always a rejoinder. “And we would sing carols until she would give us a coin to stop.” Helena smiled fondly at the memory, one of many that only she and Ruth shared. “Then we would open our gifts and Tata would pretend to fall asleep early...”
“He didn’t...” Helena began. Tata hadn’t pretended to sleep; he had passed out from the half bottle of homemade potato vodka he consumed during Wigilia, their Christmas Eve feast. Even as a young child, Helena had known the truth. How could two people live the same moment but remember it so differently?
“Of course he did,” she relented, allowing Ruth to win. Ruth sniffed with quiet satisfaction.
Helena brushed aside the memories, forcing herself to focus on more practical matters. “Or we could sell it,” she said, gesturing with her head toward the corner. The sewing machine, which Tata had bought for their mother as a wedding present, had been her most prized possession. It would fetch a fair price, even from someone who wanted to use the parts for scrap.
“No!”
“Ruti, we must be practical. We need food and coal.”
But Ruth shook her head. “We need it. That’s why Mama left it to me. She knew you wouldn’t keep it safe.”
A lump of anger formed in Helena’s throat. Had Mama actually bequeathed the sewing machine to Ruth while she was still coherent enough? More likely, Ruth had simply presumed. Helena swallowed, struggling not to retort. Ruth clung to the machine because letting it go meant acknowledging that things had changed permanently, and that Mama was not coming back.
Helena walked back to the fireplace where Karolina played by the hearth. “Let’s get you dressed.” She held out her arms, but the child hung back, looking up uncertainly at Ruth. It was Ruth from whom the children sought care and affection, preferring her softer voice and gentle, uncalloused hands.
Ruth crossed the room gracefully, appearing to swirl rather then walk, her skirt a gentle halo around her—not like Helena, who seemed to crash headlong at full force. She scooped Karolina up with effort. “She’s getting too old to be carried all of the time,” Helena scolded. “You’ll spoil her.” Ruth did not reply, but smiled sweetly, smoothing her hair and kissing the top of her head. Dorie and Karolina had had so much less of their parents than the others. Ruth tried to make up for it, fashioning little treats when she could and singing to them and rocking them at night. Karolina eyed Helena reproachfully now as Ruth carried her past. Helena opened her mouth, searching for the right words. She loved the children, too, though perhaps she never told them as much. But they needed to be strong in these times.
Helena walked past her sisters to the bedroom. Fingering the stain on her sleeve, Helena’s eyes roamed longingly toward the armoire. She opened the door. Mama’s clothing still hung neatly, as clean and pressed as the day she had gone to the hospital. Her church dress was practically new, the gleaming buttons kept immaculately. Even her two everyday dresses were nicer that Helena’s, having been spared the hardships of the woods these many months.
Helena reached inside and pulled one of the dresses out. She remembered Christmas two years earlier, when Ruth had opened a box to reveal a new skirt, pink and crisp. “There was only money for one,” Mama explained. “And Ruth’s bigger. You’ll have her old one.” It had been a pretext. Though Ruth was a bit fuller figured, the truth was that she was the prettier one with the better chance of marriage, and it was always presumed that she should have the nicer, more feminine things. There had never been any talk of a suitor for Helena, even in happier times.
“What are you doing?” Helena jumped and spun around. Ruth had appeared behind her, stealthily as a cat.
Helena held up the dress. “I was thinking of borrowing this.”
“Nonsense,” Ruth snapped. “Yours is good enough for traipsing through the woods and doing chores. You’d only soil it and we need to leave it for when Mama comes home.” She eyed Helena warily, daring her to argue. Then Ruth took the dress from her and returned it to the armoire, closing the door firmly behind her.
5 (#ulink_983a52fe-62d8-5376-a2e0-7be374b7c918)
The sun was dropping low to the trees later that afternoon as Helena neared the chapel and pushed open the door. “Dzie´n dobry...?” she called into the dank semidarkness. Silence greeted her. Surely the soldier could not have fled in his condition. For a second, she wondered if she’d imagined him. He could be dead, she thought with more dismay than she should have felt for someone she’d only met once. His wounds had seemed serious enough.
She pulled back the shutter that covered one of the broken windows to allow the pale light to filter in. The soldier was curled up in a tight ball on the ground, much as he had been when she found him, but farther from the door. She hesitated as excitement and alarm rose in her. What was she thinking by coming here? She didn’t know this man, or whether he was here to help or do harm.
Helena walked over and knelt to feel his cheek, caught off guard by the softness of his skin. She was relieved to find he was still warm. Then she remembered Karolina’s illness, barely passed. Had she made a mistake by coming and possibly bringing sickness to this man in his already-weakened state?
The soldier moved suddenly beneath her hand and she jumped. His eyes snapped open. He stiffened, almost as Mama had when she feared pain in the hospital.
“It’s okay,” Helena said, holding her hands low and open. “I’m the one who brought you here.”
He forced himself to a sitting position, trying without success to stifle a whimper. “Who are you?” His Polish was stiff and a bit accented.
“I’m called Helena. I live close to the village. You should rest,” she added.
But he sat even straighter, clenching and unclenching his hands. His chocolate eyes, set just a shade too close together, darted back and forth. “Does anyone else know that I’m here?”
“Not that I’m aware,” she replied quickly. “I haven’t told anyone.” She wanted to say that someone else might have heard the crash, but it seemed unwise to upset him more.
He stared at her, disbelieving. “Are you sure?”
“I haven’t told anyone,” she repeated, suddenly annoyed. “Why would I have gone to all of the trouble to save you just to turn you in?”
He shrugged, somewhat calmer now. “A reward, maybe. Who knows why people do anything these days?”
“No one knows that you’re here,” she replied, her voice soothing.
“Where is ‘here’ exactly?” he asked.
“Southern Poland, Małopolska. You’re about twenty kilometers from the city.”
“Kraków?” Helena nodded, sensing from his expression that her answer was not what he expected. “That puts us about an hour from the southern border, doesn’t it?”
“Roughly, yes. Perhaps a bit more.”
His face relaxed slightly. “You’re real.” She cocked her head. “I thought I might have been delirious and dreamed you. And then I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied quickly. “It’s hard to get away.” He had rugged features, an uneven nose and a chin that jutted forth defiantly. But his eyelashes were longer than she knew a man could have, and there was a softness to his gaze that kept him from being too intimidating.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” the man added. “Just that I’m glad to see you again.” A warm flush seemed to wash over her then, and she could feel her cheeks color. “I don’t think I introduced myself properly. Sam Rosen.” He held out his hand. “I’m American.” His deep voice had a lyrical quality to it, the words nearly a song.
“But you’re speaking Polish.”
“Yes, my grandparents were from one of those eastern parts by the border that was Poland when it wasn’t Russia. They used to speak Polish with my mother when they didn’t want the children to understand what they were saying. So I had a reason to try to figure it out.” The corners of his mouth rose with amusement.
She shook his outstretched hand awkwardly. He had wiped the blood from his face, she noticed, leaving a narrow gash across his forehead. “You’re looking better,” she remarked, meaning it. There was a ruddiness to his complexion that had not been there before. His hair was darker than she remembered it, almost black. A healed scar ran pale and deep from the right corner of his mouth to his chin.
“Thanks to you,” he replied, his eyes warm. “Bringing me here saved my life. And the food you left did me a world of good.” He made it sound as though she had left him an entire feast and not just a handful of bread.
“A bit more,” she said, passing him another piece of bread, slightly larger. His fingers brushed against her own, coarse and unfamiliar. “I’m sorry that’s all I could manage.” She could not take any of the scarce sheep’s cheese or lard they needed for the children.
“You’re very kind.” His voice was full with gratitude. He tore into the bread with an urgency that suggested true hunger. Of course, the morsel she’d left him last time would not have lasted a day, once he was able to eat. She noticed then a pile of leaves—he must have dragged himself outside to forage. “They taught us in training which things we could eat, roots and such. And I’ve managed to drink some rainwater.” He gestured across the chapel to a puddle that had formed where it had rained through the opening in the roof. “I’m sorry not to get up,” he added. “My leg is still a mess. But I don’t think it needs to be set.”
She looked around the chapel—the wooden pews had rotted to the floor and there was no sign of any pulpit, but fine engravings were still visible on the walls, faded images of angels and the Virgin Mary at the front. “It’s a good thing I found you,” she said, sounding more pleased with herself than she intended. “The path is just off the main road. Someone else might have turned you in to the police for favors or food.”
“What about animals?” he asked. “Are there wolves?”
She hesitated. “Yes.” His eyes widened. She did not want to alarm him, but other than sparing Ruth the occasional bit of reality, it was not in Helena’s nature to lie. Once the wild animals had clung to the high hills, content to feed on small prey. But with food sources growing scarce, they’d become bolder, venturing down to the outskirts of the village to steal livestock.
“Here.” Helena opened her bag. She had looked around the hospital ward while visiting her mother earlier, searching for whatever supplies she could take to help him. There had only been a few rags and a small bottle of alcohol lying on one of the nurse’s carts and she didn’t dare to risk looking in the supply closet or any of the cupboards. She handed the bottle to him. “I brought you these, too.” She pulled out the wool coat and thick gray sweater that had been her father’s. Sam took the sweater and put it on, swimming in its massive girth. She hoped he could not detect the smell of liquor that lingered, even after it had been washed.
“Thank you. My jacket must have been stripped off with the parachute. It’s probably hanging from a tree somewhere.”
So he had fallen from the sky, after all. “So you jumped?”
He nodded. “Before the plane crashed. The weather forced us to fly farther north than we should have, I think, and the pilot had to go off course. At first we received orders to turn back, but we had all agreed that we were too far gone for that—we wanted to see the mission through. Then something went wrong with the plane. We knew we were going to have to wild jump, that means just land anywhere, as well as we could.” She imagined it, leaping from the plane in darkness and mist, not knowing what lay below. “I wasn’t sure my chute was going to have time to open. It did, but I got caught in a tree. When I was trying to free my chute, I fell from the tree and, well...” He gestured to his leg. “The rest you know.”
Sam opened the bottle and doused the cloth, then pressed it against the gash on his forehead, grimacing. He shivered and there was a sudden air of vulnerability about him, as though all of the foreign bits had been stripped away.
“I’ll be right back,” she announced. Before he could respond, Helena rushed outside to the grassy patch above the chapel, collecting an armful of sticks to make a fire. She stopped abruptly. What was she doing coming to the woods to tend to this stranger, risking discovery at any moment? Caretaking had never been in her nature. It was Ruth who nurtured the others, Michal that cared for small, hurt animals. And she had her family’s well-being to think about. She had done enough, too much, her sister would surely say.
Helena eyed the path back toward the village. She could just turn and go, now. But then she remembered the gratitude in the soldier’s eyes as he had taken the food from her. She was his only hope. If the Germans came, though, she would be arrested, leaving her family helpless. She had to think of them first. One had to be practical in order to survive in these times. She would build the soldier a fire before going and that was all.
She returned with her armful of kindling, which she carried to the small stove in the corner. He frowned. “It isn’t right, you hauling wood for me.”
Helena fought the urge to laugh. She carried enough wood to keep her family warm—the small pile of kindling was nothing. Still, she was touched by his concern. “It’s fine.” The wood was too damp, she fretted as she broke it into pieces. But when she struck the match she’d brought from home and touched it to the pile, it began to burn merrily.
“Thank you,” Sam said, sliding closer along the floor as she closed the grate. The tiny flames seemed to make his dark eyes dance. He winced.
“Is it very painful?” she asked.
“It isn’t so bad when I’m still, but when I move, it’s awful.”
“Let me.” She walked to him and slowly helped him inch closer to the fire, letting him lean on her for support, feeling his muscles strain with the effort of each movement.
“There is one other thing...” He hesitated. “I’m so sorry to ask, but I’d like to wash if that’s somehow possible.” She’d noticed it earlier, his own masculine earthy scent, stronger than it had been last time she was here. “Perhaps some water?”
“Let me see what I can find.” Helena went back outside to where she had seen a rusty bucket lying by the drain. She picked up the bucket and walked uphill several meters to the stream. She moved slowly on her return, taking care not to spill. “It’s cold,” she cautioned as Sam took it from her, his hand brushing hers.
He cupped his hand and drank from the bucket hurriedly. Then he splashed the water on his face, not seeming to mind as the icy droplets trickled down his neck. “That feels great.”
He pulled off the sweater and unbuttoned his shirt. She blushed and half turned away; out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of his back where it met his shoulder, muscle and bone working against the bare, pale skin as he bathed. She sucked in her breath quickly, then held it, hoping he hadn’t heard.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. “Pan Rosen...” she began, lowering herself to the ground as he dried himself with his torn shirt.
“Sam,” he corrected. Sam. In that moment, he was not a soldier, but a man, with an open face and broad smooth cheeks she wanted to touch. He pulled on the sweater she had given him once more. “And may I call you Hel...” He faltered.
“Helena,” she prompted.
“Helena,” he repeated, as if trying it on for size. “That’s quite a mouthful. May I call you Lena?”
“Y-yes,” she replied, caught off guard. All of the other children had pet names, Ruti, Mischa—but she had always been Helena.
“Lena,” he said again, a slight smile playing at the corners of his lips. His shoulders were broad, forearms strong. Sitting beside him, she felt oddly small and delicate.
She struggled to remember what she wanted to say. “What are you doing here, Sam? Are the Americans coming to help us?”
“No.” Her heart sank. The talk of the Americans entering the war had been growing in recent months, whispered everywhere from the hospital corridors to the market in the town square. And if the Americans weren’t coming yet, then what was he doing here? “That is, I mean...” He broke off. “I really can’t say too much,” he added apologetically. Then he frowned again. “You must be taking a terrible risk coming here.”
Not really, she wanted to say, but that would be untrue. “Everything is dangerous now,” she replied instead. In truth, finding him was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in years, maybe ever, and she had been eager to return. “Especially going to see my mother.” She told him then about sneaking in and out of Kraków, her near-encounter with the jeep. “Of course, if not for the German I would never have come this way and found you.” She could feel herself blush again.
He did not seem to notice, though, but continued staring at her, his brow crinkled. “I wish you wouldn’t go to the city again.”
Helena was touched by his concern, more than she might have expected from a man she just met. “That’s what my...” She stopped herself from telling him about Ruth, the fact that she had a twin. She did not want to acknowledge her prettier sister. “There are five children in the family, including me. I’m the one who has to go check on Mama. My father is gone and there’s no one else to make sure she’s cared for.”
Helena’s thoughts turned to her mother. She’d actually seemed better today. For once she’d been awake and hadn’t mistaken Helena for her sister. And she had reached for the bread that Helena offered. For a second, Helena had hesitated; she had hoped to keep the extra food for the soldier. She was overcome with shame and had quickly broken the bread and moistened it. “Pani Kasia says that they’re going to kill us,” Mama had announced abruptly as she chewed, gesturing to the woman in the bed next to hers. She had an unworried, slightly gossipy tone as though discussing the latest rumor about one of the neighbors back home.
Inwardly, Helena had blanched. She had worked so hard to shield Mama from the outside world. But the hospital was a porous place and news seeped through the cracks. “She’s a crazy old woman,” Helena replied carefully in a low voice. For months she had done her best to keep the truth from her mother without actually lying to her, and she didn’t want to cross that line now.
“And sour to boot,” Mama added, smiling faintly. There was a flicker of clarity to her eyes and for a second Helena glimpsed the mother of old, the one who had baked sweet cakes and rubbed their feet on frigid winter nights. There were so many things she wanted to ask her mother about her childhood and the past and what her hopes and dreams had been.
“Mama...” She turned back, then stopped. Her mother was staring out the window, once more the cloud pulled down over her face like a veil, and Helena knew that she was gone and could not be reached.
“It’s so brave of you to make that journey every week,” Sam said, drawing her from her thoughts. His voice was full with admiration.
“Brave?” She was unaccustomed to thinking of herself that way. “You’re the brave one, leaving your family to come all the way over here.”
“That’s different,” he replied, and a shadow seemed to pass across his face.
“How old are you, anyway?” she asked, hearing her sister’s phantom admonition that the question was too blunt.
“Eighteen.”
“Same as me,” she marveled.
“Almost nineteen. I enlisted the day after my birthday.”
“Did you always want to be a soldier?”
“No.” His face clouded over. “But I had to come.”
“Why?”
He bit his lip, not answering. Then he lifted his shoulders, straightening. “When I joined the army, they sent me to school in Georgia, that’s in the southern part of the United States, for nearly a year. I had to learn to be a soldier, you see, and then how to be a paratrooper.”
Helena processed the information. She had never thought about someone becoming a soldier; it seemed like they were already that way. But now she pictured it, Sam donning his uniform and getting his hair cut short. “Is that why it’s taking so long for the Americans to come?” It came out sounding wrong, as though she was holding him personally responsible for his country.
But he seemed to understand what she meant. “In part, yes.” His brow wrinkled. “Some people don’t want us to enter the war at all.” How could the Americans not help? Helena wanted to ask. Sam continued, “Everyone has to be trained, they have to plan the missions...” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t say too much. It’s nothing personal,” he hastened to add. “I’m not supposed to talk about it with anyone.”
“I understand.” But the moment hung heavy between them. She was a Pole and not to be trusted.
“They don’t know,” he explained earnestly. “I mean, the American people know about Hitler, of course, and the Jews there are concerned for their relatives, trying to get them out. Until I came to Europe, I had no idea...” He stopped abruptly.
“No idea about what?”
Sam bit his lip. “Nothing.” Helena could tell from his voice that there were things that she, even in the middle of it all, had not seen. Things he would not share with her. “Anyway, our rabbi back home said that—”
“You’re Jewish?” she interrupted. He nodded. She was surprised—he didn’t look anything like the Jews she’d seen in the city, shawl covered and stooped. But there was something unmistakably different about him, a slight arch to his nose, chin just a shade sharper than the people around here. His dark hair was curly and so thick it seemed that water could not penetrate it. “You don’t look it,” she blurted. Her face flushed. “That is, the Jews around here...”
He smiled, not offended. “There are different kinds of Jews. Some, like the Orthodox, are more observant than others, and they dress differently.”
That was not quite what Helena had meant, but she was grateful to let it be. Thinking of the empty streets and shuttered shops of Kazimierz, and what the nurse had told her about the ghetto and her sister about the Jews of Nowy S˛acz, she was suddenly nervous for him. Not just a foreigner, but a Jew. The full danger of his situation crashed down upon her. “Did they make you come?”
“No, I volunteered.” He cleared his throat. “That is, the kind of work I do...” She wanted to ask what that was exactly, but she knew he wouldn’t say. “It’s a really big honor and I raised my hand to be considered. At first they said no—they were worried that being Jewish I might let emotions get in the way.” His face was open and honest in a way that she liked, as if he could not hide a single feeling. So unlike here, where everyone kept their eyes low to avoid trouble. “Are you Catholic?”
Helena nodded, picturing the worn old rosary Mama kept in her bed stand drawer, even at the hospital. She had insisted on dressing the children in their best clothes and going to Mass each Sunday. Helena always dreaded the stares of the other villagers, wondering where their father was, speculating that he was sleeping off another night of drinking. After Mama got sick and had gone to the sanatorium, Ruth had stubbornly persisted in herding the children to church. But then their better clothes became too small and threadbare to wear and after Tata died they stopped going altogether. “Everyone is here, more or less.”
He did not speak further, but stared off into the distance. “What are you going to do now?” she asked finally.
He paused. “I don’t know. Stay here for now, I guess. I don’t have much choice with this leg.” He finished the bread and looked at her with a serious expression. “When you found me, was there any sign of anyone else?”
She shook her head. “No one. You were by yourself in the woods. No other people, no plane. And the night before, when I heard the crash, I never saw anything.” She did not have the heart to tell him about the force with which the crash had shaken their house, making the likelihood that anyone else had survived virtually nil.
“No, you wouldn’t have. We flew in low with lights down. It was an engine problem, I think, maybe birds, that got us—not the Germans.” The distinction seemed to matter to him a great deal. “The plane was too low for our chutes to open properly. I doubt the others were as lucky.” Pain washed over his face. His own injuries had been awful, but surely his fellow soldiers had suffered worse. She was seized with the urge to put her arms around him and comfort him, as Ruth might Dorie when she scraped a knee. But offering comfort did not come naturally to Helena and she stopped, caught off guard by the unfamiliar impulse.
He cleared his throat and took her hand in his. “You cut yourself.” The spot where she had caught her hand on the thorny bush while fleeing had reopened from the cold, dry air.
She pulled back sharply. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It isn’t that.” She was ashamed of the rough calluses, the places where her knuckles had split from chopping wood. Ruth always scolded her to take care of her hands. She kept her own soft by wearing an old pair of Tata’s work gloves as she washed and cleaned, rubbing lanolin into her palms and pushing back her cuticles. Ruth took time to do the little things, as though it still mattered and there were young men looking for wives and not that Piotr, her last best hope, had disappeared into the abyss. For once Helena wished that she had listened.
“May I?” He reached out once more. Helena nodded, then extended her hand, allowing him to cradle it in the warmth of his own. He examined it carefully. She felt silly having him worrying about such a little cut, when he was so much more seriously wounded. He dropped her hand and she wondered if he was repulsed by its coarseness. But he reached in his pocket and pulled out a small tube, uncapped it. “It’s a salve,” he explained as he squeezed some into his palm. “Hard to believe that I lost almost everything but managed to keep this.”
“Plus your flashlight and your gun,” she replied pointedly.
He blinked with surprise. “Yeah, that, too.” A moment of awkward distrust passed between them, then evaporated. He took her hand in his own once more, sending shivers of unfamiliar warmth through her as he rubbed the lotion into her skin.
She pulled away again. “I can do it.”
“Of course.” Sam held out the tube. He had strong wrists, flat on top with a few dark hairs curling toward the backs of his hands. She was suddenly mindful of her thick stockings, the darning where they had torn at the knee impossible to conceal.
She finished rubbing in the lotion, studying him more closely now. “Your scar—is it from the war?”
“No, I fell when I was younger,” he answered, a beat too quickly.
She recapped the tube and tried to hand it back. “You keep it,” she said.
“Oh, I couldn’t...”
“Okay, then I’ll give you some more next time.” Next time. The two words hung in the air, waiting for her to refute them.
She looked up, noticing then how the sun had dipped low. “I have to go.” She stood reluctantly. Talking with Sam had been such a reprieve from the dreariness of the rest of her life. “Do you need anything else?”
“Some longer branches, if you wouldn’t mind. I can use them to make a crutch.”
“I saw some out by the knoll.” She returned a few minutes later with several pieces of wood.
“Thank you,” Sam said. “I didn’t expect... That is, I didn’t think people here would be nice.”
“Oh.” She brought her hand to her mouth, feeling her cheeks flush.
“That was thoughtless of me to say,” he recovered hastily. “You have to understand, the Jews who came to America from Poland, well, they left for a reason and maybe they didn’t have the best experience here, or leave with the best impression of the people.” He was talking quickly now, stumbling over his words. But it was more than just awkwardness, or embarrassment over what he had said. He was nervous. “Thank you,” he repeated, somehow making the words sound like something more. She nodded and started toward the door.
“Please wait.” She turned back. “It’s important, you understand, that no one else know I am here.” His voice was grave and she knew he was talking about something larger than his personal safety.
“I promise.”
He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again and stood reluctantly. “Lena, wait...” She turned back as he struggled to stand, holding on to the wall of the chapel. “The trains,” he said. “Can you see them from where you live?”
Helena hesitated, puzzled. She nodded. From the window of the barn loft where she had always hidden as a child when things got bad one could see the tracks. She went there still when she needed a moment of quiet. The trains had changed lately, increasing their frequency, seeming to move with grim determination. “You can tell a lot from the rail lines—how often they go, in which direction, what kind of cars they are carrying, if they are empty or full.”
“I’ll watch,” she promised.
She noticed the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin, which seemed to have grown thicker during her visit. “I can bring a razor next time,” she said, remembering her father’s, which sat in a tin cup in the cupboard, waiting for the soft peach fuzz on Michal’s upper lip to evolve.
“You mean you’ll... That is...” He paused, conflict washing over his face. “No, you mustn’t come again. It isn’t safe,” he added, and she saw then that he was worried for her safety. He was setting her free, giving her permission to go and not come back. Could she take it? Her shoulders slumped and she was suddenly overwhelmed and saddened, by all that had happened and that she had taken on in coming here—and by the fact that she was now leaving him.
“I’ll see you soon,” she replied firmly, not realizing that she was making the promise until the words had flown from her mouth. Then, before he could argue further, she turned and started down the hill.
6 (#ulink_548b3e16-2aff-5e2b-b66b-add8c5c530cb)
After Helena disappeared into the forest, Ruth set Karolina down to play with wooden blocks by the fire and busied herself cleaning up the breakfast dishes. When she finished, she dried her hands and opened the cupboard. In the back, exactly as Mama had kept it, was the glass jar of honey. Ruth had discovered the jar when she was eight, and Mama (whose sweet tooth was her one weakness) had shared a bit with her in exchange for keeping it a secret. Ruth dipped a finger in it now and then put it in her mouth, the familiar sweetness a reminder of happier times. How wonderful it had been to have something that was just hers, instead of split between her and Helena. Guilt surged through her. She should share it with the children, a rare treat for all of them. But then it would be gone. It was all right to keep this one thing as hers alone, wasn’t it? Better for them not to get used to such things, anyway, when they likely would not have any more.
Checking on Karolina, who was still playing contentedly, Ruth poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the seat by the window. The wind whistled, seeping through the cracks. Outside Michal and Dorie continued to run, undeterred by the cold. As Ruth looked around the cottage, a sense of foreboding overcame her. “Things are changing,” Helena had observed cryptically the previous evening. Why did she say this as though it were a good thing? Ruth had liked the old world with its seasons and predictable expectations. Now everything was topsy-turvy, uncertain.
She shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Piotr. The memory of his face had grown fuzzy in her mind since the last time he’d come to see her. She had taken the time that morning to roll her hair into a fine braided knot. “Ruth, you look like a princess!” Dorie had exclaimed. Touched, Ruth had glowed with a bit of nearly forgotten pride. “Princess” was Dorie’s highest honor, and one she had only bestowed on Mama—until now.
Piotr had appeared across the field from town at one o’clock, as he had each Sunday, head bowed low against an autumn wind. He was not bad looking, Ruth had reflected. Taller than her by a head and broad-shouldered, he had thick features and colorless blond hair. Balled in one hand was the scarf she had knitted for him and she wondered why he wasn’t wearing it. She might have kept it for Christmas and given it to him as a gift, but she’d wanted him to have it exactly for days like this.
“Cze´s´c.” He greeted her with an awkward kiss that did not quite reach her cheek. She waited for him to notice her hair, but he did not remark upon it.
“Shall we walk?” she asked, speaking a bit more quickly than usual. Their courtship had been unremarkable, consisting mostly of strolls by the stream when the weather permitted it. “Or would you prefer to come in and warm up by the fire?” He did not answer but peered uneasily over her shoulder. It was the others, she decided. Piotr was an only child and more comfortable around a calf or foal than human little ones.
Ruth put on her cape and followed him outside in the direction of the stream. The water was low, pulled back to reveal dry muddy banks littered with pebbles and branches. A mossy smell rose from the muck. The stream would swell again when the snows came and melted, then rise perilously with the spring rain showers. She pointed to a bend in the stream, just beyond the edge of their property. “Helena says that is a fine place for catching trout. Perhaps in the spring...”
Piotr stopped and turned to her abruptly. “I can’t. That is, my father doesn’t want me to come anymore.” He faltered, face reddening like a beet.
“I don’t understand.” Her stomach burned ominously.
“Things are going so poorly with the farm. And now there are the quotas.” He was referring to the percentage that the Germans now exacted from each farmer’s yield. The sisters’ own garden was too small to offer much, but from a farm like Piotr’s, the demand would be severe. “There isn’t enough to support a family.”
It was a lie, of course—she and Helena managed to feed the children with so much less. But he was offering it as a reason—an excuse, really—as to why they could not go forward. Ruth watched him, contemplating what to do, which smile or touch might cajole him to change his mind. She’d learned from observing Mama how to charm a man into doing what she wanted. A few minutes ago he was just an ordinary boy; now he was all she had, and she was suddenly desperate to keep him.
“The war has just made things so difficult,” Piotr began again. He broke off and thrust the scarf in her direction so quickly that it fell to the ground, then he stomped off in the opposite direction with a gait too clumsy to be a run.
She took a step forward, stumbling over a tree root. “Piotr!” Her voice echoed against the stillness of the trees. It was not until he had disappeared across the field that she realized he would not be coming again.
Staring at the emptiness before her, so new and yet so permanent, Ruth recalled how just a week earlier he had kissed her behind the barn. She had pushed his fumbling hands away, partly because it was the right thing to do, and also because once she gave him that, he would no longer want her. But he had left her, anyway. Had Piotr broken off things because she had let him go too far, or because she had stopped him?
Neither, she decided now, gazing out the window at the very spot where their courtship had ended. It had not been about sex, but money. Piotr’s family just didn’t want to be saddled with supporting so many children who were not their own. Piotr’s mother had undoubtedly told him to get rid of dead wood while he still had the chance, that Ruth and her family would never be anything but a burden. But if Piotr had been a stronger man, he would have stayed in spite of his mother’s opinion—and for that weakness Ruth hated him most of all.
Piotr had begun courting the liveryman’s daughter, beautiful and unencumbered by anyone, just three weeks later, confirming Ruth’s suspicions. Her cheeks burned now as she relived the rejection. It wasn’t so much Piotr she missed, Ruth reflected. She hadn’t really wanted to go live in his big cold house on the other side of town, and there was a roughness to his touch that had made her dread what lay ahead. No, it was the idea of him, the now-gone promise of having a place secured, which filled her with a sense of loss.
Worst of all that day, she’d had to return to the house to face Helena. Though she had not said a word, her sister’s expression indicated that she’d known it would end poorly all along. She did not want to accept Helena’s sympathy—or acknowledge the fact that they were the same again, alone without anyone.
There was a knock at the door. Ruth started, setting down her coffee cup so quickly that a bit splashed high over the edge onto the table. No one came calling unannounced, or at all these days. For a fleeting second she thought that it might be Piotr, conjured from her thoughts. Perhaps he had come to beg her forgiveness and tell her that he had made a mistake. She would take him back, if his apology was sincere, although not right away. She had given things too easily before, a mistake she did not intend to repeat. But of course, Piotr was off fighting somewhere. Helena, she decided. She must have come back for something and forgotten her key—again.
Ruth opened the door, then stepped back at the sight of an unfamiliar woman whose dark hair was streaked with silver. Though she did not wear the yellow star, something about her shawl suggested that she was a Jew, from a neighboring village, perhaps. “Tak?”
The woman did not speak, but looked over Ruth’s shoulder, assessing the house, which despite its modest size and furnishings must have seemed luxurious. Ruth cringed, wondering if for a moment the woman would ask for food or money, or worse yet, shelter. They had nothing extra to spare and letting the woman in would surely invite trouble. She noticed that the woman wore no gloves or hat, but seemed oblivious to the cold. “Can I help you?” Ruth asked more softly. Karolina toddled up behind her, tugging at the hem of her dress. Ruth lifted her protectively.
“My child,” the woman croaked, her voice younger than her careworn face might have suggested. Was the woman deluded and thinking that Karolina was hers? Ruth hugged the child tighter to her breast. “I have a little girl.” The woman held her hand up to just below her waist. “Wearing a red plaid scarf with an eagle on it. Have you seen her?”
For a moment, Ruth thought she must have misunderstood, for who misplaced a child? But the woman’s eyes, ringed with circles from her not having slept or rested in her search, were sincere. “I’m sorry, I haven’t.” She eyed the woman. She had only seen Jews from afar, dark, mysterious creatures that seemed to confirm Father Dominik’s admonitions in his sermons that they were shrewd and cunning and drank the blood of Christian infants. But the woman before her just looked like any mother, tired and bedraggled and desperate.
“They said a camp...” the woman began feebly, and before Ruth could ask, the woman turned and started off across the hill.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said again into the empty space before her, with more feeling than she had expected. Though the woman might look different, a child was a child, and Ruth could not help but pity her. Still, Ruth had her own family to think about and could not afford to become involved.
She closed the door and sat down with Karolina on her lap, shaken by the lingering image of the woman’s face. They knew families that had lost children in the traditional sense, born too small or taken by influenza or some other illness—not the odd way this woman had just described. She had seen the grieving mothers at market with their hollow eyes, disbelieving, despite the odds, that it had happened to them. The merchants seemed to speak softly and cut more generously for those women, but other villagers stepped back, as if the loss might somehow be contagious. Ruth’s throat tightened. She would take the squabbling and competition and hardships of a large family if it meant that they were safe—and together.
Suddenly anxious, Ruth rapped on the window, gesturing for Michal and Dorie to come inside. “Take your boots off,” she instructed, closing the door quickly behind them. “I’ll warm some milk.” As she set Karolina in her high chair, she hoped they would not ask about the woman.
The children darted beneath the table and around the chairs, as though the colder weather had made them unusually restless. “Where’s Helena?” Dorie asked, seeming to notice her sister’s absence for the first time.
“She’s gone to the city,” Ruth replied absently.
“Nooo!” the child wailed, her face seeming to crumple. She swung her braids from side to side, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Ruth stopped in surprise, milk pitcher suspended midair. The children seldom noticed, much less minded, Helena’s absences. She set the pitcher down and knelt. “There, there,” she soothed, stroking Dorie’s hair. The child’s breath was improbably sweet like cinnamon. “She’ll be back by tonight. You’ll see. She’s only gone to visit Mama.” She usually refrained from mentioning their mother, not wanting to remind the children and cause them distress or answer their many questions. But now she added the information, hoping it would bring further plausibility to her explanation of Helena’s absence.
“You know Christmas is coming,” Ruth offered, trying to change the subject.
“Are we having a tree?” Michal asked.
“I don’t think so, darling,” Ruth said, a knife going through her as she watched his face fall. It seemed frivolous, cutting down a pine tree when there was so much else to worry about. “But we’ll have a lovely meal and all of the songs and stories.”
“And Mama?” Dorie looked up hopefully, eyes brightening. “Will she be back for Christmas, too? Did Helena go to get her?” Ruth understood then that for some reason today, Dorie had equated Helena’s going to the city with Mama’s disappearance, a trip was taken in one direction only. She imagined that Helena, too, wasn’t coming back.
“Mama,” Karolina repeated absently, asking for the mother she surely could not remember.
Inwardly, Ruth crumbled. This was the conversation she had been avoiding. “No,” she said gently, knowing that there was no way to avoid breaking Dorie’s heart again. She pushed a cup of milk toward her sister. “Mama needs to stay in the hospital where there are doctors and medicine that can make her feel better.”
“Just like we were playing outside, Dor,” Michal offered. Ruth braced herself for further questions about their mother’s recovery, tried to anticipate and come up with answers that were not quite lies but spared the child from the truth. But Dorie turned away and began playing with her rag doll on the floor.
“What were you playing outside?” Ruth asked, grateful to Michal for redirecting the conversation. When she and Helena were little, theirs were simple pretend games, like house and school. Ruth was always the mother or the teacher, taking charge in a way that now seemed prophetic.
“Hospital,” Michal replied. “Dorie’s the nurse. I was the patient and Dorie cured me.” She wondered what the unseen hospital life must look like in his mind.
“Doctor,” his little sister corrected quickly. “I’m going to become a doctor for real.”
Ruth started to tell Dorie that to be a doctor you need to go to school and then college, which would take money they did not have. That even under better circumstances, it would be nearly impossible for a woman. But Dorie’s eyes shone at the idea, a childlike dream not yet deterred by the war or realities of their situation, and Ruth would not take that from her. “That sounds wonderful.”
Dorie’s expression dampened. “Ruti, what are Nazis?” she asked, shifting topics without warning.
“Why do you ask?”
“I heard you talking to Helena about them.” Inwardly, Ruth sighed. She already knew better than to speak in front of Michal about matters from which she wanted to shield the children. But Dorie was getting older now, and speaking guardedly or spelling out words did not work anymore.
“They’re Germans, darling—German soldiers.” The last word—too good for them, really—stuck in her throat.
“Why have they come?” Dorie had a need to know why things were a certain way, how they worked, to scratch beneath the surface. It was a fierce intellect that in another time and place might have been nurtured to greatness. But Ruth did not know how to channel it, and after taking care of their basic survival needs, she seldom had the energy.
Ruth stopped, stymied by the impossibility of explaining war to children. Why indeed? “They want to be in charge. It’s all about politics and government. But they haven’t come to Biekowice so they won’t bother us.”
“But what about the Garzels?” Dorie had been outside playing when she and Helena had spoken of their neighbors’ disappearance. Had Helena told her about it? “Did the Germans make them leave the village?” Dorie persisted.
“Never you mind about the Garzels. Tend your own garden, as Mama used to say.” Karolina giggled from her high chair, as though Ruth had said something funny. Ruth wiped the milk that had dribbled onto her chin, then picked her up and set her on the floor by the fire.
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Pam Jenoff
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN'S TALE OUT NOWLove will tear them apart…Helena and Ruth Nowak are like chalk and cheese: one staunchly outspoken and independent, the other gentle and caring. Caught up in the struggle of Nazi occupied Poland, the sisters have bound together and created an enviable bond that can’t be broken. Or so they thought…When Helena discovers a Jewish Allied paratrooper, wounded but alive, she risks the safety of herself and her family to hide him. As her feelings for the solider grow deeper, she finds her loyalties torn.Outraged at this impulsive choice that endangers them all, mild-mannered Ruth finds herself becoming increasingly jealous of Helena.As tensions are sparked, a singular act of betrayal unleashes a chain of events that will endanger them all and reverberate for decades to come.From hardship and heartbreak, this gut-wrenching tale puts to the test the ties of sisterhood in the shadow of WW2.Praise for Pam Jenoff:‘ heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ – Heat‘Must read’ – Daily Express
A stirring novel of first love in a time of war and the unbearable choices that could tear sisters apart, from the celebrated author of Kommandant’s Girl
Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation. The constant threat of arrest has made everyone in their village a spy, and turned neighbor against neighbor. Though rugged, independent Helena and pretty, gentle Ruth couldn’t be more different, they are staunch allies in protecting their family from the threats the war brings closer to their doorstep with each passing day.
Then Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village, wounded, but alive. Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam—a Jew—but Helena’s concern for the American grows into something much deeper. Defying the perils that render a future together all but impossible, Sam and Helena make plans for the family to flee. But Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy her choices have sparked in Ruth, culminating in a singular act of betrayal that endangers them all—and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate across continents and decades.
Praise for PAM JENOFF (#ulink_f43a2fd6-1ec8-54c1-b7d6-45a0b41abbd3)
‘This love story will melt you.’
—Company magazine on The Ambassador’s Daughter
‘This is historical romance at its finest.’
—Publishers Weekly on Kommandant’s Girl
‘In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanising the unfathomable as well as the heroic.’
—Booklist
‘Poignant and intense’
—Good Book Guide on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘Jenoff explores the immediate aftermath of World War II with sensitivity and compassion, shedding light on an often overlooked era of European history. She expertly draws out the tension and illustrates the danger and poverty of Eastern Europe as it falls under communism. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.’
—Library Journal on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘… well constructed and a real page-turner’
—Birmingham Jewish Weekly on The Diplomat’s Wife
PAM JENOFF is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Kommandant’s Girl, which also earned her a Quill Award nomination. Along with a bachelor degree in International Affairs from George Washington University and a Master’s degree in History from Cambridge, she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department in Europe, as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon and as a practising attorney. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.
Visit Pam at www.pamjenoff.com (http://www.pamjenoff.com)
Also by Pam Jenoff (#ulink_2a400dc9-67e7-5dd7-8cc6-c65a243d13b2)
KOMMANDANT’S GIRL
THE DIPLOMAT’S WIFE
THE AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER
For Mom,
who still makes our lives better every single day.
Contents
Cover (#ueb1ba5fd-5a67-59d0-8363-db52061577e1)
Back Cover Text (#ub58f1258-76b3-5531-b897-44034ccccba3)
Praise for PAM JENOFF (#uc5f90ace-f4f3-5cf0-b402-98edf2488884)
About the Author (#ueeb0d8df-431c-5652-af2b-776fd88a878d)
Also by Pam Jenoff (#ulink_1ec4068c-081e-5545-b236-cf36a0eb0ef8)
Title Page (#ub501f937-674f-5468-bc4f-f7ef74dbdf15)
Dedication (#ue513789f-063b-5f98-9a19-393e0542514e)
Prologue (#u983f9064-fb16-5c66-b620-7f33e4e4ee1d)
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Prologue (#ulink_340e6bc5-b0e4-549b-bc5e-ed8a909e9a31)
New York, 2013
“They’re coming around again,” Cookie says in a hushed voice. “Knocking on doors and asking questions.” I do not answer, but nod as a tightness forms in my throat.
I settle into the worn floral chair and tilt my head back, studying the stucco ceiling, the plaster whipped into waves and points like a frothy meringue. Whoever said, “There’s no place like home” has obviously never been to the Westchester Senior Center. One hundred and forty cookie-cutter units over ten floors, each a six hundred and twenty square foot L-shape, interlocking like an enormous dill-scented honeycomb.
Despite my issue with the sameness, it isn’t an awful place to live. The food is fresh, if a little bland, with plenty of the fruit and vegetables I still do not take for granted, even after so many years. Outside there’s a courtyard with a fountain and walking paths along plush green lawns. And the staff, perhaps better paid than others who perform this type of dirty and patience-trying work, are not unkind.
Like the white-haired black woman who has just finished mopping the kitchen floor and is now rinsing her bucket in the bathtub. “Thank you, Cookie,” I say from my seat by the window as she turns off the water and wipes the tub dry. She should be in a place like this with someone caring for her, instead of cleaning for me.
Coming closer, Cookie points to my sturdy brown shoes by the bed. “Walking today?”
“Yes, I am.”
Cookie’s eyes flicker out the window to the gray November sky, darkening with the almost-promise of a storm. I walk almost every day down to the very edge of the path until one of the aides comes to coax me back. As I stroll beneath the timeless canopy of clouds, the noises of the highway and the planes overhead fade. I am no longer shuffling and bent, but a young woman striding upward through the woods, surrounded by those who once walked with me.
And I keep a set of shoes by the bed all of the time, even when snow or rain forces me to stay indoors. Some habits die hard. “How’s Luis?” I ask, shifting topics.
At the mention of her twelve-year-old grandson, Cookie’s eyes widen. Most of the residents do not bother to learn the names of the ever-changing staff, much less their families’. She smiles with pride. As she raises a hand to her breast, the bracelet around her wrist jangles like ancient bones. “He made honor roll again. I’m about to go get him, actually, if you don’t need anything else...”
When she has gone, I look around the apartment at the bland white walls, the venetian blinds a shade yellower with age. Not bad, but not home. Home was a brownstone in Park Slope, bought before the neighborhood had grown trendy. It had interesting cracks in the ceiling, and walls so close I could touch both sides of our bedroom if I stretched my arms straight out. But there had been stairs, narrow and steep, and when my old-lady hips could no longer manage the climb, I knew it was time to go. Kari and Scott invited me to move into their Chappaqua house; they certainly have the room. But I refused—even a place like this is better than being a burden.
I look across the parkway at a strip mall now past its prime and half-vacant, wondering how to spend the day. The rest of my life rushed by in an instant, but time stretches here, demanding to be filled. There are activities, if one is inclined, knitting and Yiddish and aqua fitness and day trips to see shows. But I prefer to keep my own company. Even back then, I never minded the silence.
One drop, then another, comes from the kitchen faucet that Cookie did not manage to shut. I stand with effort, grimacing at the dull pain that shoots through my thigh, the wound that has never quite healed properly over more than a half century. It hurts more intensely now that the days have grown shorter and chilled.
Outside a siren wails and grows closer, coming for someone here. I cringe. Now, it is not death I fear; each of us will get there soon enough. But the sound takes me back to earlier times, when sirens meant only danger and saving ourselves mattered.
As I start across the room, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. My hair has migrated to that short curly style all women my age seem to wear, a fuzzy white football helmet. Ruth would have resisted, I’m sure, keeping hers long and flowing. I smile at the thought. Beauty was always her thing. It was never mine, and certainly not now, though I’m comfortable in my skin in a way that I lacked in my younger years, as if released from an expectation I could never meet. I did feel beautiful once. My eyes travel to the lone photograph on the windowsill of a young man in a crisp army uniform, his dark hair short and expression earnest. It is the only picture I have from that time. But the faces of the others are as fresh in my mind, as though I had seen them yesterday.
A knock at the door jars me from my thoughts. The staff has keys but they do not just walk in, an attempt to maintain the deteriorating charade of autonomy. I’m not expecting anyone, though, and it is too early for lunch. Perhaps Cookie forgot something.
I make my way to the door and look through the peephole, another habit that has never left me. Outside stand a young woman and a uniformed policeman. My stomach tightens. Once the police only meant trouble. But they cannot hurt me here. Do they mean to bring me bad news?
I open the door a few inches. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Nowak?” the policeman asks.
The name slaps me across the cheek like a cold cloth. “No,” I blurt.
“Your maiden name was Nowak, wasn’t it?” the woman presses gently. I try to place how old she might be. Her low, dishwater ponytail is girlish, but there are faint lines at the corners of her eyes, suggesting years behind her. There is a kind of guardedness that I recognize from myself, a haunted look that says she has known grief.
“Yes,” I say finally. There is no reason to hide who I am anymore, nothing that anyone can take from me.
“And you’re from a village in southern Poland called...Biekowice?”
“Biekowice,” I repeat, reflexively correcting her pronunciation so one can hear the short e at the end. The word is as familiar as my own name, though I have not uttered it in decades.
I study the woman’s nondescript navy pantsuit, trying to discern what she might do for a living, why she is asking me about a village half a world away that few people ever heard of in the first place. But no one dresses like what they are anymore, the doctors eschewing white coats, other professionals shedding their suits for something called “business casual.” Is she a writer perhaps, or one of the filmmakers Cookie referenced? Documentary crews and journalists are not an uncommon site in the lobby and hallways. They come for the stories, picking through our memories like rats through the rubble, trying to find a few morsels in the refuse before the rain washes it all away.
No one has ever come to see me, though, and I have never minded or volunteered. They simply do not know who I am. Mine is not the story of the ghettos and the camps, but of a small village in the hills, a chapel in the darkness of the night. I should write it down, I suppose. The younger ones do not remember, and when I am gone there will be no one else. The history and those who lived it will disappear with the wind. But I cannot. It is not that the memories are too painful—I live them over and over each night, a perennial film in my mind. But I cannot find the words to do justice to the people that lived, and the things that had transpired among us.
No, the filmmakers do not come for me—and they do not bring police escorts.
The woman clears her throat. “So Biekowice—you know of it?”
Every step and path, I want to say. “Yes. Why?” I summon up the courage to ask, half suspecting as I do so that I might not want to know the answer. My accent, buried years ago, seems to have suddenly returned.
“Bones,” the policeman interjects.
“I’m sorry...” Though I am uncertain what he means, I grasp the door frame, suddenly light-headed.
The woman shoots the policeman a look, as though she wishes he had not spoken. Then, acknowledging it is too late to turn back, she nods. “Some human bones have been found at a development site near Biekowice,” she says. “And we think you might know something about them.”
1 (#ulink_76e6affc-a1e6-59c2-b022-f10b8a8716d3)
Poland, 1940
The low rumbling did not rouse Helena from her sleep. She had been dreaming of makowiec, the poppy seed rolls Mama used to make, thick and warm with a dusting of sugar. So when the noise grew louder, intruding on her dream and causing her hands to tremble, she clung tighter to the bread, drawing it hurriedly to her mouth. But before she could take a bite, a crash rattled the house and a dish in the kitchen fell and shattered.
She sat bolt upright, trying to see through the darkness. “Ruth!” Helena shook her sister. Ruth, who was curled up in a warm ball with her arms wrapped around the three slumbering children between them, had always slept more soundly. “Bombs!” Immediately awake, Ruth leaped up and grabbed one of their younger sisters under each arm. Helena followed, tugging a groggy Michal by the hand, and they raced toward the cellar as they had rehearsed dozens of times, not bothering to stop for the shoes lined up at the foot of the bed.
Helena scrambled down the ladder first, followed by Michal. Then Ruth passed five-year-old Dorie below before climbing down herself, the baby wrapped around her neck. Helena dropped to the ground and pulled Dorie onto her lap, smelling the sour milk on the child’s breath. She cringed as the inevitable wetness of the muddy earth seeped through her nightclothes, then braced herself for the next explosion. She recalled the horrors she’d heard of the Warsaw bombings and hoped that the cottage could withstand it.
“Is it a storm?” Dorie asked, her voice hushed with apprehension.
“Nie, kochana.” The child’s body relaxed palpably in Helena’s arms. Dorie could not imagine something worse than a storm. If only it were that simple.
Beside her, Ruth trembled. “Jeste´s pewna?” Are you certain there were bombs?
Helena nodded, then realized Ruth could not see her. “Tak.” Ruth would not second-guess her. The sisters trusted each other implicitly and Ruth deferred to her where their safety was concerned. Michal leaned his tangle of curls against her shoulder and she hugged him tightly, feeling his ribs protrude beneath his skin. Twelve years old, he seemed to grow taller every day and their meager rations simply couldn’t keep up.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty, without further noise. “I guess it’s over,” Helena said, feeling foolish.
“Not bombs, then.”
Helena could sense her sister’s lips curling in the darkness. “No.” She waited for Ruth’s rebuke for having dragged them needlessly from bed. When it did not come, Helena stood and helped Dorie up the ladder. Together they all climbed back into the bed that had once belonged to their parents.
Helena thought of the noises early the next morning as she made her way up the tree-covered hill that rose before their house. The early-December air was crisp, the sky heavy with foreboding of the harsher weather that would soon come. It had not been her imagination—she was sure of that. She had heard the drone of the airplane flying too low and the sound that followed had been an explosion. But she could see for miles from this vantage point, and when she peered back over her shoulder, the tiny town and rolling countryside were untouched, the faded rooftops and brown late-autumn brush she had known all her life showing no signs of damage.
She was halfway up the hill when a rooster crowed. Helena smiled smugly, as though she had outplayed the animal at its own game. Pausing, she turned and scanned the horizon again, gazing out at the rolling Małopolska hills. Beyond them to the south sat the High Tatras, their snowcapped peaks obscured by mist. She gazed up at the half crescent moon that lingered against the pale early-morning sky. The wind blew then and the moon seemed to duck behind some silvery gray clouds, casting light around the edges.
Helena bent to untangle the frayed hem of her skirt from the tops of her boots with annoyance. Her eyes dropped once more. Biekowice was just one of a dozen or so villages surrounding the larger town of My´slenice, spokes on a wheel fanning across the countryside. The entire region had been part of the Austrian empire not thirty years earlier and the latticed, red roof houses still gave it a slightly Germanic feel. There was one road into town, feeding into a cluster of streets, which wound claustrophobically around the market square like a noose. Another road led out just as quickly. A patchwork of farms dotted the outskirts, gray smoke wafting from their chimneys to form a halo above.
Shifting the small satchel she carried, Helena continued along the western path, a pebble-strewn route that climbed upward toward the main road. In the stream that ran alongside the path, water gurgled. Her footsteps fell into an easy rhythm. Despite her mother’s admonitions, Helena had escaped to the woods frequently as a child. In the confines of their small cottage, she bounced about restlessly like a rubber ball, with nowhere for her energy to go. But this was the one place she could be by herself and truly feel free.
Pine needles crackled beneath her feet, breaking the stillness, their scent mixing with more than a hint of smoke. What brush or refuse could the farmers be burning now? Everything, even items once discarded, might have some use. Leaves and twigs could, if not fuel a fire, at least make it burn longer, stretch the logs or make them hotter when the wood in the pile was damp. She scoured the ground now as she walked, looking for dropped berries or nuts or even acorns that might be used for tea. But the earth here was picked bare by the animals, as ravenous and desperate as she.
The war had broken out more than fifteen months earlier, and for a while, despite the warnings that crackled nonstop across the radio, first in Polish and later in German, it seemed as though it might not have happened at all. Though their small village was less than twenty kilometers from Kraków, little had changed other than the occasional passing of military trucks on the high road outside town. It was the blessing, Helena reflected, of living in a place so sleepy as to be of no strategic value. But the hardships had come, if not the Germans themselves: herds of cattle and other livestock disappeared in the night, reportedly over the western border. Coal stores were requisitioned and sent to the front to help the war effort. And an unusually cruel summer drought had contributed to the misery, leaving little to be canned for winter storage.
She reached the paved road that led toward the city. It was deserted now, but exhaust hung freshly in the air, suggesting a car or wagon had passed recently. Helena’s skin prickled. She could not afford to encounter anyone now. She looked longingly back toward the trees, but taking the steep, winding forest path would only slow her down.
As she started forward, Helena’s thoughts turned to the previous evening. “Don’t go,” Ruth had begged as they readied the children for bed. They’d worked seamlessly in tandem as they’d completed the familiar grooming chores, like two appendages of the same body. “It’s dangerous.” She accidentally pulled Dorie’s braid too hard, causing her to squeal.
Ruth’s objection was familiar. She had fought Helena since she’d first proposed going to the city, continuing Tata’s weekly pilgrimage after his death. It was not so much that the half-day trek was physically demanding; Helena had navigated the steep, rocky countryside with her father all her life. But the Nazis had forbidden Poles from traveling beyond the borders of their own provinces without work passes. If they noticed Helena and asked questions, she could be arrested.
“What other choice do we have?” Helena had asked practically, pulling the nightdress over Karolina’s hair, savoring her freshly washed smell. They did baths twice a week, Karolina first, then the older children and Ruth and finally Helena, scrubbing as well as she could in the cool, filmy water after the rest had gone to bed. “We have to make sure Mama eats.” And is not mistreated, she added silently. The care at the sanatorium was minimal, the resources scarce. She hadn’t told Ruth of the times she’d turned up to find their mother missing her socks or lying in her own excrement, risking infection of the bedsores she persistently developed from not being turned.
Ruth had not answered, but continued unbraiding Dorie’s hair, lips pursed in conflict. Helena knew that Ruth found the notion of Mama shut away in some city hospital alone unbearable, and that Helena checking on her each week gave her some comfort. Ruth feared the outside world, though. She had responded to everything that had happened by closing off and drawing within.
Helena, on the other hand, wanted to see the world. Her mind reeled back to an earlier trip to the city. It was a fine fall day, some leaves still orange on the trees, others giving a satisfying crunch beneath her feet. She had passed the turnoff for the city and it was a good two kilometers down the road before she realized she was on the path that would lead away from Biekowice for good. Ruth’s face had flashed in her mind then and Helena had stopped, guilt-stricken. She had been distracted, she told herself, and accidentally missed the turn. But she knew it was something more—for a moment she was actually leaving, without looking back. She had not taken that path again, but each trip she stopped and looked longingly down the road, wondering how far she could actually go.
Helena was jolted from her thoughts by a loud noise, a giant’s foot crunching down on a house. Ahead, a German jeep, machine gun mounted on the front, blocked the roadway. Helena leaped back into the roadside brush, catching her hand on something jagged. She stifled a cry as a thorn cut through her worn glove and into her skin.
As blood seeped through the wool, Helena berated herself silently for her carelessness in not clinging to the cover of the trees that lined the road. She crouched low to the ground, not daring to breathe. But it was too late: the gun mounted atop the jeep turned toward her with a creak. A soldier stood behind it, his gaze seeming to focus just above her. He shielded his eyes, searching the forest. This was the closest Helena had come to the war and, despite her terror, she found herself studying the man. He was ruddy faced and ordinary; save for the uniform and gun, he might have been one of the loggers down at the mill.
The soldier’s eyes narrowed, a mountain wolf hunting its prey. A hand seemed to grip Helena’s throat, squeezing. Would he arrest her or shoot her here? She was suddenly desperate to be in the house that an hour ago she had so eagerly escaped. Her heart pounded as she imagined her death. Ruth would be sad, or maybe cross. “I told you so,” her twin might say if she were here now, a smug smile playing about her full lips. Ruth liked to be right more than just about anything and Helena seemed to always give her reason by spilling or breaking something. Helena pictured Michal, wise beyond his years, comforting his sisters. But the little ones were closer to Ruth, depended on her for their care. And they had been so battered by the loss of their parents that they might weather this additional blow without much grief.
Helena felt against her side the cool metal of the knife she’d taken from Tata’s hunting kit and tucked in the waist of her skirt. She carried it in case she encountered a wolf, but now an image seized her of drawing it and slashing the German’s throat.
A minute passed, then another. Finally, the man sat down and started the ignition. As the jeep started in the other direction, Helena slumped against a tree, trying to catch her breath.
When the sound of the engine had faded, Helena stepped out from the bushes and scanned the now-deserted road. She didn’t dare continue this way now. Perhaps Ruth had been right about the danger of the trip and she should return home. But she imagined Mama alone in the hospital and knew that she had no choice. She doubled back to the path where it emerged from the woods. Steeling herself, Helena stepped into the forest and the welcome shelter of the trees that loomed overhead as she started toward the steep pass over the hills.
2 (#ulink_91ef3335-ce18-57f4-965d-343d54e71f6f)
At the sound of the door clicking shut, Ruth snapped her eyes open and tightened her arms around the children. She strained without success to see in the darkness, instantly struck by the sense of emptiness beside her. The bed was a bit cooler and the mattress did not sink as heavily as usual. Helena was gone. She had left for the city, this time without nudging Ruth as she usually did. And she had gone earlier, though perhaps that was not so strange, given the shortening days and the need to get back more quickly before nightfall.
Ruth shifted with effort, weighing the void she always felt in Helena’s absence. Michal’s head was on her shoulder, Dorie holding to her ankle and Karolina flung across her chest. The children seemed to gravitate toward her instinctively, even while sleeping. They were curled around her like puppies now, sweaty fingers clinging to her arm, cold toes pressing against her side. They had slept like this since their parents had gone, not only for warmth and to comfort the little ones, but also to keep everyone near in case of bombs like the ones Helena thought she had heard the previous night, or God only knew what else. Usually she found comfort in their closeness. But now they seemed cloying and heavy, making each breath an effort.
Disentangling herself carefully, Ruth donned her housecoat and slippers. She made her way to the kitchen, savoring the easy movements of her now-free limbs. She pulled back the shutters to watch as her sister climbed the hill. Her stomach fluttered anxiously. She had never quite gotten used to Helena’s absences. They had always been together, and in some hazy memory she could remember looking up from her mother’s breast to see the roundness of her sister’s head, eyes locking as they fed. Being without her was an appendage missing.
“Don’t go,” she wanted to shout as Helena grew smaller. They had sworn to Mama that they would keep the family together, and each time Helena ventured out to Kraków, risking arrest or worse, they were putting that promise in jeopardy. Her mind cascaded, as it always did, to the worst-case scenario: without Helena, Ruth would not be able to sustain the family and the children would have to be placed in an orphanage, where they would surely remain because no one was taking on extra mouths to feed these days.
As Helena disappeared, seemingly swallowed by the thick pine trees, Ruth was struck by an unexpected touch of envy. What was it like to just walk away, escape the house and the children and their needs for a few hours? Generally Ruth liked the comfort of their home with all of its memories and had no interest in venturing beyond the front gate. But now she imagined striding through the brisk morning air, arms free and footsteps light. Did Helena ever want to keep going and not come back?
Pushing away her uneasiness, Ruth walked to the kitchen and began preparing the ersatz coffee, knowing even as she did that the bitter mixture of ground acorns and grain would do little to stave off her exhaustion. She slept so poorly these days, waking at every creak. Helena had always been the one with the vivid dreams, while her own sleep was deep and uninterrupted. Now her nights were shattered with dark images of holding on to a tree, trying not to get blown away by a storm with winds so fierce they lifted her from her feet, seeming to pull her by the ankles and threatening to tear her in two.
She dreamed of the odd things, too—not food dreams like the ones Helena and the children often discussed, describing in mouthwatering detail the cakes and breads as if doing so might cause them to actually appear. Instead, Ruth dreamed of stockings, the smooth silk kind, well-woven without any holes or pulls. Nylons, she’d heard them called on the radio. They talked of German soldiers giving them to the girls. She sniffed. Piotr had not given her any gifts, even when she’d knitted him the scarf. He had talked about making her something for her birthday or Christmas, but their courtship hadn’t lasted that long.
Setting the coffeepot with the rusted handle on the stove, she looked around the house, their one saving grace. Built by their grandfather over the course of a decade, it was made of stone, and sturdy enough to keep out the harshest of weather. There was a large living room with a wide-beam oak floor and fireplace, and the lone bedroom off the back. Beside a faded picture of the Virgin Mary, a ladder climbed to the loft where the children had slept when their family had still been whole. Ruth saw an image like a long-forgotten dream of Tata playing with Helena on the floor, roaring with laughter as she and Mama looked on. They had been too happy to know how poor they were. Ruth had joined in, too, sometimes when the play was not as rough. Other times, she had watched from the side, wishing she could be a part of the game but too timid to play.
Seeing the house clearly now, Ruth began mentally inventorying the cleaning and decorating that needed to be done for Christmas. Once she had looked forward to the holiday so eagerly. Now it felt an effort, the idea of celebrating without their parents inconceivable. But they had to keep to their traditions as much as possible for the little ones’ sake.
There were other things that had to be done before deep winter set in, too: Helena would have to reseal the windows and repair the chimney crack their father had neglected to fix. Tata had promised grander things, too, like plumbing pipes for an indoor toilet. He had always tried so very hard to please Mama, but the basic chores to keep the house running and the odd jobs he took when he could get them seemed to fill every waking hour. Mama did not complain when such extra things did not materialize.
Once Ruth had imagined a home of her own—nothing terribly grand, just a bit bigger than this, with a flower garden. But that vision had walked off over the hill with Piotr, and remembering it now, she felt frivolous. Daydreams were not a luxury she could afford anymore, and wanting too much, well, maybe that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place.
Ruth uncovered the plate of peas that she’d left by the sink the previous evening and began shelling them for the soup she would make for lunch. A year earlier, the broth would have been thick with sour cream and pieces of lard. Now it would be mostly water. There was a bit of beetroot, too; she could shred and mix it with some vinegar and call it salad.
She pulled out the radio that sat hidden beneath the sink, adjusting the volume so as not to wake the children. Radios had been forbidden by the Germans, and keeping it was her one act of defiance, a link with the outside world. Only heavy static came through. Whether the radio was dying or the Germans had jammed the signal, she did not know. She made a note to ask if Helena could fix it. An unintelligible voice crackled then, growing clearer in time for her to hear the announcer warn in a low gravelly voice that Jews were no longer to ride the trolley cars.
Reaching for the coffeepot, Ruth stifled a laugh. There was no trolley in Biekowice, and no Jews, either. She had seen Jews only once in her life on a trip with her parents to the market in My´slenice. “Dorfjuden,” she’d heard them called on the radio recently. Village Jews. Their cluster of dismal, tar-roofed shacks made her family’s own cottage seem luxurious by comparison.
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them, really, with all of the trouble,” Helena had remarked a few weeks earlier over breakfast, in that vague manner of speech they tended to use around the children.
“Better that they stay where they are,” Ruth had replied, her own voice sounding harsh. She did not mean it unkindly, nor did she harbor any special animosity toward the Jews. But while the Germans seldom seemed to trifle with Poles, they had enacted an endless series of laws aimed at the Jews, forbidding them from doing ordinary things and making their already-miserable lives harder. Ruth just didn’t want, as Mama would have said, to borrow trouble by having them around.
But Helena had a point, Ruth reflected now. Why didn’t the Jews scatter and flee the Germans? Though they probably thought there was strength in numbers, staying in their small compact centers just made them an easier target.
There was no mention of the bombing on the radio that Helena had thought she had heard the previous evening. Ruth smiled with satisfaction, glad that her sister, who always accused her of having an overactive imagination, had this time been wrong.
She finished shelling the peas and transferred them to a smaller bowl. From the bedroom came the sound of Michal’s snoring, the girls breathing gently beside him. She sighed. No one saw the work she did, the little things that kept them going. Helena deemed the chores she did outside and in the barn so much harder, scoffing at what she called “woman’s work.” Perhaps that was because Mama had made it look so easy, doing things twice as well and without complaint. To Ruth, though, it sometimes felt like too much.
Ruth washed the plate and dried it carefully, setting it back in its place in the cupboard. She tried to keep everything exactly as Mama had, as though she might walk through the door at any moment and inspect everything with a sweeping eye and issue Ruth a grade. Not like Helena, who blew through a room like a storm, sending things scattering. Borrowed was how the house seemed to Ruth, though she had grown up here herself. Like a sweater she kept carefully because she would one day be expected to return it. To acknowledge anything more would mean that Mama might not come back, and the thought was more than she could bear.
Ruth was suddenly restless. It was not like her. Usually Helena was the one hopping around like a chimpanzee. “Bored?” Ruth had replied incredulously once when her sister remarked upon it. The notion seemed absurd, especially when there was so much work to be done. But now the house felt small and confining. She wanted to go—not into the woods, rough and deep, like Helena, but somewhere else.
Ruth tiptoed back into the bedroom to the washbasin, studying her reflection in the pale early light that just illuminated the cracked mirror. She took in her thick auburn hair and round blue eyes with a twinge of self-admiration, avoiding the scar that marred her neck. She combed her hair and patted a bit of Mama’s old lotion onto her cheeks, fighting the tears that welled up at the familiar, flowery smell. The jar of lotion Mama had given her was one of Ruth’s most prized possessions and she loved the way it soothed her cheeks and eased the redness brought on by the wind and cold. She did not know where the cream had come from or how she would replace it when the last precious drops were gone.
It was important, Mama had said, to always look one’s best, even for the most mundane of occasions. Ruth did not wear the lotion every day, though; she used to save it for Sundays when Piotr came. Her mind reeled back to one of his visits a few months earlier. The weather had been unseasonably warm and he had cajoled her into the shadows of the trees, persuaded her to let his hands wander lower and longer than they had before. But she had pushed him away a minute later and he had not tried again. Her cheeks stung now, remembering.
Turning from the mirror, she looked down at the sleeping children and a wave of affection passed over her. She had been sixteen when Karolina was born, old enough to have a family of her own if things had worked out differently. At the sight of the squiggling bundle in their mother’s arms, she’d felt a longing she could not remember with Dorie or Michal—and more than a twinge of envy as Tata hovered above, glazed eyes proud and happy. Not that Ruth was jealous of his attention—she had long since resigned herself to being the daughter he did not see, his main interest in Helena because she would walk the woods and do rugged things with him. But Ruth wanted to be the center of her own family, an adoring husband standing anxiously above her. Now she had the family, the responsibility of caring for the children, only with none of the love or affection of a husband.
“Watch the others,” she whispered into Michal’s ear, judging by the way the covers shifted that he had heard her. The girls did not move. Let me go with you, Dorie would have pled through the long, uneven fringe of hair that fell into her eyes. Having lost both parents, she was afraid to let Ruth out of her sight, for fear she, too, might not return.
Nearing the front door, Ruth frowned at a brown footprint she had somehow missed when sweeping in the dim light the previous evening. Keeping the house was an endless battle against dirt tracked in under feet, crumbs and milk spilled on the table. But she persisted doggedly in her attempts to keep the house as neat as Mama had. What would happen, she wondered now, if she simply stopped trying?
Ruth donned her coat. It was more of a cape, really, great swaths of billowing fabric where the sleeves should have been. She had found it in the back of her mother’s armoire two years earlier, and had been instantly captivated by the soft, flowing garment, which was more fitting of what she imagined a night at the opera to be than anything in their roughshod farm life. “Where did you get it, Mama?”
Her mother had stared at the cape, as though it was part of another lifetime. “I don’t remember.” It was not just her vague tone that told Ruth she was lying—surely one could not forget acquiring such an extraordinary thing.
“Can I keep it?” Mama shrugged, seemingly divorced from whatever part of her life she had worn it. After that, Ruth wore the cape from October to April.
“So impractical,” Helena chided each winter. “Not very warm. And you’re going to trip.” Ruth’s first impulse was always to take it off to escape Helena’s disdain. But she persisted in wearing it, navigating the extra folds of cloth like a second skin. She pulled the hood high and close around her face now, her own personal coat of armor. Mama’s lavender scent enveloped her like the arms she had not felt in more than a year. It was growing fainter, though, muted by her own smell and the passage of time. She had to burrow deeper, stick her nose in the collar, to really find it anymore.
Ruth stepped outside and breathed in the crisp, coal-tinged air like a drink of water she had not known she needed. She had not realized how much she craved this bit of solitude, a few minutes just for herself. Their wounded goat, Bolek, one of the last two animals still living in the barn, limped hopefully to the fence and she patted his nose in silent apology for the lack of the treat he was seeking. She paused at the gate to arrange some twigs on the ground, pointing in the direction of the barn. It was a game she and Dorie played, Ruth leaving clues that led around the house and yard. Once they might have ended with the discovery of a piece of fruit or hard candy, but with none to be had she would have to come up with another sort of treasure.
Closing the gate, Ruth gazed up at the hill where her sister had traveled a few hours earlier, trying to picture the hospital. They would make Mama well, though how they would go about it, she could not fathom. Helena was always so vague in her descriptions of the nurses and Mama’s treatment, and Ruth did not like to ask too much and admit that she did not know. But there was a plan, she had always believed, and that plan could surely not be to leave the children with neither parent. No, Mama would not be going to the Other Place with Tata. Not now.
“The other place,” Helena repeated, with that one eyebrow arched, after overhearing Ruth using the expression to explain to Michal where their father had gone.
“Heaven, or whatever you would call it, where they go after they die...” Ruth kept speaking, using too many words, spilling them on top of one another like a drink carried too quickly across the room.
“I thought that was something you’d made up just for the children,” Helena replied. Ruth looked over her shoulder to make sure the little ones were out of earshot. “Surely you don’t believe it.”
Ruth faltered. “Don’t you?” Helena had gone to church and sat beside her as the priest talked about heaven each week.
“I believe we put Tata in the ground. And that is where he is.” Stifling a gasp, Ruth crossed herself. She had pushed away the image of the coffin being lowered into the earth, holding Dorie back so she didn’t throw herself in the hole after it. To Helena, dead was dead. They had not spoken of it again.
Ruth continued walking along the narrow band of water that wound along the edge of town like a ribbon. Farther down, it passed between high banks of peat moss under a crude wooden bridge where children played in summer as their mothers washed clothes. It quickly disappeared around the bend where it widened into the gorge. When they were younger, she and Helena would climb the bluff holding hands and watch the logs travel downstream to the mill.
An image flashed through Ruth’s mind of her and Helena standing in this very spot when they were seven. A snowstorm had come suddenly on their way home from school and Helena had been transfixed by the way the forest was suddenly coated in white. “Come,” Ruth had urged, tugging her toward home, but Helena stood still. Ruth’s gaze followed her sister’s upward to where the treetops and sky became one. They remained motionless, for how long Ruth did not know, hand in hand, the two of them alone in that snow globe of a world.
“Dziewczyny!” Girls, a voice called like a sharp wind, blowing her into place. Only then had Ruth noticed the coating of ice on Helena’s face, and the way her own feet had gone numb. A neighboring farmer had found them and carried them home. They might have died, Mama scolded. But together they had not been afraid. How she wished for just another moment like that, the two of them alone in a white, silent world.
At the adjacent Slomir farm, an old man pulled a wagon with both hands, taking the place where his horse had once been. Though his land was ten times the size of theirs, Pan Slomir had always looked enviously across the fence at their plush, fertile patch, which seemed to draw energy from the stream like a child from its mother’s breast. Now he glared at her, not bothering to mask his disdain. Ruth hunched her shoulders slightly to avoid making eye contact. Once she had loved the walk into town, soaking up the approving looks like sunshine warm on her face. She could almost hear him thinking: What would become of the Nowaks? It was a question that Ruth herself did not like to ask.
Closer to town, she focused on the familiar things—the way the houses, set close to the road, slatted at exactly the same angle, the birds seeming to dart from rafter to rafter in identical patterns, as though performing a dance. Twigs and roots poked out persistently between the paving stones. Biekowice was not a place that one ever left. Children grew up and married and raised their families in the same house, or maybe their husband’s house if it had more room. Sons worked at the same jobs their fathers had before them. Marriage just above one’s original station was the best to be hoped for a daughter. Every ten years or so, some headstrong young person would head off to the city never to be heard of again. Rumors of doom and destruction always followed. There had been a story once of a girl who had left and found her fortune, but Ruth didn’t know her personally.
She passed the school, now closed by German decree. A group of girls, twelve or thirteen years old, played around the wide base of a tree. Ruth envied the easy way they laughed and joked. She and Helena had gone to school for a few years when they were younger, before Mama decided to teach them at home. But the village schoolgirls regarded the identical twin sisters, who sat in the back of the classroom together holding hands, as an oddity. Helena had never seemed to mind much, deeming the other girls “silly.” Ruth would have liked to have been included in their secrets and games, though. She had never quite fit in here, felt an outlier from the others. But that couldn’t be right, for she had never been anywhere else. Was it possible simply to belong nowhere?
She approached the main square. Market was a modest affair, a dozen or so canvas-covered tables smelling of carp in stale water and odd bits of too-old meat. Beside the stalls, Gorale women who had come from the sharp mountain peaks to the south sat on the ground, selling crude wool sweaters and salty sheep cheese from burlap sacks, their weather-hardened faces turned upward.
At the dairyman’s stall, Ruth gave her most appreciative smile, hoping that he might move the wire over a bit to make the cut of cheese more generous. But he simply looked down at his work. She turned away, feeling foolish. Once her smiles seemed to buy everything. Now it was as if her prettiness had faded, making her a tarnished coin. It wasn’t just that, of course—the war had taken the men to the front. There were so many more women that even a tired old merchant failed to notice.
She passed the dairyman the ration cards and moved on. Behind the vegetable stall, Pani Kowalska sorted potatoes and did not look up. She had been a contemporary of Mama’s and could not be more than forty-five, but the hair tucked beneath her kerchief was white and she had many chins, making her look much older. What was it about the women in the village who seemed to age overnight? One day they were young and beautiful, with the promise of a future before them, and the next they were crones. Mama had never made the transition—she had not had the chance before taking ill. But Ruth knew that one day she would wake up looking exactly as Pani Kowalska, and then any remaining hope for a future would be gone for good.
She appraised the selection of fruits and vegetables. Even before the war it had not been good, the cool climate and short growing season inhospitable for vegetables like tomatoes and peppers. Now all that remained were a few mottled onions and potatoes already sprouting roots.
“Three apples,” Ruth requested. An unfamiliar police car sat at the edge of the market, engine idling despite the lack of a driver. Ruth shivered uneasily. The fact that the provincial police had come to town had nothing to do with her, but it was different, and change seldom meant anything good.
“Did you hear about the Garzels?” Pani Kowalska asked as she weighed the fruit on the scale. The mole on her nose, which seemed to have doubled in size since Ruth had last visited the stall, bobbed as she spoke.
Ruth shook her head as though the woman were watching. Life in a small village reminded Ruth of what a zoo might be like, though she had only read about such places. Homes transparent, lives exposed to one another. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, almost before it had happened. “Nie.” Ruth suspected that she did not want to hear the answer. She inspected the apples the woman handed her, which were mottled and bruised. She did not protest, knowing the rest in the barrel would be no better.
Pani Kowalska wiped her hands on her skirt. “Gone.”
“Perhaps they went to find Leopold,” Ruth suggested. The elderly couple’s son, just a few years older than Michal, had disappeared ahead of a transport of conscripted men to the front. The call-ups had taken place with alarming frequency of late, young men ordered to report for either military service or other forced labor for the Reich.
“Not if he went to forest they didn’t.” Ruth did not want to admit that she was unfamiliar with the term. “To the woods to fight,” Pani Kowalska clarified unbidden. Ruth had heard the rumors of soldiers from the decimated Polish army who had gone underground to wage war against the Germans.
Ruth searched for another plausible explanation. “Without him to work the farm, they must have decided to go to relatives.”
Pani Kowalska shook her head, chins jiggling. “They left with the door open, all of their belongings still inside. Who on earth does that?”
Who indeed? One would board up the house if truly going for a while and planning it—unless one did not want anyone to know or to attract too much attention.
“And then there are the goings-on in Nowy S˛acz,” Pani Kowalska added, gaining steam even as she returned to sorting potatoes. “They arrested all of the Jews.” How had the woman heard such things? The news on the radio would not have spoken of them. But gossip, even about those they did not know, seemed to travel with the wind like pollen. “Good riddance, I say,” the old woman spat with more bile than Ruth might have thought she could muster. Ruth did not respond, but sadness tugged at her. Why did Pani Kowalska sound so angry about a handful of Jews in another town? Ruth did not have any particular affinity for the Jews, but it was the ugliness of it all that bothered her.
“Christ killing heathens. Always driving down my prices,” Pani Kowalska added, as if answering the unspoken question. So that was the real reason. Her hatred of the Jews stemmed less from purported drinking of baby’s blood than the price of turnips.
The Jews weren’t all hard-charging vegetable merchants, Ruth wanted to point out. “Surely just the men have been taken,” she offered instead.
Pani Kowalska shook her head. “All of them.” What would the Germans want with the women and children? And what could they possibly do with so many people? Ruth’s arms suddenly ached for her brother and sisters. But before she could ask, the old woman looked past Ruth’s shoulder at another customer. “Tak?”
Ruth stepped aside and surveyed the rest of the market. Taking in the flies that swarmed above the meat stand as though it were August, she decided to save the rest of their ration coupons for her next visit.
At the corner, she spied a familiar figure approaching, a sallow, fiftyish women who stared vacantly ahead and carried her empty basket as though it bore rocks. Ruth started quickly in the opposite direction. Her foot caught on the curb and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell to the ground. Piotr’s mother turned toward her, then looked away quickly, no more wanting the encounter than Ruth did. But it was unavoidable. Ruth brushed her hands on her skirt and took a step toward the woman.
A moment of silence passed between them. It was your fault, Ruth wanted to yell, seized with the urge to slap her sagging cheek. Piotr’s mother had welcomed Ruth warmly in her home, professing that Ruth was the daughter that she’d never had. But at the first opportunity, she had turned on Ruth, casting her out.
“Dzie´n dobry,” Ruth greeted instead over the dryness in her throat, cursing her own lack of nerve. She eyed the stitching of the woman’s scarf, tighter and of a better quality wool than her own. Had she knitted it herself or was it a gift from Piotr’s new fiancée? Her pale blue eyes were a mirror of her son’s, but Ruth had not noticed until just now how cold and unfeeling they could be. “How is Piotr?” she asked, in spite of herself. His name stuck in her throat.
A slight wince crossed the woman’s face. “He’s been sent to the front.”
A knife shot through her and she knew in that instant he would not be coming back. Her eyes stung. “I’m sorry,” Ruth said awkwardly, as though she had been personally responsible for his conscription. She stumbled past Piotr’s mother and continued on, struggling to keep her back straight and head high. He was not hers to worry about anymore.
3 (#ulink_6249c553-7d3a-5818-8662-a868d20038af)
Helena reached the top of the forested hills that rose high above the city of Kraków. A fine perspiration coated her skin from the climb, causing the wool collar of her coat to itch unpleasantly. From here, shrouded by the tall clusters of perennially flush pine trees that pointed defiantly toward the sky, she could see whether the winding streets below were clear and it was safe to go down.
The panorama of the city unfurled before her. Wawel Castle sat upon a hill, presiding over the sea of slate roofs and spires below. Months ago, the city had looked untouched from here, the cobblestone passageways timeless, save for a handful of cars. But the war now seemed everywhere. The streets were choked with trucks and soldiers, like the big black ants that appeared in the kitchen at the first sign of spring.
After charting her course to avoid any checkpoints, Helena began the descent into the city. She emerged from the woods onto the path that quickly became a dirt road, trying to walk normally as the trees thinned and the houses grew more clustered. Closer in, the paved streets were speckled with harried pedestrians, darting between the shops, eager to scurry back to the safety of their homes. The air was thick with exhaust from a delivery truck idling at the curbside. Workers in overalls carried their dinner pails, eyes low.
She crossed the bridge and started down ulica Dietla. Once Roma children had played instruments at the corner of the wide thoroughfare, open violin cases turned upward in hope of a few coins. But now only a hapless gray-haired babcia sat propped against the base of a building, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Her eyes were closed and toothless mouth agape, as though she might already be dead.
Helena slipped into the crowd, her skin prickling as she viewed the city with more trepidation than ever. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window. Beneath her faded, nondescript coat, her dress hung like a baggy sack and her reddish-brown hair was hastily pulled back in a knot. Anxiety formed in her stomach. She looked like a girl from the countryside, “na wsi” as she had heard the city dwellers call it derisively—not at all like she fit in. Certainly a passerby would recognize any moment now that she did not belong here and summon the police.
Steeling herself, she pressed onward. Twenty minutes later, she reached Kazimierz, which was the Jewish quarter, or at least what was left of it. There were no Jews in the village back home, and when she had first journeyed to the city, Helena had enjoyed walking through the streets here, smelling the chicken fat and dill from the butcher mix with the aroma of cinnamon and raisins from a nearby bakery. The loud voices, speaking a language she did not understand, had made Kazimierz seem like a foreign country. But the streets were nearly deserted now, as if the population of Kazimierz was dwindling, or simply too afraid to be out on the streets. Many of the shops were boarded up, windows that had not been shattered slashed in yellow paint with the word .Zyd. Jew.
The building that housed the hospital had once been grand, its marble steps and tall columns suggesting a bank or perhaps a government office. Now its stone facade was black with soot and the steps covered with droppings from the pigeons that occupied the eaves. Helena walked through the vacant lobby, past the front desk nobody bothered to man anymore, down the lone gray corridor redolent with old plaster, urine and bile.
When Tata had told them that he’d placed their mother in a Jewish hospital, the only facility with a bed they could afford, Helena had imagined somewhere dark and exotic, with shrouded men performing strange rituals. She had been surprised on her first visit by just how unremarkable it was—the white walls were bare and the nurses wore simple dresses and caps. The gowned patients were undistinguishable by faith, time and illness stripping away all social division. Save for the tarnished ornaments affixed to each doorway (mezuzahs, she’d heard them called on a past visit) and the occasional rabbi or other visitor in religious garb, one would not know it was a Jewish place at all.
Helena crossed the ward. Though it was a dismal affair, there were little touches, light-filled windows and slightly wider-than-average beds that said the people who ran it had once cared. Nearing her mother, Helena’s heart sank. Mama had been a beauty, tall and slender with alabaster skin. Now her green eyes were clouded and her chestnut hair dulled to a lifeless gray. The skin below her cheekbones had caved in, giving her a ghoulish look. “Mama,” Helena said, touching her hand. Her mother did not move or respond, but stared vacantly at the ceiling.
The elderly woman in the next bed listed to one side, her gown hanging open to expose a withered breast. Helena walked over to her and straightened the woman’s head, keeping her own eyes averted as she fixed the woman’s gown. “Excuse me,” Helena said gently, hoping she did not mind the intrusion. The woman blinked, conveying with the simple movement an ocean of gratitude and relief.
A nurse moved swiftly at the other end of the ward, folding blankets, shifting patients from side to side with deft hands as she freshened the beds. Her name was Wanda, Helena recalled. She was more capable than most of the other staff, and kinder when time allowed it.
“Dzie´n dobry,” Helena greeted as Wanda neared. The heavy-boned nurse did not respond, but stared downward at the fresh red wound on Helena’s hand.
As if on cue, the cut from the thorny bush, which Helena had rinsed hurriedly in the icy stream, began to throb. Wanda disappeared into a closet across the room and emerged a moment later with a piece of damp gauze, which she gave to Helena. She closed the closet door swiftly, as though something might escape.
“Thank you.” As Helena cleaned the wound, alcohol stinging the raw skin, she waited for Wanda to ask how she had hurt herself.
“She sat up this morning,” Wanda informed her instead, too busy to take further interest in maladies not her own. “Took a bit of broth and even said hello to me.” The words, offered to make Helena feel better, slammed her in the chest. Her mother had been cognizant for a fleeting moment and Helena had missed it. Had Mama felt all alone, confused about where she was and why no one was there with her?
“Perhaps in the spring when the weather is nicer, I can wheel her outside in one of the chairs,” Helena offered.
A strange look crossed Wanda’s face. Did she not think that Mama would still be here then, or was her concern larger than that? “With so many Jews gone...” Wanda faltered in her explanation.
“Where have they gone?” Helena was glad to have the opportunity to ask.
Wanda lowered her voice. “Some have left the city, or even gone abroad, if they were able. Others have been ordered to the ghetto.”
Helena shook her head. “Ghetto?”
“The walled neighborhood in Podgórze.” Helena had passed by the industrial neighborhood across the river and seen the streets that the Germans had begun to cordon off. She had surmised that some Jews from the villages were to live there. But it seemed odd to relocate the Kazimierz Jews, who already had a neighborhood of their own. And if the Jews were going, what future could the hospital have here? “Will they all go?”
“I doubt it. There are still a good number of Jews living in Kazimierz.”
Mama coughed once, then again. “Is Dr. Ackerman here today?” Helena asked. “I need to speak with him about my mother’s medicine.”
Wanda frowned. “He’s been called away.” Helena sensed that it was better not to ask when he would return. At first the war had seemed a boon to the hospital—the Jewish doctors, forbidden from treating Gentile Poles, had flocked eagerly to work here. But their numbers had diminished ominously in the preceding weeks. “And I’m sorry about the medicine. We haven’t been able to get any new shipments of the laudanum and so we’ve had to dilute what we have left in order to make it last.”
They had decreased Mama’s dosage, Helena reflected, and yet she was no more lucid—further proof that wherever her mind had gone with the illness, it wasn’t coming back. “Then perhaps another medicine,” she suggested. “Something that doesn’t make her so drowsy.”
“I’ll ask.” But Wanda’s tone made clear that there were no other drugs to be had.
“The medicine supply,” Helena persisted, “is there truly nothing to be done?”
Wanda’s forehead crinkled. “I’ve tried the other hospitals, even gone to the Mariacki Cathedral to see if any could be bought.”
She was talking about the black market, Helena realized, caught off guard by the casual way in which the nurse mentioned procuring illegal goods, in a church no less. Helena considered the nurse: Wanda did not wear the yellow star of a Jew. Yet she had chosen to remain working here. Helena was touched by the nurse’s effort, risking her personal safety to help her patients. “Here.” Helena fished in her pocket for a coin. She could ill-afford to give away money now, but in addition to expressing her gratitude, it might buy Mama an extra moment’s care. She watched the conflict that washed over Wanda’s face, wanting to refuse the offering because taking care of Helena’s mother was her job.
But no one could afford to be that proud in times like this. Wanda took the coin and shoved it into her pocket. “Dzi˛eki.” She shuffled past, continuing on her rounds.
Helena settled into the chair beside the bed. Mama had suffered silently for months with what she presumed were just the normal aches and tugs of a body that had borne five children trying to pull itself back into place. But the pain grew worse and her appetite waned and by the time the village’s lone doctor came he could feel the lump in her belly, larger than an apple. She might have stayed at home until the end of her days, had fought for it. But then her mind started to slip, as though the cancer had spread there, or perhaps the fate she was going to face was simply too much to contemplate. One night they’d found her over the baby’s crib holding a pot of hot water and they knew the time had come for her to go.
Helena pulled out the bread wrapped in paper. She tore it into small pieces and held it out. “Look, Mama,” she offered, bringing the dry, flat bread close to her mother’s nose. “Ruth baked this for you yesterday.” Even Ruth’s best efforts could not come close to the bread Mama had once made, but it was hardly a fair comparison, given the lack of good flour these days.
When Mama did not respond, Helena leaned forward and dipped the bread into the glass of tepid water that sat on the table beside the bed. Then she lifted her mother’s head and put a small piece in her mouth, willing her to eat it. But the bread lay between her slack lips. Finally, Helena removed it again, fearful that she would choke. A sour smell came from between her lips, the teeth Mama had maintained with such care beginning to rot. Helena stared at the remaining fistful of bread uncertainly. No one would take the time to feed it to her once Helena was gone; it would just be taken by one of the nurses or other patients. She tucked it back in her bag.
Helena gazed out the window, grateful yet again that the ward in which her mother was located looked into the interior courtyard. From here, Mama could not see the military vehicles that rumbled by or the German soldiers in the streets. A different room would have made the pretense of normalcy impossible.
“You aren’t going to tell her about the war, are you?” Ruth had asked their father the first time he prepared to set out for the city after the invasion. Overhearing, Helena had been surprised. It was a war, for goodness’ sake, and their mother was at the heart of it. But Tata hadn’t said anything. Looking around the sanatorium now, Helena was struck by how little had changed—the machines still hummed and the patients still moaned, trapped in their own private battles. So the fiction had persisted.
Beside Helena, her mother stirred. “Mama?” Helena leaned forward, hope rising in her as she kissed her mother on her papery cheek.
But her mother only looked at her blankly. Did she wonder why her beloved husband no longer came to visit, or had she not noticed? “Ruti?” she asked, using her pet name for Helena’s sister.
Helena blanched. No, it wasn’t Ruth who was sturdy enough to make the journey, or brave enough to try. But if thinking it was so brought their mother comfort, Helena would play along. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.” It should have been Ruth here, Helena reflected. She had always been closer to Mama, sitting at their mother’s side, learning with rapt attention how to cook and sew while thick-fingered Helena followed Tata into the woods, gathering kindling and roots. Sometimes it seemed as though she and Ruth had been cast into those roles at birth. “The pretty one,” she’d heard people remark more than once about Ruth—but how was that possible when they were twins and meant to look just the same? She herself had been deemed sturdy and capable for so long she could not fathom where the idea had first arisen. Had their parents noted these differences in them from the start and nurtured them, or had they grown to play the parts they had been given?
“Jealous, even as a baby,” their mother had remarked of Helena more than once over the years. “You would give me such a look when I held your sister instead of you.” I wasn’t jealous, Helena had wanted to respond later, when she was old enough to understand. I just wanted to be held, too, to be a part of things before you had to set us down and move on to the next task or chore. But it was always that way with twins, never enough time or arms to go around, and the extra always seemed to go to sweet, helpful Ruth.
The sisters had always been a great source of curiosity in the town, the first set of twins seen there in more than a generation. “And after, when the midwife put you both in the cradle, the first thing you did was hold hands,” Mama was fond of recalling. “She’d said she’d never heard of such a thing.”
Whenever they went out, people made sport of trying to guess which one was which. “No, no, don’t tell me!” In fact, the sisters had subtle differences: Ruth had a rounder face and large blue eyes while Helena’s own features were plainer, her skin more ruddy than luminescent. And there was the birthmark, too, heart-shaped just below Ruth’s right ear, which Ruth desperately tried to conceal, that made them impossible to confuse if one looked closely. But to the casual observer, they were indistinguishable.
Helena sat in silence for several minutes. There were things she wanted to ask her mother now, about how to make a good poultice for the goat’s wounded leg, and the way to get the cabinet above the stove to stop sticking. She wanted to tell her mother that Dorie had lost another tooth, how Karolina was starting to speak a bit. But she was never sure if hearing about the children would make Mama happy or more forlorn, or even if she remembered them at all.
She searched her mother’s face, looking for some words that would change it all. But she had stopped believing in magic years ago, and prayers were Ruth’s province. “Come back to us,” she said plaintively, knowing there would be no response.
Helena opened the drawer on the night table and busied herself taking inventory of the scant contents, taking note of the spare sock that was missing. She picked up her mother’s extra housecoat, which someone had shoved in the drawer without bothering to fold. There was blood at the collar. Helena bent hurriedly to check for a wound, and Mama winced, as though accustomed to a rough touch.
“Shh,” Helena soothed, willing herself to move more slowly. But there was no mark on her mother’s neck. Had the blood come from an old wound or had someone else worn the gown? She put it in her knapsack, replacing it with the fresh one she had brought with her.
“I should go,” she said finally. Guilt rose in her then as it always did at the notion that after she left Mama would again be all alone in this sad place. But she had to get home to help Ruth, and if she didn’t leave now she would not make it before dark. She searched her mother’s face for some reaction, but found none. No, the sadness about parting was all hers. Mama was already alone.
Helena left the hospital, retracing her steps through Kazimierz as she made her way from the city. The gray clouds had grown thick and ominous now, the air biting. The earlier dampness under her clothes had dried to an uncomfortable chill. As she wound her way around the base of Wawel Castle, Helena peered over her shoulder, inexplicably fearful that someone might be following her. Spotting nothing unusual, she pressed forward, heart beating just a bit too quickly. Despite her anxiety, she could not help but feel a touch of excitement. For so long it had seemed that everything moved around her while she stood in place like the moon behind the clouds. Now with the explosion she was sure she had heard the previous night and the sighting of the German jeep, the world had shifted slightly and suddenly life felt different.
As she crossed the wide bridge that spanned the river, her thoughts turned to her father. The priest had called Tata a hero for stepping in front of the runaway wagon and blocking it from hitting a child. Helena knew he was the furthest thing from that, though. Tadeusz Nowak was a drunk and he had most likely gotten hit because he was too inebriated to move out of the wagon’s path, even at ten o’clock in the morning. But she said nothing, accepting the neighbors’ gifts of sympathy, the soups and baked goods that flowed much more generously than if he had been found lying in a pile of vodka and vomit.
Helena was the one who had answered the knock the day they came about Tata and followed the constable to the site. There were details she would spare Ruth and the others about the way he had soiled himself, how his neck hung at a funny angle like a broken doll. She had focused instead at the hands and arms that were as familiar as her own.
Tata had been her counterpart, the one most like her, and with his death a part of her had died, too. But after he was gone she discovered a newfound clarity and purpose, slipping into his role, taking charge of the wood and the hunting and their safety. She found she was capable of doing things that she had never been taught, as though a part of Tata had left his body in the moment he was struck down and leaped into hers.
An hour later, Helena reached the edge of the forest. She rubbed at the back of her hand where a bit of pine tar had stuck above the wound, contemplating her route. The road would have been faster, but she would take the high pass over the mountain so as not to risk encountering more Germans. She started forward. The terrain ahead was much more difficult, the rolling hills deceptive. It gave no indication of the steep slope, or the sharp stones that jutted out from the ground, marring the path. Helena navigated through the rocks, finding the familiar footholds. She had come this way every week as a child on walks with Tata. She had loved the springtime best when they would gather mushrooms, father and daughter making their way through the woods in the predawn darkness, the silence only broken by the sloshing of his flask.
The goodwill of the neighbors had evaporated quickly after their father’s death, as people pulled back to whisper about how the Nowak children—now virtually orphans—would survive. Helena did not mind—she preferred their distance to the overkindness she had never quite believed. There was speculation, too, about the lack of a possible suitor for either twin. Ruth had had someone for a time, a big strapping boy called Piotr. He had called on her faithfully each week, bringing the odd bit of candy for the children. But then the business with their father had happened and Piotr had come one last time to speak with Ruth. Helena had not been able to hear their conversation, but when she had peered around the side of the barn she spied them down by the stream, Piotr handing back the brown scarf her sister had knitted for him, Ruth pushing it away so that it dropped to the ground. Helena had rushed out afterward to collect it so the scarce wool could be reused.
When Ruth had come back inside the house, Helena had faltered. She put her arm around Ruth’s shoulder, cringing at her own stiffness. “I’m sorry.”
Ruth shrugged off her arm and stepped away. “You never liked him.” Ruth’s tone was accusing. Helena wanted to deny it, but Ruth was right: she had not liked Piotr, and had resented that Ruth had something beyond their family. She had not wanted him to stay. But now he had hurt Ruth, though, and for that she wanted to kill him.
Though Ruth had not said, Helena knew that it was the children who had caused Piotr to run. No man wanted to take on the responsibility of caring for someone else’s family, especially not one with young mouths needing to be fed for so many years yet. There would be no marriage for her or Ruth now; of that she was sure. So they would go on working and keeping the children alive until they were big enough to fend for themselves. Michal perhaps would support them in a few years or the younger girls might someday marry; they were pretty enough. What else? Helena could plant a good-size garden in the spring and sell the extra bounty in town. She’d heard that the war had opened up jobs for the women left behind by the men forced to go and fight. But even if she could secure a work pass, traveling to the city once a week was hard enough; she could not commute daily and she could not leave Ruth alone with the children for longer than that.
As Helena paused to catch her breath, an unfamiliar scent tickled her nose. It was sweet yet acrid, like when the farmers burned brush in early autumn and something unintended got tossed into the fire, a dead squirrel perhaps. No one was burning this late in the season, though. Looking west, she noticed then a thick finger of dark smoke curling toward the sky. Where was it coming from? There were no factories in that direction and it was too far beyond the trees to be a forest fire.
A sudden rustling noise from the bushes made her jump. Recalling the German she’d encountered earlier, her heart pounded. But the noise had not come from the road. She scanned the side of the path. There had been stories of hungry wolves in these parts, but it was more likely a dog or raccoon. Something she might kill for food, if it was not too wounded or rabid. She heard the noise came again, this time more of a wheeze.
She reached for her knife. A voice not entirely her own told her to run. But instead, she drew closer to the bushes, curious. Beneath a scraggly pine tree there was a lump, too long to be an animal, huddled in a pile of leaves. As she neared, the air grew thick with the metallic smell of blood. She pushed aside the branches, then stopped with surprise. A man lay on his side, almost hidden by the leaves. He didn’t move, but is torso rose and fell with labored breaths.
Helena stared at him. Before today, she had not encountered anyone on her treks through the forest. “Who are you?” she demanded, hoping to sound braver than she felt. He did not respond. Fear rose up in her. No good could come of a meeting with a stranger and she was far from any help. “Who are you?” she repeated. A low, guttural moan escaped his throat. Helena studied the man, whose dark hair was pasted tight to his head by a mixture of blood and sweat. She relaxed slightly; he was in no shape to do her harm.
“Show me where you are hurt,” she said, more gently now. His arm, which had been covering his midsection, flopped in the direction of his right leg, but there was no visible injury. The stranger wore a uniform of some sort, dirt-caked and torn. She recalled the explosion from the previous night that she had taken to be a bomb. The Nazi jeep she’d encountered earlier had not been looking for her. The full danger of the situation crashed down upon her and she turned to flee.
“Please,” he croaked just above a whisper, and somewhere in her mind she registered the word as English. Her mind whirled: what was an American or British soldier doing here?
Freezing, was her first thought as she turned back to him in spite of herself. He lay on the ground and his skin was a shade of blue-gray that she had never seen before. He needed shelter if he was to live. Without thinking, she reached for his arm and pulled as though to lift him, her fingers not quite wrapping around its thick girth. The man was heavier than she expected and did not move, but shrieked with pain, his cry echoing against the bareness of the trees.
“Spokój!” she hissed, and he looked up, his brown eyes meeting hers, long lashes fluttering with fear. But she could tell from his expression that he did not speak Polish or was too disoriented to understand, so she raised her finger to her lips and shook her head to silence him.
The church, she remembered then. There was an old wooden chapel, about fifty meters farther along the path into the woods. But if she could not move him, how could she possibly get him there? “Come.” She knelt and put her arm around his shoulder, close to the stranger in a way that made her shiver. Then she tried to stand, more gently this time. But she stumbled under his weight. He fell forward, and as she went to lift him again he waved her off, dragging himself along the ground in a half crawl.
As he inched forward, she glanced over her shoulder nervously, willing him to move faster. Her skin prickled. A sharp barking cut through the stillness. “Hide,” she whispered frantically, pushing him into the thick bushes. There came a dull thud from the other side, followed by a cry. She crawled through the brush toward him. He had rolled down a steep ravine and into the stream that ran alongside the path. There was another bark, followed by footsteps. She peered out from the bushes, jumping back as a man with a shotgun appeared, an underfed German shepherd on a leash by his side. He did not wear a uniform like the German soldier she had encountered earlier on the road, but the clothes of an ordinary farmer (albeit one she did not recognize from the village). Perhaps he was just hunting or trapping.
A second man appeared from the opposite direction. “Anything?” His Polish was thick and peasantlike.
“A small chapel. But I found nothing there,” the other man replied. Helena’s anger rose. These men were searching for the soldier, doing the Germans’ bidding. Panic quickly overshadowed her fury as the dog sniffed along the edge of the path, drawing closer. Surely the animal would smell the soldier’s wounds.
Her heart raced as the dog stopped, its ugly snout just inches from her own face. “Chocz!” ordered the man holding the leash, tugging at it and forcing the dog to follow. They continued deeper into the forest.
A rasping noise came from behind her. Helena turned back toward the soldier, who lay on his back in the stream, seemingly oblivious to the icy water that trickled around him. Hurriedly she moved to him, pressing her hand to his mouth to muffle the sound. She looked over her shoulder, hoping the men had not heard. She wanted to admonish the man to be quiet once more, but he was too far gone for that. His face was ghostly white and he seemed to be struggling for each breath.
Quickly she reached down with both arms and, using her legs to brace, pulled him from the water onto the incline of the bank. “You have to help me get you to shelter,” she said. But his eyes were half-closed and she had no idea if he understood.
She checked the now-empty path once more. The men knew about the chapel. Did she still dare to take the soldier there? Though the men had already checked it, they could still come back. But she could not take him to her house—even if he could make the journey, the road out of the forest to their cottage was open and exposed. And leaving him out here meant certain death. There was no other choice—the chapel was his only hope.
She wrapped the soldier’s arm around her shoulder, cold water dripping from his hair and seeping into her collar. Bracing herself anew, she maneuvered him back onto the path. The force of his weight brought her to her knees once more. “Help me,” she pleaded, her voice a whisper. She held her breath as he dragged himself slowly the last few meters down the path, certain the men would return to discover them.
At last they reached chapel. It was no bigger than Helena’s cottage, but taller with an elongated knave. A wood-shingled roof overhung the building like a cap drawn close around the brow. The top of the steeple was completely gone, the mounted cross threatening to topple at any second. She had discovered the abandoned chapel as a child and played around it many times despite her mother’s admonishment lest the roof cave in and crush them. She had often wondered who would have cared enough to build a chapel, not big enough for more than a handful of worshippers, here in the woods, instead of just going to the church in town. And why had they stopped coming?
Helena opened the door and peered inside. The air was thick with the scent of moldy wood and damp earth. She had not been here in years and the structure had deteriorated further with time. The floor had rotted to a few remaining planks over dirt and much of the roof had peeled away, revealing the gray sky above.
Helena turned back to help the man through the doorway, propping him against the nearest wall. Her hand brushed against something hard at his waist and she pulled back his shirt to reveal a pistol that had somehow survived his ordeal. She did not know why she was surprised—he was a soldier, after all. For a moment, she considered taking it, then decided to leave him his one defense, if it even still worked. She ran her hands over his torso, feeling for other injuries, not sure what she would do if she found any. Then she pulled her hands back, wondering if he minded the intimacy of her stranger’s touch. But he lay with his eyes closed, still laboring to breathe.
She shivered, not entirely sure it was from the cold. There was something exciting and dangerous about him that made her take a step backward, that made her want to run and yet unable to look away at the same time. She peered in her satchel, pulling out the small loaf of bread she had tried to feed to her mother and placing it on the ground beside him. He needed a fire, but there was no wood and nothing else to burn.
“I’ll get help,” she offered. But even before he shook his head she knew that it was impossible. There was no one to be trusted and telling anyone would only put them both in danger. She looked around desperately. There was nothing more she could do for him here, and if she waited longer it would be dark and she would be unable to make the rest of the trip home.
She started to stand and he clung to the hem of her skirt in a way that might have been improper if he’d had the strength to mean it. Don’t go, the helpless look in his eyes seemed to say. She took his hand from her dress and placed it back on his chest, struck by the warmth of his fingers, and the strong muscle beneath the torn uniform. “I’ll be back,” she promised. And then she turned on her heel and ran.
4 (#ulink_a88c3638-77d7-5305-9ec8-4222b2c861fc)
“I’m going to see Mama again today,” Helena announced two days later as she fed breakfast to Karolina. She held a spoonful of coarse oat cereal suspended midair a few inches short of the baby’s open mouth, watching for Ruth’s reaction.
Ruth stopped dressing Dorie, the skirt stuck awkwardly over the child’s head. “Why? Is she worse?”
“She’s fine.” Helena immediately recognized the lack of truth in her response. “Fine” would have meant Mama recognizing her own daughter or chewing a mouthful of bread. Helena didn’t like to lie.
But Ruth tended to view the world as she wanted to see it. “When Mama comes back...” she would often say. At first Helena had wanted to correct her—how could she possibly believe that would ever happen? Denial was Ruth’s means of survival, though, and there was no harm in pretending as long as she didn’t rely on it. So Helena sometimes spared her from the worst.
“Me!” Karolina squawked, grabbing the spoon. As the child tried to feed herself, Helena considered telling Ruth about the soldier she had found. Ruth was better with salves and bandages and such, and she might have some other ways they could help the man. But something stopped her.
“Her doctor wasn’t there last time and I wanted to ask him about her medicine,” Helena added instead, stretching the story. She had never gone to see Mama more than once a week before. Surely Ruth would see through the lie. But Ruth just yanked the skirt over Dorie’s head, then sat the child in the chair to braid her hair, which had more than a hint of red to it, without reaction.
Helena took the spoon back from Karolina and scraped a last spoonful of cereal for her. “Drink your milk,” she said, more sternly than she intended. Waste could not be tolerated, even by the children.
“Mook,” Karolina offered. She had been a quiet baby for so long they had fretted something might be wrong, a deficit caused perhaps by the trauma of her parents’ disappearance. But she had begun speaking a few months earlier, gathering new words each day and trying them on for size. She took a sip from her cup, then smiled brightly, searching her sister’s face for praise. She was, like Ruth, too dependent on the approval of others—approval that seldom came anymore for any of them.
Helena looked across the crude wooden table at Michal, who had finished eating and now rested his chin on his hands, staring into the space. None of the children played during meals as she and Ruth had in happier times, giggling and whispering until their parents would scold them. Rather, they sat and ate gravely, as though they realized the scarcity of food and were unwilling to take it for granted.
The wind blew more strongly today than it had in months, howling around the house like a wolf looking for an entry point. Helena’s thoughts shifted to the soldier, alone in the cold, damp chapel. She had helped him without thinking, the same instinct that had prompted her to bring home a wounded squirrel she’d found as a child. Though his ripped uniform had not born any markings, she suspected that he was American, or perhaps British. Her heart skipped as she remembered the bit of pale flesh that she had glimpsed through the fabric. Enough, she admonished herself. This was not a schoolgirl’s crush, like Ruth always seemed to have on various boys when they were younger—this was about the soldier’s survival. Was he in pain? Was he even still alive? Helena had wanted to get away sooner to check on him. But Karolina had come down with a brief, soaring fever the night she’d returned, and Ruth couldn’t handle the three children alone when one was sick.
What if she didn’t go back to the chapel? She had brought the soldier to safety, and surely that was as much as anyone could expect from her. Anything else would put their family in danger. But he was already dependent on her, and without her help he would die of cold or starvation or something worse.
Across the table, Michal’s hazel eyes met hers. He had been born with wisdom beyond his years and had never gone through a childish phase. Though she did not believe in such things, it sometimes seemed as though he was an old soul who had seen all of this a thousand times before, and his understanding of the world made him somber. The day she’d almost taken the leaving path, Michal had peered at her deeply when she returned, as if aware of her near-transgression. He was staring at Helena now in a way that made her wonder if he had read her mind and knew about the soldier at the church. But of course, that was impossible.
She reached across the table and put her hand on his. He looked up, surprised at her rare display of affection. Perhaps more so than the girls, it was Michal to whom she was closest and had tried to shield. It had not always been that way—at first, she’d hated him. “A boy,” Tata had announced the day Michal was born, his face beaming with pride. Then six, Helena looked at the tiny infant with a mix of resentment and love. He would grow into the son who would take her place as their father’s favorite. Over the years, she had fought to stay stronger and more useful, always a step ahead, even as Michal grew taller.
One morning when she was twelve, she’d awakened to a squawk of dismay as Tata pulled her six-year-old brother from his bed for his first hunting trip. Jealousy nagged at her—before Michal, it had been she who had accompanied Tata on his dark forays into the cold woods to set traps and shoot deer. Now he had his son. But Michal sat on the floor, skin white and eyes wide as their father tugged at his collar, trying to force him to his feet. Michal looked up at her imploringly. He had always loved animals, had all but stopped eating meat as a child once he’d realized where it came from. Tata loomed over him, unwilling to be dissuaded. “Come,” she said, helping Michal to dress. Tata did not object when she tagged along, holding her brother’s hand as they trudged wordlessly through the dark, still woods.
There was nothing to be caught that day. When they had returned home, Tata stomped into the barn and emerged holding a flailing chicken by the neck. “Kill it,” he instructed Michal, unwilling to be placated until the lesson was complete. The boy stood back, trembling. Several seconds passed. “Do it.” Tears streamed down Michal’s cheeks.
Helena stepped forward and grabbed the chicken from her father, snapping its neck beneath the warm feathers with one swift movement. Her eyes met Tata’s defiantly and for a moment she feared he was going to return to the barn to get another chicken, their last, for Michal to kill. But he had simply walked away. “Come,” she’d said again to her brother. Together they went to clean the bird, Helena gently but persistently showing him how to remove the feathers and separate the bones.
It was perhaps hardest on him now, Helena reflected as the memory cleared. Michal was old enough to remember faint glimpses of the happiness that had once been theirs, not like Dorie and Karolina, who didn’t know what they had missed. But he had been too young to understand why it had all gone away, leaving him alone in a house full of girls.
“Here.” Helena pushed the rest of her bread toward him, trying to ignore her stomach, which grumbled in protest. As she did, she noticed a stain on her sleeve left by spilled milk and cereal.
Michal hesitated, then devoured the bread in two bites, hardly bothering to chew. “May I be excused?”
“No,” said Ruth.
“Yes,” said Helena in near-unison, their voices clashing against each other. They looked at each other uneasily. It was a tacit understanding that, despite their differences, they would not disagree in front of the children. For all of the hard times, she could not recall her parents quarreling, at least not when they thought the children could hear, and she and Ruth had tried to maintain that unified front. But the sisters seemed to differ more of late, their opposition laid bare for the children to see.
“Yes,” Ruth relented quickly. “Check on the animals, will you?”
“Come on, Dorie,” Michal said, holding out his hand.
Dorie followed him, her gait stilted. Her right leg had grown more slowly and was now an inch shorter than her left, causing her to her limp. “It will even out,” Mama had predicted optimistically when Dorie had started walking and the problem first became apparent. But the difference had become more pronounced with time.
Last spring, Helena had cut down a block of wood and affixed it to Dorie’s right shoe to compensate. It worked, and the limp had been all but gone when she had worn it. But a day later, Dorie had pulled the wood from her shoe. “It just doesn’t feel right.” Around the house, her limp had become so much a part of things they scarcely noticed it. As Helena watched Dorie hobble now along Michal’s long, foal-like gait, she seemed so vulnerable.
Michal and Dorie bounded through the door, spurred by the brisk morning air, their two heads bobbing auburn. Helena opened the shutters to let in the light. Ruth kept the children immaculate, Helena conceded inwardly. Their clothes were not torn or stained, the darned bits hidden so well they could scarcely be seen. She brushed their teeth with baking soda each night, insisted that their baths be thorough. Helena sometimes wondered why she bothered when they so seldom saw anyone but one another.
Outside the children ran in circles, Michal pretending to exert himself but really going much slower than he might have, allowing Dorie to catch him and feel that she was doing well. They chased a chipmunk around the yard, nearly colliding into the dwindling woodpile as the animal ducked beneath. Watching them play together, Helena was flooded with pride—despite their thinness and simple clothing, there was a light about them, a kind of strength other children did not possess. And they had a way of instinctively protecting each other, always had, even before they could walk or speak.
Was it different for them somehow because they weren’t twins? Helena wondered. With her and Ruth, it had always been a competition, who had spoken first (Ruth) and walked first (Helena), and later who was prettier, smarter, could sew or cook better. But it wasn’t any easier having older or younger siblings, she supposed, someone always ahead of you in the queue or behind in the scramble for food or attention. It was the plight of being one of many. Big families were the norm in these parts, even families like their own that could ill-afford them.
As the children disappeared into the barn, she smiled at Michal’s awkwardness, the way he had not quite grown into the long legs and broad shoulders he’d inherited from their father. “I heard something at market the other day,” Ruth said in a hushed tone, even though only little Karolina was there to hear them. Helena’s breath caught. Had Ruth learned—or somehow guessed—about the soldier? Guilt nagged at her suddenly. Until now, she always told Ruth everything. Yet this time something had held her back. It was as if, by discovering the man in the woods, she had taken a step apart from her siblings.
Helena licked her lips. “What is it?”
“The Garzels disappeared—Pani Kowalska said maybe they were arrested.”
Helena’s brow arched. “She said that?”
Ruth bristled. “Well, she didn’t exactly say it, but she suggested that was the case.”
Helena waved her hand dismissively. “Just silly gossip from an old woman with too much time on her hands.”
Ruth tried again. “She said that they arrested the Jews in Nowy S˛acz, too. People couldn’t make up such awful things from whole cloth, could they? There must be some truth to it.” She sounded as if she really needed Helena to believe her.
“Perhaps,” Helena said, trying to take the idea seriously. She started to lift Karolina down from the chair before she began to fuss, demanding to climb down herself.
“Here,” Helena said, relenting and letting her do it, but keeping a protective hand close behind. Karolina looked at her in disbelief—it was Ruth, not Helena, who usually gave in. But the child’s smile, so rare these days, was reward enough. Karolina scampered down. She had always shown physical prowess beyond the others, rolling over at three months and walking at nine months, almost as if she knew that the world was testing her, and despite her small size she would need to get around on her own two feet. Helena checked her forehead and noted with relief that her skin was now cool to the touch, then released her to play on the floor.
“People wouldn’t stand for it,” she replied to Ruth, resuming their conversation in that fractured way that happened frequently while they were caring for the children. A lack of confidence eroded her voice. In fact, the war had stripped away so many civilities, given people a license to act on their deeper, baser selves. Many, she suspected with an uneasy feeling, would be only too happy to let the Germans get rid of not just Jews but neighbors they had never really wanted in the first place.
Helena’s eyes traveled to the corner by the fireplace, where the scarf Ruth had knitted for Piotr still lay crumpled in a ball, untouched though months had passed. She kicked it out of the way, hoping Ruth had not seen. Anger rose within her as she thought of the boy who had broken her sister’s heart. “He’s not worth it,” she had wanted to say many times since Piotr last had come. But she held back, knowing such sentiments would only bring Ruth more pain.
Helena gestured to Karolina’s thick hair, which Ruth had cowed earlier into two luminous pigtails. Karolina was the outlier in their auburn-haired cluster—thick locks the color of cornstalks made her shine like the sun. “Do mine next?” she asked.
“Really?” Ruth’s brow lifted. Helena held her breath, wondering if she’d gone too far. She’d never had the patience to sit, instead pulling her hair into a scraggly knot at the back of her neck. She worried that this, coupled with her announcement of an extra visit to their mother, might arouse Ruth’s suspicion. But Ruth just shrugged. “Sit down.” Helena dropped into the chair. Ruth’s touch was gentle, her movements soothing as she coaxed the stubborn wisps into place with deft fingers. Helena fought the urge to fidget—it was all she could do not to leap from the chair and run out the door into the forest.
“Mischa needs shoes,” she announced grimly when Ruth had finished braiding. Ruth’s brow wrinkled. For the girls, there was always an old pair to be handed down, but Michal would not be big enough to wear Tata’s boots for at least another year or two, and there was no money for new ones. “What about your knitting? You could sell some pieces.”
Ruth cocked her head, as if she had not considered that her handiwork would have value to anyone outside of the house. “Perhaps with Christmas coming I can barter something knitted for a pair at market.”
Christmas. The word sounded foreign, as if from another lifetime. “Remember how Mama would decorate the house with mistletoe?”
“Holly,” her sister corrected, her voice crackling with authority. With Ruth, there was always a rejoinder. “And we would sing carols until she would give us a coin to stop.” Helena smiled fondly at the memory, one of many that only she and Ruth shared. “Then we would open our gifts and Tata would pretend to fall asleep early...”
“He didn’t...” Helena began. Tata hadn’t pretended to sleep; he had passed out from the half bottle of homemade potato vodka he consumed during Wigilia, their Christmas Eve feast. Even as a young child, Helena had known the truth. How could two people live the same moment but remember it so differently?
“Of course he did,” she relented, allowing Ruth to win. Ruth sniffed with quiet satisfaction.
Helena brushed aside the memories, forcing herself to focus on more practical matters. “Or we could sell it,” she said, gesturing with her head toward the corner. The sewing machine, which Tata had bought for their mother as a wedding present, had been her most prized possession. It would fetch a fair price, even from someone who wanted to use the parts for scrap.
“No!”
“Ruti, we must be practical. We need food and coal.”
But Ruth shook her head. “We need it. That’s why Mama left it to me. She knew you wouldn’t keep it safe.”
A lump of anger formed in Helena’s throat. Had Mama actually bequeathed the sewing machine to Ruth while she was still coherent enough? More likely, Ruth had simply presumed. Helena swallowed, struggling not to retort. Ruth clung to the machine because letting it go meant acknowledging that things had changed permanently, and that Mama was not coming back.
Helena walked back to the fireplace where Karolina played by the hearth. “Let’s get you dressed.” She held out her arms, but the child hung back, looking up uncertainly at Ruth. It was Ruth from whom the children sought care and affection, preferring her softer voice and gentle, uncalloused hands.
Ruth crossed the room gracefully, appearing to swirl rather then walk, her skirt a gentle halo around her—not like Helena, who seemed to crash headlong at full force. She scooped Karolina up with effort. “She’s getting too old to be carried all of the time,” Helena scolded. “You’ll spoil her.” Ruth did not reply, but smiled sweetly, smoothing her hair and kissing the top of her head. Dorie and Karolina had had so much less of their parents than the others. Ruth tried to make up for it, fashioning little treats when she could and singing to them and rocking them at night. Karolina eyed Helena reproachfully now as Ruth carried her past. Helena opened her mouth, searching for the right words. She loved the children, too, though perhaps she never told them as much. But they needed to be strong in these times.
Helena walked past her sisters to the bedroom. Fingering the stain on her sleeve, Helena’s eyes roamed longingly toward the armoire. She opened the door. Mama’s clothing still hung neatly, as clean and pressed as the day she had gone to the hospital. Her church dress was practically new, the gleaming buttons kept immaculately. Even her two everyday dresses were nicer that Helena’s, having been spared the hardships of the woods these many months.
Helena reached inside and pulled one of the dresses out. She remembered Christmas two years earlier, when Ruth had opened a box to reveal a new skirt, pink and crisp. “There was only money for one,” Mama explained. “And Ruth’s bigger. You’ll have her old one.” It had been a pretext. Though Ruth was a bit fuller figured, the truth was that she was the prettier one with the better chance of marriage, and it was always presumed that she should have the nicer, more feminine things. There had never been any talk of a suitor for Helena, even in happier times.
“What are you doing?” Helena jumped and spun around. Ruth had appeared behind her, stealthily as a cat.
Helena held up the dress. “I was thinking of borrowing this.”
“Nonsense,” Ruth snapped. “Yours is good enough for traipsing through the woods and doing chores. You’d only soil it and we need to leave it for when Mama comes home.” She eyed Helena warily, daring her to argue. Then Ruth took the dress from her and returned it to the armoire, closing the door firmly behind her.
5 (#ulink_983a52fe-62d8-5376-a2e0-7be374b7c918)
The sun was dropping low to the trees later that afternoon as Helena neared the chapel and pushed open the door. “Dzie´n dobry...?” she called into the dank semidarkness. Silence greeted her. Surely the soldier could not have fled in his condition. For a second, she wondered if she’d imagined him. He could be dead, she thought with more dismay than she should have felt for someone she’d only met once. His wounds had seemed serious enough.
She pulled back the shutter that covered one of the broken windows to allow the pale light to filter in. The soldier was curled up in a tight ball on the ground, much as he had been when she found him, but farther from the door. She hesitated as excitement and alarm rose in her. What was she thinking by coming here? She didn’t know this man, or whether he was here to help or do harm.
Helena walked over and knelt to feel his cheek, caught off guard by the softness of his skin. She was relieved to find he was still warm. Then she remembered Karolina’s illness, barely passed. Had she made a mistake by coming and possibly bringing sickness to this man in his already-weakened state?
The soldier moved suddenly beneath her hand and she jumped. His eyes snapped open. He stiffened, almost as Mama had when she feared pain in the hospital.
“It’s okay,” Helena said, holding her hands low and open. “I’m the one who brought you here.”
He forced himself to a sitting position, trying without success to stifle a whimper. “Who are you?” His Polish was stiff and a bit accented.
“I’m called Helena. I live close to the village. You should rest,” she added.
But he sat even straighter, clenching and unclenching his hands. His chocolate eyes, set just a shade too close together, darted back and forth. “Does anyone else know that I’m here?”
“Not that I’m aware,” she replied quickly. “I haven’t told anyone.” She wanted to say that someone else might have heard the crash, but it seemed unwise to upset him more.
He stared at her, disbelieving. “Are you sure?”
“I haven’t told anyone,” she repeated, suddenly annoyed. “Why would I have gone to all of the trouble to save you just to turn you in?”
He shrugged, somewhat calmer now. “A reward, maybe. Who knows why people do anything these days?”
“No one knows that you’re here,” she replied, her voice soothing.
“Where is ‘here’ exactly?” he asked.
“Southern Poland, Małopolska. You’re about twenty kilometers from the city.”
“Kraków?” Helena nodded, sensing from his expression that her answer was not what he expected. “That puts us about an hour from the southern border, doesn’t it?”
“Roughly, yes. Perhaps a bit more.”
His face relaxed slightly. “You’re real.” She cocked her head. “I thought I might have been delirious and dreamed you. And then I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied quickly. “It’s hard to get away.” He had rugged features, an uneven nose and a chin that jutted forth defiantly. But his eyelashes were longer than she knew a man could have, and there was a softness to his gaze that kept him from being too intimidating.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” the man added. “Just that I’m glad to see you again.” A warm flush seemed to wash over her then, and she could feel her cheeks color. “I don’t think I introduced myself properly. Sam Rosen.” He held out his hand. “I’m American.” His deep voice had a lyrical quality to it, the words nearly a song.
“But you’re speaking Polish.”
“Yes, my grandparents were from one of those eastern parts by the border that was Poland when it wasn’t Russia. They used to speak Polish with my mother when they didn’t want the children to understand what they were saying. So I had a reason to try to figure it out.” The corners of his mouth rose with amusement.
She shook his outstretched hand awkwardly. He had wiped the blood from his face, she noticed, leaving a narrow gash across his forehead. “You’re looking better,” she remarked, meaning it. There was a ruddiness to his complexion that had not been there before. His hair was darker than she remembered it, almost black. A healed scar ran pale and deep from the right corner of his mouth to his chin.
“Thanks to you,” he replied, his eyes warm. “Bringing me here saved my life. And the food you left did me a world of good.” He made it sound as though she had left him an entire feast and not just a handful of bread.
“A bit more,” she said, passing him another piece of bread, slightly larger. His fingers brushed against her own, coarse and unfamiliar. “I’m sorry that’s all I could manage.” She could not take any of the scarce sheep’s cheese or lard they needed for the children.
“You’re very kind.” His voice was full with gratitude. He tore into the bread with an urgency that suggested true hunger. Of course, the morsel she’d left him last time would not have lasted a day, once he was able to eat. She noticed then a pile of leaves—he must have dragged himself outside to forage. “They taught us in training which things we could eat, roots and such. And I’ve managed to drink some rainwater.” He gestured across the chapel to a puddle that had formed where it had rained through the opening in the roof. “I’m sorry not to get up,” he added. “My leg is still a mess. But I don’t think it needs to be set.”
She looked around the chapel—the wooden pews had rotted to the floor and there was no sign of any pulpit, but fine engravings were still visible on the walls, faded images of angels and the Virgin Mary at the front. “It’s a good thing I found you,” she said, sounding more pleased with herself than she intended. “The path is just off the main road. Someone else might have turned you in to the police for favors or food.”
“What about animals?” he asked. “Are there wolves?”
She hesitated. “Yes.” His eyes widened. She did not want to alarm him, but other than sparing Ruth the occasional bit of reality, it was not in Helena’s nature to lie. Once the wild animals had clung to the high hills, content to feed on small prey. But with food sources growing scarce, they’d become bolder, venturing down to the outskirts of the village to steal livestock.
“Here.” Helena opened her bag. She had looked around the hospital ward while visiting her mother earlier, searching for whatever supplies she could take to help him. There had only been a few rags and a small bottle of alcohol lying on one of the nurse’s carts and she didn’t dare to risk looking in the supply closet or any of the cupboards. She handed the bottle to him. “I brought you these, too.” She pulled out the wool coat and thick gray sweater that had been her father’s. Sam took the sweater and put it on, swimming in its massive girth. She hoped he could not detect the smell of liquor that lingered, even after it had been washed.
“Thank you. My jacket must have been stripped off with the parachute. It’s probably hanging from a tree somewhere.”
So he had fallen from the sky, after all. “So you jumped?”
He nodded. “Before the plane crashed. The weather forced us to fly farther north than we should have, I think, and the pilot had to go off course. At first we received orders to turn back, but we had all agreed that we were too far gone for that—we wanted to see the mission through. Then something went wrong with the plane. We knew we were going to have to wild jump, that means just land anywhere, as well as we could.” She imagined it, leaping from the plane in darkness and mist, not knowing what lay below. “I wasn’t sure my chute was going to have time to open. It did, but I got caught in a tree. When I was trying to free my chute, I fell from the tree and, well...” He gestured to his leg. “The rest you know.”
Sam opened the bottle and doused the cloth, then pressed it against the gash on his forehead, grimacing. He shivered and there was a sudden air of vulnerability about him, as though all of the foreign bits had been stripped away.
“I’ll be right back,” she announced. Before he could respond, Helena rushed outside to the grassy patch above the chapel, collecting an armful of sticks to make a fire. She stopped abruptly. What was she doing coming to the woods to tend to this stranger, risking discovery at any moment? Caretaking had never been in her nature. It was Ruth who nurtured the others, Michal that cared for small, hurt animals. And she had her family’s well-being to think about. She had done enough, too much, her sister would surely say.
Helena eyed the path back toward the village. She could just turn and go, now. But then she remembered the gratitude in the soldier’s eyes as he had taken the food from her. She was his only hope. If the Germans came, though, she would be arrested, leaving her family helpless. She had to think of them first. One had to be practical in order to survive in these times. She would build the soldier a fire before going and that was all.
She returned with her armful of kindling, which she carried to the small stove in the corner. He frowned. “It isn’t right, you hauling wood for me.”
Helena fought the urge to laugh. She carried enough wood to keep her family warm—the small pile of kindling was nothing. Still, she was touched by his concern. “It’s fine.” The wood was too damp, she fretted as she broke it into pieces. But when she struck the match she’d brought from home and touched it to the pile, it began to burn merrily.
“Thank you,” Sam said, sliding closer along the floor as she closed the grate. The tiny flames seemed to make his dark eyes dance. He winced.
“Is it very painful?” she asked.
“It isn’t so bad when I’m still, but when I move, it’s awful.”
“Let me.” She walked to him and slowly helped him inch closer to the fire, letting him lean on her for support, feeling his muscles strain with the effort of each movement.
“There is one other thing...” He hesitated. “I’m so sorry to ask, but I’d like to wash if that’s somehow possible.” She’d noticed it earlier, his own masculine earthy scent, stronger than it had been last time she was here. “Perhaps some water?”
“Let me see what I can find.” Helena went back outside to where she had seen a rusty bucket lying by the drain. She picked up the bucket and walked uphill several meters to the stream. She moved slowly on her return, taking care not to spill. “It’s cold,” she cautioned as Sam took it from her, his hand brushing hers.
He cupped his hand and drank from the bucket hurriedly. Then he splashed the water on his face, not seeming to mind as the icy droplets trickled down his neck. “That feels great.”
He pulled off the sweater and unbuttoned his shirt. She blushed and half turned away; out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of his back where it met his shoulder, muscle and bone working against the bare, pale skin as he bathed. She sucked in her breath quickly, then held it, hoping he hadn’t heard.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. “Pan Rosen...” she began, lowering herself to the ground as he dried himself with his torn shirt.
“Sam,” he corrected. Sam. In that moment, he was not a soldier, but a man, with an open face and broad smooth cheeks she wanted to touch. He pulled on the sweater she had given him once more. “And may I call you Hel...” He faltered.
“Helena,” she prompted.
“Helena,” he repeated, as if trying it on for size. “That’s quite a mouthful. May I call you Lena?”
“Y-yes,” she replied, caught off guard. All of the other children had pet names, Ruti, Mischa—but she had always been Helena.
“Lena,” he said again, a slight smile playing at the corners of his lips. His shoulders were broad, forearms strong. Sitting beside him, she felt oddly small and delicate.
She struggled to remember what she wanted to say. “What are you doing here, Sam? Are the Americans coming to help us?”
“No.” Her heart sank. The talk of the Americans entering the war had been growing in recent months, whispered everywhere from the hospital corridors to the market in the town square. And if the Americans weren’t coming yet, then what was he doing here? “That is, I mean...” He broke off. “I really can’t say too much,” he added apologetically. Then he frowned again. “You must be taking a terrible risk coming here.”
Not really, she wanted to say, but that would be untrue. “Everything is dangerous now,” she replied instead. In truth, finding him was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in years, maybe ever, and she had been eager to return. “Especially going to see my mother.” She told him then about sneaking in and out of Kraków, her near-encounter with the jeep. “Of course, if not for the German I would never have come this way and found you.” She could feel herself blush again.
He did not seem to notice, though, but continued staring at her, his brow crinkled. “I wish you wouldn’t go to the city again.”
Helena was touched by his concern, more than she might have expected from a man she just met. “That’s what my...” She stopped herself from telling him about Ruth, the fact that she had a twin. She did not want to acknowledge her prettier sister. “There are five children in the family, including me. I’m the one who has to go check on Mama. My father is gone and there’s no one else to make sure she’s cared for.”
Helena’s thoughts turned to her mother. She’d actually seemed better today. For once she’d been awake and hadn’t mistaken Helena for her sister. And she had reached for the bread that Helena offered. For a second, Helena had hesitated; she had hoped to keep the extra food for the soldier. She was overcome with shame and had quickly broken the bread and moistened it. “Pani Kasia says that they’re going to kill us,” Mama had announced abruptly as she chewed, gesturing to the woman in the bed next to hers. She had an unworried, slightly gossipy tone as though discussing the latest rumor about one of the neighbors back home.
Inwardly, Helena had blanched. She had worked so hard to shield Mama from the outside world. But the hospital was a porous place and news seeped through the cracks. “She’s a crazy old woman,” Helena replied carefully in a low voice. For months she had done her best to keep the truth from her mother without actually lying to her, and she didn’t want to cross that line now.
“And sour to boot,” Mama added, smiling faintly. There was a flicker of clarity to her eyes and for a second Helena glimpsed the mother of old, the one who had baked sweet cakes and rubbed their feet on frigid winter nights. There were so many things she wanted to ask her mother about her childhood and the past and what her hopes and dreams had been.
“Mama...” She turned back, then stopped. Her mother was staring out the window, once more the cloud pulled down over her face like a veil, and Helena knew that she was gone and could not be reached.
“It’s so brave of you to make that journey every week,” Sam said, drawing her from her thoughts. His voice was full with admiration.
“Brave?” She was unaccustomed to thinking of herself that way. “You’re the brave one, leaving your family to come all the way over here.”
“That’s different,” he replied, and a shadow seemed to pass across his face.
“How old are you, anyway?” she asked, hearing her sister’s phantom admonition that the question was too blunt.
“Eighteen.”
“Same as me,” she marveled.
“Almost nineteen. I enlisted the day after my birthday.”
“Did you always want to be a soldier?”
“No.” His face clouded over. “But I had to come.”
“Why?”
He bit his lip, not answering. Then he lifted his shoulders, straightening. “When I joined the army, they sent me to school in Georgia, that’s in the southern part of the United States, for nearly a year. I had to learn to be a soldier, you see, and then how to be a paratrooper.”
Helena processed the information. She had never thought about someone becoming a soldier; it seemed like they were already that way. But now she pictured it, Sam donning his uniform and getting his hair cut short. “Is that why it’s taking so long for the Americans to come?” It came out sounding wrong, as though she was holding him personally responsible for his country.
But he seemed to understand what she meant. “In part, yes.” His brow wrinkled. “Some people don’t want us to enter the war at all.” How could the Americans not help? Helena wanted to ask. Sam continued, “Everyone has to be trained, they have to plan the missions...” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t say too much. It’s nothing personal,” he hastened to add. “I’m not supposed to talk about it with anyone.”
“I understand.” But the moment hung heavy between them. She was a Pole and not to be trusted.
“They don’t know,” he explained earnestly. “I mean, the American people know about Hitler, of course, and the Jews there are concerned for their relatives, trying to get them out. Until I came to Europe, I had no idea...” He stopped abruptly.
“No idea about what?”
Sam bit his lip. “Nothing.” Helena could tell from his voice that there were things that she, even in the middle of it all, had not seen. Things he would not share with her. “Anyway, our rabbi back home said that—”
“You’re Jewish?” she interrupted. He nodded. She was surprised—he didn’t look anything like the Jews she’d seen in the city, shawl covered and stooped. But there was something unmistakably different about him, a slight arch to his nose, chin just a shade sharper than the people around here. His dark hair was curly and so thick it seemed that water could not penetrate it. “You don’t look it,” she blurted. Her face flushed. “That is, the Jews around here...”
He smiled, not offended. “There are different kinds of Jews. Some, like the Orthodox, are more observant than others, and they dress differently.”
That was not quite what Helena had meant, but she was grateful to let it be. Thinking of the empty streets and shuttered shops of Kazimierz, and what the nurse had told her about the ghetto and her sister about the Jews of Nowy S˛acz, she was suddenly nervous for him. Not just a foreigner, but a Jew. The full danger of his situation crashed down upon her. “Did they make you come?”
“No, I volunteered.” He cleared his throat. “That is, the kind of work I do...” She wanted to ask what that was exactly, but she knew he wouldn’t say. “It’s a really big honor and I raised my hand to be considered. At first they said no—they were worried that being Jewish I might let emotions get in the way.” His face was open and honest in a way that she liked, as if he could not hide a single feeling. So unlike here, where everyone kept their eyes low to avoid trouble. “Are you Catholic?”
Helena nodded, picturing the worn old rosary Mama kept in her bed stand drawer, even at the hospital. She had insisted on dressing the children in their best clothes and going to Mass each Sunday. Helena always dreaded the stares of the other villagers, wondering where their father was, speculating that he was sleeping off another night of drinking. After Mama got sick and had gone to the sanatorium, Ruth had stubbornly persisted in herding the children to church. But then their better clothes became too small and threadbare to wear and after Tata died they stopped going altogether. “Everyone is here, more or less.”
He did not speak further, but stared off into the distance. “What are you going to do now?” she asked finally.
He paused. “I don’t know. Stay here for now, I guess. I don’t have much choice with this leg.” He finished the bread and looked at her with a serious expression. “When you found me, was there any sign of anyone else?”
She shook her head. “No one. You were by yourself in the woods. No other people, no plane. And the night before, when I heard the crash, I never saw anything.” She did not have the heart to tell him about the force with which the crash had shaken their house, making the likelihood that anyone else had survived virtually nil.
“No, you wouldn’t have. We flew in low with lights down. It was an engine problem, I think, maybe birds, that got us—not the Germans.” The distinction seemed to matter to him a great deal. “The plane was too low for our chutes to open properly. I doubt the others were as lucky.” Pain washed over his face. His own injuries had been awful, but surely his fellow soldiers had suffered worse. She was seized with the urge to put her arms around him and comfort him, as Ruth might Dorie when she scraped a knee. But offering comfort did not come naturally to Helena and she stopped, caught off guard by the unfamiliar impulse.
He cleared his throat and took her hand in his. “You cut yourself.” The spot where she had caught her hand on the thorny bush while fleeing had reopened from the cold, dry air.
She pulled back sharply. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It isn’t that.” She was ashamed of the rough calluses, the places where her knuckles had split from chopping wood. Ruth always scolded her to take care of her hands. She kept her own soft by wearing an old pair of Tata’s work gloves as she washed and cleaned, rubbing lanolin into her palms and pushing back her cuticles. Ruth took time to do the little things, as though it still mattered and there were young men looking for wives and not that Piotr, her last best hope, had disappeared into the abyss. For once Helena wished that she had listened.
“May I?” He reached out once more. Helena nodded, then extended her hand, allowing him to cradle it in the warmth of his own. He examined it carefully. She felt silly having him worrying about such a little cut, when he was so much more seriously wounded. He dropped her hand and she wondered if he was repulsed by its coarseness. But he reached in his pocket and pulled out a small tube, uncapped it. “It’s a salve,” he explained as he squeezed some into his palm. “Hard to believe that I lost almost everything but managed to keep this.”
“Plus your flashlight and your gun,” she replied pointedly.
He blinked with surprise. “Yeah, that, too.” A moment of awkward distrust passed between them, then evaporated. He took her hand in his own once more, sending shivers of unfamiliar warmth through her as he rubbed the lotion into her skin.
She pulled away again. “I can do it.”
“Of course.” Sam held out the tube. He had strong wrists, flat on top with a few dark hairs curling toward the backs of his hands. She was suddenly mindful of her thick stockings, the darning where they had torn at the knee impossible to conceal.
She finished rubbing in the lotion, studying him more closely now. “Your scar—is it from the war?”
“No, I fell when I was younger,” he answered, a beat too quickly.
She recapped the tube and tried to hand it back. “You keep it,” she said.
“Oh, I couldn’t...”
“Okay, then I’ll give you some more next time.” Next time. The two words hung in the air, waiting for her to refute them.
She looked up, noticing then how the sun had dipped low. “I have to go.” She stood reluctantly. Talking with Sam had been such a reprieve from the dreariness of the rest of her life. “Do you need anything else?”
“Some longer branches, if you wouldn’t mind. I can use them to make a crutch.”
“I saw some out by the knoll.” She returned a few minutes later with several pieces of wood.
“Thank you,” Sam said. “I didn’t expect... That is, I didn’t think people here would be nice.”
“Oh.” She brought her hand to her mouth, feeling her cheeks flush.
“That was thoughtless of me to say,” he recovered hastily. “You have to understand, the Jews who came to America from Poland, well, they left for a reason and maybe they didn’t have the best experience here, or leave with the best impression of the people.” He was talking quickly now, stumbling over his words. But it was more than just awkwardness, or embarrassment over what he had said. He was nervous. “Thank you,” he repeated, somehow making the words sound like something more. She nodded and started toward the door.
“Please wait.” She turned back. “It’s important, you understand, that no one else know I am here.” His voice was grave and she knew he was talking about something larger than his personal safety.
“I promise.”
He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again and stood reluctantly. “Lena, wait...” She turned back as he struggled to stand, holding on to the wall of the chapel. “The trains,” he said. “Can you see them from where you live?”
Helena hesitated, puzzled. She nodded. From the window of the barn loft where she had always hidden as a child when things got bad one could see the tracks. She went there still when she needed a moment of quiet. The trains had changed lately, increasing their frequency, seeming to move with grim determination. “You can tell a lot from the rail lines—how often they go, in which direction, what kind of cars they are carrying, if they are empty or full.”
“I’ll watch,” she promised.
She noticed the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin, which seemed to have grown thicker during her visit. “I can bring a razor next time,” she said, remembering her father’s, which sat in a tin cup in the cupboard, waiting for the soft peach fuzz on Michal’s upper lip to evolve.
“You mean you’ll... That is...” He paused, conflict washing over his face. “No, you mustn’t come again. It isn’t safe,” he added, and she saw then that he was worried for her safety. He was setting her free, giving her permission to go and not come back. Could she take it? Her shoulders slumped and she was suddenly overwhelmed and saddened, by all that had happened and that she had taken on in coming here—and by the fact that she was now leaving him.
“I’ll see you soon,” she replied firmly, not realizing that she was making the promise until the words had flown from her mouth. Then, before he could argue further, she turned and started down the hill.
6 (#ulink_548b3e16-2aff-5e2b-b66b-add8c5c530cb)
After Helena disappeared into the forest, Ruth set Karolina down to play with wooden blocks by the fire and busied herself cleaning up the breakfast dishes. When she finished, she dried her hands and opened the cupboard. In the back, exactly as Mama had kept it, was the glass jar of honey. Ruth had discovered the jar when she was eight, and Mama (whose sweet tooth was her one weakness) had shared a bit with her in exchange for keeping it a secret. Ruth dipped a finger in it now and then put it in her mouth, the familiar sweetness a reminder of happier times. How wonderful it had been to have something that was just hers, instead of split between her and Helena. Guilt surged through her. She should share it with the children, a rare treat for all of them. But then it would be gone. It was all right to keep this one thing as hers alone, wasn’t it? Better for them not to get used to such things, anyway, when they likely would not have any more.
Checking on Karolina, who was still playing contentedly, Ruth poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the seat by the window. The wind whistled, seeping through the cracks. Outside Michal and Dorie continued to run, undeterred by the cold. As Ruth looked around the cottage, a sense of foreboding overcame her. “Things are changing,” Helena had observed cryptically the previous evening. Why did she say this as though it were a good thing? Ruth had liked the old world with its seasons and predictable expectations. Now everything was topsy-turvy, uncertain.
She shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Piotr. The memory of his face had grown fuzzy in her mind since the last time he’d come to see her. She had taken the time that morning to roll her hair into a fine braided knot. “Ruth, you look like a princess!” Dorie had exclaimed. Touched, Ruth had glowed with a bit of nearly forgotten pride. “Princess” was Dorie’s highest honor, and one she had only bestowed on Mama—until now.
Piotr had appeared across the field from town at one o’clock, as he had each Sunday, head bowed low against an autumn wind. He was not bad looking, Ruth had reflected. Taller than her by a head and broad-shouldered, he had thick features and colorless blond hair. Balled in one hand was the scarf she had knitted for him and she wondered why he wasn’t wearing it. She might have kept it for Christmas and given it to him as a gift, but she’d wanted him to have it exactly for days like this.
“Cze´s´c.” He greeted her with an awkward kiss that did not quite reach her cheek. She waited for him to notice her hair, but he did not remark upon it.
“Shall we walk?” she asked, speaking a bit more quickly than usual. Their courtship had been unremarkable, consisting mostly of strolls by the stream when the weather permitted it. “Or would you prefer to come in and warm up by the fire?” He did not answer but peered uneasily over her shoulder. It was the others, she decided. Piotr was an only child and more comfortable around a calf or foal than human little ones.
Ruth put on her cape and followed him outside in the direction of the stream. The water was low, pulled back to reveal dry muddy banks littered with pebbles and branches. A mossy smell rose from the muck. The stream would swell again when the snows came and melted, then rise perilously with the spring rain showers. She pointed to a bend in the stream, just beyond the edge of their property. “Helena says that is a fine place for catching trout. Perhaps in the spring...”
Piotr stopped and turned to her abruptly. “I can’t. That is, my father doesn’t want me to come anymore.” He faltered, face reddening like a beet.
“I don’t understand.” Her stomach burned ominously.
“Things are going so poorly with the farm. And now there are the quotas.” He was referring to the percentage that the Germans now exacted from each farmer’s yield. The sisters’ own garden was too small to offer much, but from a farm like Piotr’s, the demand would be severe. “There isn’t enough to support a family.”
It was a lie, of course—she and Helena managed to feed the children with so much less. But he was offering it as a reason—an excuse, really—as to why they could not go forward. Ruth watched him, contemplating what to do, which smile or touch might cajole him to change his mind. She’d learned from observing Mama how to charm a man into doing what she wanted. A few minutes ago he was just an ordinary boy; now he was all she had, and she was suddenly desperate to keep him.
“The war has just made things so difficult,” Piotr began again. He broke off and thrust the scarf in her direction so quickly that it fell to the ground, then he stomped off in the opposite direction with a gait too clumsy to be a run.
She took a step forward, stumbling over a tree root. “Piotr!” Her voice echoed against the stillness of the trees. It was not until he had disappeared across the field that she realized he would not be coming again.
Staring at the emptiness before her, so new and yet so permanent, Ruth recalled how just a week earlier he had kissed her behind the barn. She had pushed his fumbling hands away, partly because it was the right thing to do, and also because once she gave him that, he would no longer want her. But he had left her, anyway. Had Piotr broken off things because she had let him go too far, or because she had stopped him?
Neither, she decided now, gazing out the window at the very spot where their courtship had ended. It had not been about sex, but money. Piotr’s family just didn’t want to be saddled with supporting so many children who were not their own. Piotr’s mother had undoubtedly told him to get rid of dead wood while he still had the chance, that Ruth and her family would never be anything but a burden. But if Piotr had been a stronger man, he would have stayed in spite of his mother’s opinion—and for that weakness Ruth hated him most of all.
Piotr had begun courting the liveryman’s daughter, beautiful and unencumbered by anyone, just three weeks later, confirming Ruth’s suspicions. Her cheeks burned now as she relived the rejection. It wasn’t so much Piotr she missed, Ruth reflected. She hadn’t really wanted to go live in his big cold house on the other side of town, and there was a roughness to his touch that had made her dread what lay ahead. No, it was the idea of him, the now-gone promise of having a place secured, which filled her with a sense of loss.
Worst of all that day, she’d had to return to the house to face Helena. Though she had not said a word, her sister’s expression indicated that she’d known it would end poorly all along. She did not want to accept Helena’s sympathy—or acknowledge the fact that they were the same again, alone without anyone.
There was a knock at the door. Ruth started, setting down her coffee cup so quickly that a bit splashed high over the edge onto the table. No one came calling unannounced, or at all these days. For a fleeting second she thought that it might be Piotr, conjured from her thoughts. Perhaps he had come to beg her forgiveness and tell her that he had made a mistake. She would take him back, if his apology was sincere, although not right away. She had given things too easily before, a mistake she did not intend to repeat. But of course, Piotr was off fighting somewhere. Helena, she decided. She must have come back for something and forgotten her key—again.
Ruth opened the door, then stepped back at the sight of an unfamiliar woman whose dark hair was streaked with silver. Though she did not wear the yellow star, something about her shawl suggested that she was a Jew, from a neighboring village, perhaps. “Tak?”
The woman did not speak, but looked over Ruth’s shoulder, assessing the house, which despite its modest size and furnishings must have seemed luxurious. Ruth cringed, wondering if for a moment the woman would ask for food or money, or worse yet, shelter. They had nothing extra to spare and letting the woman in would surely invite trouble. She noticed that the woman wore no gloves or hat, but seemed oblivious to the cold. “Can I help you?” Ruth asked more softly. Karolina toddled up behind her, tugging at the hem of her dress. Ruth lifted her protectively.
“My child,” the woman croaked, her voice younger than her careworn face might have suggested. Was the woman deluded and thinking that Karolina was hers? Ruth hugged the child tighter to her breast. “I have a little girl.” The woman held her hand up to just below her waist. “Wearing a red plaid scarf with an eagle on it. Have you seen her?”
For a moment, Ruth thought she must have misunderstood, for who misplaced a child? But the woman’s eyes, ringed with circles from her not having slept or rested in her search, were sincere. “I’m sorry, I haven’t.” She eyed the woman. She had only seen Jews from afar, dark, mysterious creatures that seemed to confirm Father Dominik’s admonitions in his sermons that they were shrewd and cunning and drank the blood of Christian infants. But the woman before her just looked like any mother, tired and bedraggled and desperate.
“They said a camp...” the woman began feebly, and before Ruth could ask, the woman turned and started off across the hill.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said again into the empty space before her, with more feeling than she had expected. Though the woman might look different, a child was a child, and Ruth could not help but pity her. Still, Ruth had her own family to think about and could not afford to become involved.
She closed the door and sat down with Karolina on her lap, shaken by the lingering image of the woman’s face. They knew families that had lost children in the traditional sense, born too small or taken by influenza or some other illness—not the odd way this woman had just described. She had seen the grieving mothers at market with their hollow eyes, disbelieving, despite the odds, that it had happened to them. The merchants seemed to speak softly and cut more generously for those women, but other villagers stepped back, as if the loss might somehow be contagious. Ruth’s throat tightened. She would take the squabbling and competition and hardships of a large family if it meant that they were safe—and together.
Suddenly anxious, Ruth rapped on the window, gesturing for Michal and Dorie to come inside. “Take your boots off,” she instructed, closing the door quickly behind them. “I’ll warm some milk.” As she set Karolina in her high chair, she hoped they would not ask about the woman.
The children darted beneath the table and around the chairs, as though the colder weather had made them unusually restless. “Where’s Helena?” Dorie asked, seeming to notice her sister’s absence for the first time.
“She’s gone to the city,” Ruth replied absently.
“Nooo!” the child wailed, her face seeming to crumple. She swung her braids from side to side, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Ruth stopped in surprise, milk pitcher suspended midair. The children seldom noticed, much less minded, Helena’s absences. She set the pitcher down and knelt. “There, there,” she soothed, stroking Dorie’s hair. The child’s breath was improbably sweet like cinnamon. “She’ll be back by tonight. You’ll see. She’s only gone to visit Mama.” She usually refrained from mentioning their mother, not wanting to remind the children and cause them distress or answer their many questions. But now she added the information, hoping it would bring further plausibility to her explanation of Helena’s absence.
“You know Christmas is coming,” Ruth offered, trying to change the subject.
“Are we having a tree?” Michal asked.
“I don’t think so, darling,” Ruth said, a knife going through her as she watched his face fall. It seemed frivolous, cutting down a pine tree when there was so much else to worry about. “But we’ll have a lovely meal and all of the songs and stories.”
“And Mama?” Dorie looked up hopefully, eyes brightening. “Will she be back for Christmas, too? Did Helena go to get her?” Ruth understood then that for some reason today, Dorie had equated Helena’s going to the city with Mama’s disappearance, a trip was taken in one direction only. She imagined that Helena, too, wasn’t coming back.
“Mama,” Karolina repeated absently, asking for the mother she surely could not remember.
Inwardly, Ruth crumbled. This was the conversation she had been avoiding. “No,” she said gently, knowing that there was no way to avoid breaking Dorie’s heart again. She pushed a cup of milk toward her sister. “Mama needs to stay in the hospital where there are doctors and medicine that can make her feel better.”
“Just like we were playing outside, Dor,” Michal offered. Ruth braced herself for further questions about their mother’s recovery, tried to anticipate and come up with answers that were not quite lies but spared the child from the truth. But Dorie turned away and began playing with her rag doll on the floor.
“What were you playing outside?” Ruth asked, grateful to Michal for redirecting the conversation. When she and Helena were little, theirs were simple pretend games, like house and school. Ruth was always the mother or the teacher, taking charge in a way that now seemed prophetic.
“Hospital,” Michal replied. “Dorie’s the nurse. I was the patient and Dorie cured me.” She wondered what the unseen hospital life must look like in his mind.
“Doctor,” his little sister corrected quickly. “I’m going to become a doctor for real.”
Ruth started to tell Dorie that to be a doctor you need to go to school and then college, which would take money they did not have. That even under better circumstances, it would be nearly impossible for a woman. But Dorie’s eyes shone at the idea, a childlike dream not yet deterred by the war or realities of their situation, and Ruth would not take that from her. “That sounds wonderful.”
Dorie’s expression dampened. “Ruti, what are Nazis?” she asked, shifting topics without warning.
“Why do you ask?”
“I heard you talking to Helena about them.” Inwardly, Ruth sighed. She already knew better than to speak in front of Michal about matters from which she wanted to shield the children. But Dorie was getting older now, and speaking guardedly or spelling out words did not work anymore.
“They’re Germans, darling—German soldiers.” The last word—too good for them, really—stuck in her throat.
“Why have they come?” Dorie had a need to know why things were a certain way, how they worked, to scratch beneath the surface. It was a fierce intellect that in another time and place might have been nurtured to greatness. But Ruth did not know how to channel it, and after taking care of their basic survival needs, she seldom had the energy.
Ruth stopped, stymied by the impossibility of explaining war to children. Why indeed? “They want to be in charge. It’s all about politics and government. But they haven’t come to Biekowice so they won’t bother us.”
“But what about the Garzels?” Dorie had been outside playing when she and Helena had spoken of their neighbors’ disappearance. Had Helena told her about it? “Did the Germans make them leave the village?” Dorie persisted.
“Never you mind about the Garzels. Tend your own garden, as Mama used to say.” Karolina giggled from her high chair, as though Ruth had said something funny. Ruth wiped the milk that had dribbled onto her chin, then picked her up and set her on the floor by the fire.
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Пэм Дженофф
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN′S TALE OUT NOWLove will tear them apart…Helena and Ruth Nowak are like chalk and cheese: one staunchly outspoken and independent, the other gentle and caring. Caught up in the struggle of Nazi occupied Poland, the sisters have bound together and created an enviable bond that can’t be broken. Or so they thought…When Helena discovers a Jewish Allied paratrooper, wounded but alive, she risks the safety of herself and her family to hide him. As her feelings for the solider grow deeper, she finds her loyalties torn.Outraged at this impulsive choice that endangers them all, mild-mannered Ruth finds herself becoming increasingly jealous of Helena.As tensions are sparked, a singular act of betrayal unleashes a chain of events that will endanger them all and reverberate for decades to come.From hardship and heartbreak, this gut-wrenching tale puts to the test the ties of sisterhood in the shadow of WW2.Praise for Pam Jenoff:‘[A] heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ – Heat‘Must read’ – Daily Express