“We will wait between the maternity ward and the nursery.”
* * *
Anastasia stands back as the women she shares living quarters with cry, hug, push to get their hands on both Josie and the small infant clinging to her. It is too much for Natia, who lets the world know she is scared of so much attention from strangers. Josie turns her back on the women and gently rocks Natia, soothing and comforting her.
“One or two at a time might be best,” she says, turning back to them with a smile. “She doesn’t know you, but I want her to. I want her to know the people responsible for her being here, being alive.”
Elena pushes her way forward. “Me first, can I have a hold?”
Josie softly touches Elena on the face, making sure Natia is watching. Slowly she hands her daughter over. Elena holds her at arm’s length, not sure what to do with her. As she feels Natia relax, her little face never leaving her mother’s, Elena brings the baby to her chest. They work out that as long as Natia can see her mother she will happily be held and cuddled by them all.
Cilka stays at the back, enjoying the rare, sweet scene playing out in front of her. She cannot remember the last time they were all smiling gap-toothed smiles, laughing and crying together. She marvels at the power of something so small to make a difference. But in a place like this, any tiny moment that shifts them away from the relentless, grueling horror, from the reminder of the long years still ahead, is to be treasured. It’s a shame, really, that Hannah has not joined them, too. Preferring to lie passed out on her bed.
When Cilka has determined that everyone has had a chance to hold Natia, except the reluctant Anastasia, she pushes her way forward. Natia sees her and immediately throws her arms at her, desperate to be with Cilka. The others grumble and complain good-naturedly. Cilka walks over to Anastasia. In Cilka’s arms, Natia doesn’t complain that she can no longer see her mother.
Cilka introduces Natia to Anastasia. The little girl looks at Anastasia in puzzlement, as Anastasia makes no effort to touch her. Natia reaches out and tugs at strands of Anastasia’s growing hair that have sprung free from her scarf. They both giggle. Anastasia refuses the offer to hold her; she is quite happy just to look at her.
The others join them as Josie tells them they have now spoiled Natia and she probably won’t sleep tonight. Reluctantly, Natia is given back to her mother and they say goodbye, promising to come back in seven days’ time. Same place.
The women slowly drift back to their hut, chattering away about the evening, the embroiderers debating among themselves about the next size of gown they will need to make now they have met Natia. They all agree she is the most beautiful baby they have ever laid eyes on. Natia has been like a sun breaking through dark clouds. No one mentions the uncertain future that both Natia and Josie have, or the cruel surroundings Natia was born into. That’s a conversation no one wants to start.
* * *
They see Josie and Natia a second and third time. The third time, in a moment with Josie out of earshot of the others, Cilka asks her if she has met a man called Alexandr while working in the administration building.
“The Czech man?” Josie asks.
“Yes, he works as a messenger. Or did, last I knew,” Cilka says.
“Yes, I don’t have a lot to do with him day to day, but I see him. He is very friendly,” she says. “Which is a rare enough thing around here.”
“It is,” Cilka says. “I guess that’s why he has stayed in my mind.”
Josie contemplates Cilka. “I can try to talk to him for you.”
“Oh no…” Cilka says. “I was just wondering if he was still there. I haven’t seen him for a while.”
Josie nods. Cilka can see she wants to say more, but she turns away and calls out to little Natia, who is reaching out for her.
A fourth planned visit doesn’t happen as autumn comes early; the temperature drops dramatically, and rain and sleet prevent all but the foolhardy and those forced to work from being outside. The trusties have curtailed their daily visits to Cilka, perhaps thinking she has received the message, or having found someone else to intimidate. Still, the drugs dwindle, and the doctor seems permanently rattled. A feeling of unease plagues Cilka, darkness and cold closing in on her with the weather.
CHAPTER 19
Daily life for Cilka plays out, the only thing changing being the patients in the beds. The gloom of another winter fifty miles from the Arctic Circle hits and settles on her.
Getting out of bed in the darkness is something she doesn’t want to do. Often, she doesn’t go to the mess hall for breakfast. Her conversations in the evening have ceased. No longer does she gather around the stove, sipping hot tea and listening to the stories and complaints of the women, who now all trudge to different parts of the camp for work, with varying degrees of warmth, food, and physical challenge. More in the hut are able to aid the others now, and so the pressure is off Cilka—she is no longer the only one who can bring in extra rations or materials. But being less useful is not necessarily a state Cilka is able to embrace.
Her bed becomes her sanctuary, and she lies with her head turned to the wall.
On the ward, Raisa and Lyuba notice the change, comment on it and ask if something is wrong. Can they do anything to help her? With a forced half-smile she tells them she is fine, nothing is wrong. There is no other way to answer their questions. Cilka cannot articulate to herself, let alone anyone else, how she is feeling.
For the first time in many years she has allowed herself to be dragged down by the enormity of what she has seen, heard, and done—or not done—herself. What she no longer has and what she can never long for. It is like an avalanche—there seems to be no way now of holding it at bay. She doesn’t understand how she kept it all back before, but suspects this may be happening because she has acknowledged aloud to Yelena that she survived that other place. Josie is also front and center in Cilka’s mind. With every day that passes, Josie comes closer to being separated from her daughter.
Cilka thought she had been saved from this feeling of despair by using her position to make a difference to many of the sick and injured. Now she knows that it will always catch up to her. She is filled with heaviness. Why go on?
“Get the midday medication,” Raisa tells her one day, seeking to jolt Cilka from her melancholy. Without response, Cilka trudges to the dispensary, shutting the door behind her.
She stares at the medications lining the shelves for a long time, disoriented. She picks up a pill bottle, the Cyrillic script swimming in her vision. To take them all would bring back the blankness. She tips the pills into her hand. She rolls them around.
She tips the pills back into the bottle and, trembling, spills some on the floor. She gets down on her knees and starts to pick them up. The door opens, startling her.
“Cilka, I’ve been looking for you,” Yelena says, putting her head around the door. “Did you drop something?”
“Yes,” Cilka says, not looking up. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
Once the trembling has subsided, Cilka takes the medication to Raisa, and then finds Yelena. The doctor looks at her steadily for a while, as if guessing what has just played out in Cilka’s mind—her dance with death, oblivion, freedom from the aching loss and the guilt and shame; and then her step back from the abyss.
“Are you ready for another challenge?” Yelena asks Cilka.
“Not really,” Cilka replies.
“I think you are,” Yelena says slowly, still watching her carefully. “At least, you could try it, and if you don’t like it, well, we can always stop it.”
“Are you opening another ward?”
“No, not a ward. We need a new nurse on the ambulance. What do you say?”
“I’ve seen what the ambulance brings in. How can I help them? I need you and Raisa and Lyuba to tell me what to do.”
“No, you don’t. Not anymore, Cilka. I think you would be a great asset at the scene of an accident. They need someone who can thin
k quickly on her feet, do what needs to be done to get the patient here, then we can take over. Will you at least give it a try?”
What have I got to lose? Cilka thinks.
“All right, I will.”
“Don’t forget, Cilka, I am here. Any time you want to talk.”
Cilka sways a little on her feet. Sometimes she does run the words in her head. But can she let them out?
“I need to get back to work.”
“What about at the end of the day?” Yelena persists. “I’ll make sure you get something to eat if you miss your dinner.”
Cilka is afraid to let it come up, come out. But talking about it is something she hasn’t tried. She feels a glimmer of something, that survival mechanism; a sense of hope. Maybe she should. She nods, just a little. “Not here. I don’t want anyone we work with to see me talking to you.”
“I’ll find an empty room for us.”
While they have been talking, a new patient has arrived. Blood is seeping through the bandages on his bare chest. He is groaning quietly, the deep, painful sound Cilka has come to recognize as coming from someone barely conscious and unable to scream out in pain. She is glad of the distraction.
“Do you need a hand?” she calls out to the men roughly transferring him from the stretcher to the bed.
“He’s not going to make it,” one of them calls back.
Cilka walks over to the bed, picking up the man’s file that has been dropped on his legs. She reads the brief notes. Multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, extreme loss of blood. No active treatment.
A hand grabs at her apron. Strong and with purpose, the man pulls her toward the head of the bed, his eyes pleading, small gasps escaping from his bloodied mouth.
“Help.” Barely whispered.
Cilka takes his hand and looks down at the wounded man. Only then does she recognize him—it’s the thug who threatened her in the dispensary, shadowed her, taunted her.
“You,” he says.
“Yes, me.”
“The drugs…”
Cilka can see his face is full of regret.
“I know it’s this place that did that to you,” Cilka says.
The man manages to nod, squeezes her hand.
Cilka holds the man’s hand between her own two until she feels the strength leave it. She places it on the bed, and she closes his eyes. She doesn’t know what he did in his life, or in here, but he will not be harming anybody else, now, and she thinks she can spare him a thought. A prayer.
Picking up his file, she records the time of death.
She takes the file back to the nurse’s desk and asks Raisa if she knows what happened to the man whose death she has just recorded.
“He was the loser in a fight. The trusties of the criminal class are always wanting to be the top dog around here, this is the way it ends up.”
* * *
At the end of the day, Cilka takes a cursory look around but doesn’t see Yelena. Gathering her coat, she walks from the ward, trying not to admit to herself that she is grateful she has escaped talking to her. When she steps into the waiting room, Yelena is there. She beckons Cilka to follow her to a small room off to the side of the ward.
A desk and two chairs are the only furniture in the room. Yelena places the chairs face to face.
She waits for Cilka to begin. Cilka takes her time folding her coat and placing it just so on the floor beside her.
Raising her head, she looks directly at Yelena. “I was only sixteen when I went into that other place. But I grew up fast.”
Yelena says nothing.
“They said they wanted people to go to work for them.”
Yelena nods.
“The Germans, the Nazis. I stood in a cattle train for days, peed where I stood, held up by people surrounding me, squashing me.”
“And it took you to the camp called Auschwitz.”
“Yes,” Cilka says quietly. “My sister too.”
“How long were you there?”
“Three years.”
“But that’s—”
“A long time to be there, yes. For three years I lived in hell—the abyss. Although I have been here just as long now.”
“Tell me about the number on your arm.”
“That was our introduction to Auschwitz. They took my small bag of belongings. They took my clothes. They took my youth, my identity, and then they took my name and gave me a number.”
“How … how did you…?”
“Survive?” Cilka begins shaking. “In a place that was created for one reason only, to exterminate us? I’m not sure I can tell you.” She holds her arms around herself.
“Cilka, it’s all right. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
“Thank you, Yelena Georgiyevna,” Cilka says, and then forces herself to ask something. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“No. I don’t. I don’t know why anyone is here, and I have no need to ask. I’m sorry if that makes me sound like a coward.”
Cilka clears her throat.
“I am here because I slept with the enemy, or that is what I was charged with. Sleeping with the enemy. Working with the enemy. For me, there was no sleeping. He—they—came into my bed and sometimes slept, after they…”
“Raped you?”
“Is it rape if you don’t fight back, don’t say no?”
“Did you want them to have sex with you?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“Then it is rape. I take it these men had some kind of power or control over you?”
Cilka laughs. Standing up she walks around the room.
“They were senior officers.”
“Oh. I see. This was in Auschwitz?”
“Yes and no. It was another camp down the road from Auschwitz but still part of it. It was called Birkenau.”
“And … for three years?”
“Two and a half. Yes … And I never said no, never fought back.”
“How could you fight a man? I’m sure they were bigger than you.”
“That’s an understatement. One of them, I didn’t even come up to his chin, and there was, there was…”
“Was what?”
“The gas chambers, where everyone went. Went in alive and came out the chimney. I-I saw them every day, every day that was my future if I didn’t…”
“So, you’re telling me you spent two and a half years being raped by the men in charge of the camp in which you were a prisoner, and for that you are now here?”
Cilka sits back down on the chair. Leaning forward, she stares Yelena in the eyes.
“I gave in.”
Yelena shakes her head.
There is more, Cilka thinks. Can she say it? Tell her all of it? Telling her this much has already exhausted her.
Yelena reaches out and takes Cilka’s hands.
“The first day I saw you I felt there was something about you, a strength, a sense of self-knowledge that I rarely see. And now, with the little you’ve told me, I don’t know what to say other than that you are very brave. There is nothing I can do to get you out of here, but I can look out for you as best I can and try to keep you safe. You have shown what a fighter you are. My God, how have you done it?”
“I just want to live. I need to feel the pain I wake up with every morning, knowing I am alive, and my family aren’t. This pain is my punishment for surviving and I need to feel it, live it.”
“Cilka, I don’t know what to say to you other than keep living. Wake up each morning and breathe. You make a huge difference here, and if you go with the ambulance you will be helping keep patients alive. I truly believe you will thrive in this role.”
“All right, I’ll do it. I can be brave because of you. You’re the most courageous of us all. I haven’t said that before, but that is how I feel about you. So brave, being here when you don’t have to be.”
“You don’t have to say that. Yes, I choose to be here. I am a physician; I always wanted to help peopl
e, and here, well, here there are a lot of people who need the help I can provide. But we’re not here to talk about me.”
Cilka smiles at Yelena.
“Well, I really appreciate this, Yelena Georgiyevna, thank you.” Cilka stands, thinking of the solace of her bed, of lying facing the wall.
Yelena stands, too, and Cilka looks at her, grateful to see no pity on her face. “See you tomorrow then, Cilka.”
“See you tomorrow.”
As she steps outside she glances over toward the administration building. And today, he is there. Alexandr. Standing under a searchlight in the snow. Raising his cigarette to his lips, closing his eyes. Shifting his shoulders up and down for warmth. She holds the bright image in her mind as she walks away.
CHAPTER 20
All the next day, Cilka is on edge, distracted. She calls a patient by the wrong name, fumbles giving medication. Her eyes shift constantly, going to the door, waiting for a head to pop around and announce that the ambulance is going out.
It doesn’t happen, and she returns to the hut disappointed. Her melancholic state was meant to improve today, now she has released some of the burden and with the prospect of something new to focus on. She wants an instant fix to a problem she can’t articulate.
To make matters worse, Hannah has cornered her again, saying that her supply has been cut off, and that Cilka must procure the drugs for her again. So, it must have been the trustie thug who died who was supplying Hannah all this time. And despite her conversation with Yelena, when Cilka looks around at the women in the hut, she still doesn’t think she can face that moment when their faces change to horror, pity, fear, maybe even hatred.
* * *
The following morning, she has to force herself to concentrate, get on with the job at hand. When the call comes, “Ambulance going out,” Cilka misses it.
“Cilka, you’re needed,” Raisa calls out.
Cilka looks up at Raisa, to the door, and sees the man waiting for someone to acknowledge him.
Grabbing her coat, hat, scarf and gloves, Cilka follows him outside into the whirling snow and perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter.
Cilka's Journey Page 20