The Light in Hidden Places

by Sharon Cameron

  * * *

  The next morning, I leave early and walk by the fence, just in case I can see Max. I don’t want to be able to see Max, because I’m afraid of what might happen if he draws the attention of the Germans. Or the Polish police. But I need to see Max, to tell him about Tatarska. The area behind the fence, usually full of desperate, milling people, is empty. Nothing but the tap, tap, tap of the patrolling SS man’s boots. I circle around to the place where the barbed wire is loose, only it isn’t loose anymore. Wooden planks have been nailed across the opening, and when I go to the basement window where Max scooted in last time, there’s no one there, either. Now I have to run to work. Only to discover that thanks to Herr Braun, I am now on the night shift. I’m not due at work for another twelve hours.

  When I come back through the door, I scare Helena almost to tears, because she thinks I’ve lost my job. She’s at the sink in the kitchen, my apron around her middle, washing the dishes in water she’s warmed on the stove. I kiss her head and help her finish.

  “Look what I found,” she says. She pulls the old wooden crate Mrs. Diamant once gave me from its nook behind the bed. It’s where she puts her things now, the extra magazines to cut and the string and marbles and buttons and whatever else she finds on the street. Now she pulls out a deflated ball.

  “Mr. Szymczak told me yesterday that he has a pump to put air in tires and that he could put air in my ball,” she says.

  “Don’t you think it probably has a hole in it somewhere, and that’s why it doesn’t have any air in the first place?”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t need to be full of air for very long. Just long enough for me to kick it to the ghetto fence.”

  I sit back on my heels. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ll go near the fence and play a game with my ball, and I’ll call out things like, “Maxi! Maxi! Fusia letter!” And the guard won’t know what that means, but Max will, and he’ll come out, and I’ll kick the ball under the fence when the guard isn’t looking, and Max will give it back, and when he does, I’ll give him the letter. I’ve played ball with the guards twice to see if it works, and it does, so it’s easy.”

  I look at my little sister. Who plays ball with the SS.

  “I can do it,” she says.

  We make a deal. She can try, but I’m going with her, watching from around the corner. If Max doesn’t come in five minutes, she will stop. If anything even looks like it’s going wrong, I will make it stop. I take my place behind a little stand near the train tracks, where they used to sell ice cream, while Helena starts bouncing the ball Mr. Szymczak has put air in. She has a scrap of paper in her coat pocket that says, “We have it. Window. Two days.” Meaning we got Tatarska, and Max is to meet me at the basement window—which seems the safest spot—in two days.

  My chest is thumping so hard I think I might be sick.

  Because I’m the worst sister that ever was.

  Helena kicks the ball against the wall of a building, catching it on the bounce. “Maxi! Fusia letter!” she calls. She kicks it again and calls. Like it’s a game. I see the SS man watch her for a moment as he walks the length of the fence. Then she turns and kicks it toward him. He bends down and catches the ball, throwing it to her. She laughs and kicks it back.

  Oh. Helena is good at this.

  The SS man smiles and throws the ball to her again, pointing toward the brick wall of the building. Helena calls, kicks the ball to the wall, and catches. Calls and kicks and catches.

  And there is Max, appearing like a shadow in the doorway of a building inside the fence.

  I don’t think Helena sees him. She kicks the ball while Max sidles nearer, and then when the SS man has his back to her, a few feet from his turn at the far end, Helena kicks the ball hard at the fence.

  It rolls right under. Max chases the ball while Helena waits, her nose poking through, and when he rolls the ball beneath the wire, I see the crumpled paper slip from her hand to his. And in the other hand, a piece of paper goes from his to hers.

  I hadn’t expected that.

  It’s over in seconds. Max melts away, and Helena throws the ball back toward the wall and chases it. The guard turns and begins his walk down the length of the fence. She plays for a minute or two more, then runs around the corner. Grinning.

  “Here,” she says, giving me the paper. I take her hand, and we walk fast, until we’re two streets away and standing in the line starting to form at the bakery.

  “Are we getting rolls?” asks Helena.

  “You can have a cookie,” I say. “Because you are the smartest girl I know.”

  I think her smile is going to split her face. And then I open the paper from Max.

  Typhus. Food and medicine.

  And I wonder who is dying.

  Whoever it is, they will have to wait for my first wages tomorrow.

  * * *

  I take Helena to Tatarska Street next, one of us carrying a broom, the other a mop and a ruined dish towel. Helena runs from room to room, slamming the doors, climbing the ladder, turning circles with her arms outstretched in the kitchen.

  “It’s so big!” she calls.

  It must feel like forever to her, since the farmhouse.

  I start a fire in the stove with some lumber scraps we find behind the ladder in the little hallway. And we get to work, brushing down the walls and scrubbing the floor, disturbing more mice than I want to see. Helena learns to work the pump and pull water from the well, filling bucket after bucket, fending off the two Krajewska boys at the same time, and in the end, we are dirtier than Tatarska 3.

  I hurry home in the long twilight, get cleaned up, and hurry out again to work, arriving just before my time. There’s no one there I know, and no one to help me make my quota. I’m short, but the inspector looks at my tired face and takes pity. And when I’m leaving, the German at the desk gives me an envelope with my name on it. My wages. I turn around and tuck it in my bra.

  And I run to the shops in the dawn light, stepping into the druggist’s the second he opens the door. The aspirin costs half my wages, which is frightening. I comfort myself with the thought of more wages to come and go to the market. The farmer’s wife I usually deal with is just setting up her booth and complains that I have been going elsewhere. I tell her no, it’s just that I have a job now and have been early to work. I buy eggs, cheese, butter, and half a chicken. Sickness needs protein. Or that’s what Mama always said about birthing mothers, and I think it must be close to the same thing.

  I stumble through the door of the apartment, tell Helena she can have a slice of bread and an egg, sleep for three hours, and then pack up the food for Max. It hasn’t been two days, but I didn’t know about the typhus, then. I’m hoping he will guess this. I make a bundle out of brown paper and my apron, then take the back way around the ghetto fence to the basement window, avoiding the guarded gate.

  The narrow alley is empty except for some piles of refuse and the icy stains of someone’s dirty dishwater. The windows above me feel like eyes. I stay back, leaning against a building, the bundle tight in my hands. It’s cold. Deep cold. If I were Gestapo, I think, I’d have a man in some of these apartments, watching the fence, unseen from above. The thought makes me shiver. When nothing happens for a long time, I toss a pebble at the basement window.

  And I miss. I toss another and manage some noise. Another few seconds, and the window pushes open, and Max’s head comes out. And then I hear footsteps, loud, coming along the fence. Max disappears, the window shuts without a sound, and I duck into the deep doorway of an abandoned shop. I watch the opening to the fence through the store glass, and a policeman walks by, Polish, his cap pulled low.

  I wish I knew how often the patrol passes.

  I creep back toward the fence, and Max has his head out again, beckoning. I hurry forward, kneel down, and push the bundle through the barbed wire. He pulls it into the window.

  “Who’s sick?” I whisper.

  “Henek and Dr.
Schillinger.”

  Please don’t let Max lose another brother. “There’s aspirin,” I say.

  “I’ve told them about the house,” Max says. “I have a plan to—”

  The footsteps are back. Max disappears, the window shuts, and I get to my feet. Boots are crunching in the gravel between the paving stones, coming at a trot. I dart across the alley, but there’s no time to disappear into a doorway. I lean against the wall, as if I’m bored.

  A flash of blue, and a Polish policeman runs by. And then he stops, backs up, and stares into the alley.

  It’s Officer Berdecki.

  His blue eyes blink, and we look at each other. His cheeks are flushed.

  He really is handsome. Like someone in a magazine.

  I look like I’m hanging around, waiting for someone at the ghetto fence.

  He ought to arrest me.

  But he walks away. Shaking his head.

  I wonder what I could have done to make this man like me enough to let me go. Again.

  Or how I will pay for it later. He knows where I live.

  I run home, burst through the apartment door, and say, “Hela, let’s move. Today.”

  * * *

  It takes three hours to pack up everything we own, and that’s only because I spend an hour finding someone who will rent me a cart. Two of the boxes we carry to Tatarska ourselves, and I leave Helena with them while I go back to load the dishes and the bed frame and the mattress. I want to be quick about it so I can be gone before Officer Berdecki ends his shift and before Emilika comes home. I’m afraid if she looks at my face, she’ll know what I’m doing. Better to leave her wondering.

  I slide the mattress awkwardly down the stairs, balance it on top of the loaded cart, pay the Szymczak boy to watch it for me, then run back up to make sure I’ve left nothing behind.

  I look at the empty room, dirt and dust I would have sworn didn’t exist littering the bare floor, then walk through every inch of the echoing apartment. The memory of what was and the sight of what is clash together in my mind like tangos in two different keys. I should have swept, I think. Mrs. Diamant would have wanted that. She always kept her floors clean, especially in the shop.

  And then I think not. My babcia would have wanted me to save her sons.

  I leave the key on the mantel, close the door, and push the precarious cart all the way across Przemyśl to Tatarska 3.

  I’m so tired that night at work I’m lucky to make it to midnight with all my fingers. The night mechanic comes and taps me on the shoulder, jerking his head toward the repair table. I sleep for an hour, then work again.

  When I come home to Tatarska Street, Helena is on the floor on the bare mattress, shivering in her sleep because the weather is still bitter and she knows she’s not allowed to start a fire. But she’s hung our clothes on the hooks in the bedroom, put the ugly rugs that were over our windows on the floor, and stacked the dishes on the shelf beside the sink. I spread my coat over her, start the fire, and put the bed back together. There are two eggs and half a cup of milk left for breakfast. I have to go to the market. And I have to get a message to Max. If he goes looking for us at the apartment, there will be no one there to hide him.

  I write three words on a torn piece of brown butcher paper. Moved. Sick? When? And as soon as Helena’s eyes are open, I say, “Did you pack your ball?”

  In one hour, Helena stands at the gate to the ghetto, playing with her ball, the note in her pocket, and I am at my post beside the old ice cream shack. Only this time she’s going to wait and play more after she’s passed the note to Max, to see if she can get a reply. I’m hoping he will tell me who’s alive, who’s still sick, and when they can come to Tatarska. Helena kicks the ball, bouncing it against the blank brick wall of an apartment building.

  “Maxi! Maxi! Fusia letter!” she calls.

  There are other children hanging around the fence today. Some try to play with Helena, but she ignores them. Next to the dry fountain in the disused square, a group of four boys, young teenagers with fuzz on their lips, stand in a tight circle, passing around a cigarette. Helena tosses the ball toward the guard—an SS man, though not the same one—and he barks at her, yelling something unfriendly, though it’s hard to hear because a car is honking. She plays her game and calls but stays away from the guard.

  Good girl, Hela.

  And then I see Max walking by on the other side of the fence, well back from the wire. Helena throws the ball hard, misses her kick, and lets it roll underneath the fence. The guard has his back turned. Max stops the ball and trots up quickly to give it to her. But I can’t see if Helena has given him the note.

  “Stefania Podgórska, what are you doing standing in the street?”

  I jump like I’ve been pinched. Mrs. Wojcik is standing beside me, holding her little dog. I try to put a smile on my face.

  “Just waiting for someone.”

  “Who?” she asks.

  I really don’t like this woman. And what is she doing on this side of the railroad tracks anyway? I glance at Helena. She’s playing very near the fence. I can’t see Max.

  “Is it your policeman?” asks Mrs. Wojcik. “It is, isn’t it? He’s been trouble already, hasn’t he? You can’t fool me. I was married for thirty-two years, raised two sons, and expect to soon have a husband again.” She pauses here, obviously hoping I’ll ask. “So, you can’t argue with me. Because I know men.”

  I am much too tired for this. “Mrs. Wojcik, I have only one thing to say to that.” She leans in, expectant. “And the thing I have to say is geyn in drerd !”

  I’m sure Mrs. Wojcik has no idea she’s just been told to go to the devil in Yiddish, but from the look on her face, I think my sentiment is clear.

  The dog yips as Mrs. Wojcik huffs and marches away, and when I turn back around, the children are playing and the guard is standing in front of the gate, talking to one of the boys with the cigarette. Helena’s ball is still rolling along the fence.

  But Helena isn’t there.

  I step out from the shack.

  “Hela?” I call. “Helena?”

  I walk out into the empty space of pavement. “Helena!” I yell, turning in a circle. And then I see Max behind the fence, pointing with fast jabs to my right. The SS guard stops his conversation to look at me. I point and mouth the words, “This way?”

  The guard raises his gun, but at Max’s nod I sprint in the direction he showed me before the guard can even bark.

  “Helena!”

  People turn and stare as I run to the next street corner, skidding to a stop to look both ways. I can’t see her. The train tracks mean there’s only one way to turn. But which block?

  “Did you see a little girl run by?” I ask a man leaning against the post of a streetlight. He grunts and points left. I run that way, along the ghetto fence and into a neighborhood of apartments. There are some girls drawing squares for hopscotch on the sidewalk.

  “Did you see a little girl run this way?” I ask them, panting for breath. One with pigtails squints up at me and shakes her head.

  “But some boys did,” she says. “And a soldier.”

  I think of the boys sharing the cigarette. The one talking to the guard. Oh no.

  No, no, no.

  What did Max give her?

  “Which way did they go?” I say. My voice is rising with panic. “Which way? What kind of soldier?”

  But the girl doesn’t know.

  I look down the sidewalk. I can see at least four cross streets where Helena could have turned. But if you wanted to get to the footbridge over the train tracks, if you wanted to lose a pack of boys and a member of the Gestapo and get back to Tatarska Street, then down this lane, where there are lots of little alleys, would not be a bad way to go.

  I run along the lane, all the ways I think Helena could have gone, but I see nothing, no one. I turn toward home, flying over the bridge, across the market, and up, up the hills until my feet hit the frozen dirt of the courtyard of Tatars
ka 3. I unlock the door. Maybe she came through the window.

  “Hela?” I yell. I even call up the ladder to the attic. But I can feel no one’s there. I run straight back out into the courtyard. “Helena!”

  Mrs. Krajewska sticks her head out her door. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Have you seen my sister?”

  “Isn’t she right behind you?”

  I turn on my heel, and there is Helena, coming over the hill from the backyards instead of the street. Her lip is bleeding, tears streaming down her face.

  “Sorry to bother you!” I call over my shoulder to Mrs. Krajewska and get Helena inside. As soon as the door is shut, I drop to my knees and hug her hard. Her back is rising, falling with sharp sobs.

  “The boys …” she says. “They were watching. They were … trying to catch people who help Jews, and they saw … one of them saw … Max … give me the note.”

  I look Helena in the face, wiping the blood from her lip with a sleeve, trying not to show her how scared I am. Because I’ve already felt her coat pockets. They’re empty, and I can’t see a note in her hand.

  We might need to run. Now.

  “The big one …” Helena sobs, “he said to give him what that Jew gave me, and when I ran away, he called the soldier with the black cap, and they chased me. For a long time, and I couldn’t … barely … run, and then they caught me …”

  I glance out the window, but the street is still empty. “Hela, what did the note say?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t look! I don’t know all the words …”

  If Max used our name, or our address, anything that could give us away, then there’s no safe place for them now. Or us. “What did the boys do when they took it?”

  Helena crinkles her forehead at me.

  “Who took the note, the boys or the soldier? What did they say? Did they read it?”

  “They didn’t,” says Helena, wiping her tears. “They couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I ate it.”

  I sit back on my heels. “You ate Max’s note?”

  “I’m sorry, Stefi! But I was afraid it said something important, so I tore it up and I … put it in my mouth, only I was running, and it was so hard to swallow … I was choking, and then they caught me, and the boy hit me, and it … it went right down!”