Now the doctor frowns, clearing his throat. “I will not sign a card for someone who is not ill. To do so would be treason against the Führer. Leave my office. And next time, go to another doctor.”
I leave, biting my lip, and let the one-brow man follow me to the bottom of Tatarska Street. He never bothers climbing the hill.
I wonder how many spies the Germans have sent into that doctor’s office, trying to catch him at doing something wrong.
I wonder how sick I’m going to have to make myself.
When I go to work the next day, I don’t have to fake being tired and pale, because I can’t sleep. I don’t have to fake my headache. My dress is hanging loose. At break time, everyone runs out to the iron bridge, because lying in the ditch below is a dead woman. Frozen. Shot, Herr Braun tells us all, for hiding a Jew. Some of my coworkers say it’s awful. Some of them say she deserved it. Lubek just smokes.
The rest of the day, I’m so distracted I don’t make my quota. The inspector presses his lips into a line. And then, while the one-brow man follows me home, I hear a hiss. And a pssst. And then, “Fräulein. Fräulein!”
I look around, and there’s an SS officer with his cap pulled low, standing by himself across the street, collar turned up around his ears. He’s waving for me to come over. I feel the familiar flutter of fear, but I pay no attention to it. I am a bottle that can only hold so much. I cross the street, and then I realize.
It’s him. The SS man from the picture beside the sugar tin.
He gestures and waves and thinks, and then points to himself and says, “Handsome?”
He’s asking if I remember him. I nod, and he seems relieved. He’s still just as handsome. But he’s not any better at Polish.
I wonder what my shadow thinks of me talking with the SS. Maybe he’ll go away.
The handsome SS man is thinking again, trying to come up with words. He rubs his hands together because the wind is cold. “Do not …” he says, and then the word “walk.”
“Don’t walk?”
“Ja,” he says. “Do not walk. Go …” And he turns me around and gives me a symbolic push in the other direction. His brows are down. He looks concerned.
I am just confused.
So he takes me by the arm, gently, and guides me down the street. The way I was walking in the first place. We stop at the corner, he peeks around, and he points.
A group of German soldiers is standing around a fire built in a trash bin. They’re raucous. Loud. Like soldiers. The SS man points at them and at me. “Do not walk,” he says.
I step back from the corner. Is he trying to say those soldiers are waiting for me? It happened to another girl at the factory. Walking alone and picked up off the street. She was replaced. Because she had to be. And I don’t have a sack of coal this time. And there are too many of them to punch.
I thought I was filled up with fear. I was wrong.
The handsome SS man sees when I understand. He walks with me back down the sidewalk until I am safely at the next corner, then he shoves me again, just a little, moving me the other way. Telling me to hurry up.
“Thank you,” I say. He nods and waves his hand, and I run away.
He really does deserve a kiss this time, but I don’t give it to him.
He’s still SS.
I lock the doors of Tatarska 3 and check every window. I shiver and think in my bed all night. And when the sun comes up the next morning, I don’t go to work.
And I don’t go the next day, either. Or the next. I pay a boy on the street to take a note to Minerwa saying that I am sick. Very sick. I stay in my bed while the nurses are there, and Ilse comes and feels my forehead and asks me what’s wrong. Or I think that’s what she asks. I clutch my abdomen.
When I’ve been out from work for seven days and the nurses are on their shift, I sneak out to the secondhand shops, looking for some sweaters to reknit or clothes to resell, to make up for the loss of my pay. The weather is warming just a little, and I don’t see the one-brow man, and I don’t go farther than the square. I tell myself it’s because that wouldn’t be wise, when I’m supposed to be sick at home. The truth is I’m shaking in my shoes just being out alone on the street.
I hate being afraid.
When I come home, Helena is on the sofa, reading the dental textbook, and Januka is standing in the living room, holding her purse and tapping her foot.
“There you are!” she says. “You idiot, Stefi! The police have been here.” I look at Helena. She’s only pretending to read. Her lip is trembling. She is so frightened of the police.
“Why were the police here?” I ask.
“Because you quit coming to work! And it’s a government job, Stefi!”
“But I told them I was sick.”
“They don’t believe you! And so they sent a supervisor to check on you. Lubek heard them talking about it. Only you weren’t here, and then they sent the police, and you weren’t here, and now they’re coming back any minute to arrest you!”
She ties her scarf and tosses her purse over her shoulder.
“I have to go. I can’t lose this job, or my brothers don’t eat.”
I hadn’t known that.
“You might want to disappear tonight, Stefi, and then go back tomorrow and grovel about being sick to Herr Braun. I know they’d rather not replace you, because you can fix those water pumps. So you might get away with it.”
“Thanks, Januka,” I say, and kiss her cheek. She looks annoyed and rushes out the door.
I turn the lock. I cannot be arrested any more than I can go to Germany. My thirteen will be caught. Shot. Or they’ll starve.
“Hela, are you okay?”
She nods, still pretending to read. I’m not sure she’s okay.
“What did you tell the other people that came?”
“That you were sick, but we had to have food and I’m too little to take money to the market, so you got a farmer to give you a ride in his cart.”
Oh. She’s so good.
“That is perfect. If they knock on the door, do you think you can say it again?”
She nods. But I’m worried she doesn’t mean it.
“Can you tell them that my stomach hurts, all the time, and that I stay in bed? And that you’ve been having to do all the work?”
“But we have to eat, so you went to the market,” she whispers.
“That’s right. We—”
Someone bangs on the door. Hard.
If I’m arrested, they’re dead.
“Can you do it, Hela?” I whisper.
She nods.
I turn like one of my ghosts and run up the ladder.
Max is waiting for me at the top. He’s heard. We both crawl through the hole into the attic, and he resets the boards.
It’s chilly in here. And it smells. Henek holds Danuta, who is shivering, and Dziusia and Janek are surrounded by a circle of backs, to keep them warm. The rest crouch in little groups, or on their own. They are dirty and weak, feral and hungry-looking, like I’ve wandered into the den of some wild, desperate pack with Max as their leader.
The only thing standing between them and death right now is my eight-year-old sister.
Max watches from the peephole.
I hadn’t realized how much you can hear up here. Not words, exactly. Not from the living room. But I can hear the hinges of the door, and I can hear Helena’s voice, and a man’s, asking her questions. Short things, I think, like “Where is your sister?”
I hear Helena giving a response. And then the man’s voice comes clear to the attic.
“Little liar!” he shouts. I jump. His next words are unintelligible, except for “seen in the market.”
Someone must have seen me in the market. Maybe that nasty man who follows me.
Helena is denying it, or saying I rode on a cart, and then comes the clear sound of a smack. Skin on skin. Helena squeals once and says, “I don’t know!”
He just hit her. He hit Helena.
I m
ove toward the little door, but Max holds out a hand and shakes his head. I try to push him aside, and he shakes his head hard and puts a hand over my mouth. I freeze. If we scuffle, we’ll be heard.
The man yells clearly, “Where is your sister?”
“I don’t know!”
Smack. Smack. Helena cries.
I lunge for the door and Max tackles me, hand back over my mouth. He gets on top of me, holds me down, and shakes his head no.
Smack. Helena is screaming. Smack. A piece of furniture topples over.
“Are you going to tell me where she is?” the policeman yells.
She could tell him where I am. But she doesn’t.
Smack. “Are you going to tell me?”
Now Helena is crying too hard to answer. She’s stuttering words that don’t make sense. I struggle again, and Max holds me down.
Smack.
Smack.
Smack. My sister screams with every blow. And I am crying.
Smack. Smack. Max bites his lip so hard it bleeds. He puts his face in my hair.
Smack.
That man is going to kill her.
I struggle again, hard, and Max pushes me tight against the floor, muffling my noise with his neck. Mrs. Bessermann lies down beside us, staring, watching without a sound.
I think we’re all going to lose our minds.
And then I listen.
The door has slammed. Helena is crying, but everything else has gone quiet.
Max lets me push him away, and I knock down the planks that make the little door, nearly falling down the ladder to get to the bottom. The chickens we have left are running all over the house, and Helena is in a heap on the ugly rug in the living room, one of the kitchen chairs turned over on top of her. I move the chair and fall to my knees, pulling her gently into my lap.
Her lip is split, mouth and teeth full of blood, her eye swelling, and she’s got a knot on her forehead that must be from hitting the floor. She’s not crying anymore.
She’s shaking like a mouse in a snowstorm.
I rock her. Like I did when she was a baby.
Max is in the room now, too. He turns the lock on the door and says for God’s sake will someone come down and watch the window and bring Hirsch. Old Hirsch had been a doctor, not just a dentist.
Max finds a cloth, wets it in the water bucket, and starts cleaning Helena up while I hold her. Very gently. She doesn’t stop shaking. Old Hirsch hobbles down the ladder and looks her over. He looks translucent. A pale shadow. I’m not sure how well he can see. But he says there’s nothing broken. Nothing permanent.
Except that Helena has not stopped shaking. And I can’t unglue her arms from around my neck.
After the first time, I don’t try anymore. I just stagger to my feet while she clings, Max supporting some of her weight, and he helps me get her to the bedroom.
She’s so much bigger than when I first brought her to Przemyśl. Her legs dangle down past my knees.
We lie down on the bed together, her arms still around me, and Max covers us up with the blanket. She shakes and she shakes. She hasn’t said a word. Max sits beside us, a hand on her head while Monek watches at the window, his fingers turning over and over and over themselves, and the rest of my thirteen take the opportunity to stretch their legs.
Little by little, Helena stops shaking. Because she’s fallen asleep.
And then I cry. I cry and I cry, and Max lies down beside me, covering us both with his arm.
I cry because it’s so wrong. Everything is so wrong.
I cry because I have never felt so powerless.
And I cry because I have never, ever wanted so much to give up.
When I wake up, Ilse is shaking me. I start. Gasp. And sit up. But Max is gone. There’s no one at the window. They must have left when the nurses came home. And then I start again, because there’s no Helena, and there’s a stranger beside the bed, too. A woman I’ve never seen.
Ilse says something in German, and the woman nods and speaks to me in Polish. “I’m Edith,” she says. “I’m a nurse across the street, and my Polish is … mostly good.” She smiles. “Your sister is in the next bed. Karin has given her …” She struggles with a word. “… something … to make her sleep.”
I look at Helena, peaceful and black and blue in the next bed. Her eye is swollen shut.
Ilse speaks again, and Edith translates. “They want to know what happened to your sister?”
I can’t think why they shouldn’t know. “I’ve been too sick to work, and the factory sent the police, and when Helena didn’t know where I was, they beat her.”
Edith frowns and tells Ilse this, and then Ilse frowns and shakes her head. She acts like she’s sorry, when a few weeks ago, she nearly got my sister killed.
We all hear a creak and scrape across the floorboards above our heads. Edith looks up, and Ilse says, “Ratten.” They have a quick conversation, and then Edith turns to me.
“She wants to know have you been to a doctor?”
I nod. “He didn’t believe me.”
Another, longer conversation happens between Edith and Ilse.
Then Edith says, “Ilse wants to say she is sorry about what happened before. Karin is … she is … the word, the word …” She thinks of another way to say it. “She is worried about Jews.”
Poor Karin, then. Living with thirteen of them over her head. I nod. As if I understand.
“She says they caused you trouble, and if you would like to see a German doctor, there is one across the street who could see you right now, so you won’t have problems with work.”
“Could he write me a note for a medical card, excusing me from work?”
Edith translates, and Ilse shrugs and says, “Ja.”
“But what about …” I look at Helena.
“She will sleep for a long time,” says Edith. “Karin will stay. She’s a very good nurse.”
I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to leave Helena. I don’t want to leave Karin on her own with the run of the house. But if I don’t get that card, I’m going to Germany or I’m going to be arrested, and if that happens, my thirteen are dead. And maybe me. And Helena, too.
I suppose I’m not giving up.
Because I’m swinging my legs out from beneath the covers.
* * *
We cross the street slowly in the dark, and I wonder when the sun went down. Edith helps me on one side and Ilse on the other, because I’m supposed to be sick. And then we step up and enter the hospital.
I’ve crossed the front lines now. Into enemy territory.
They take me down a long hallway painted blinding white. And there are nurses walking by and doctors with their coats. It all looks very clean. Sterile. Precise. As different as it could be from rat-infested Tatarska 3. Then we turn into an office with a desk and portrait of Hitler and a waiting area with chairs, and Edith says auf Wiedersehen, which is not good, because now I don’t know what anyone is saying. Ilse sits with me, and then the doctor comes and takes me to an examining room.
The doctor speaks a tiny bit of Polish, and I think he basically understands the same set of lies I told the first doctor. He listens to my heart. Takes my blood pressure. Has me lie back and presses on different places on my abdomen. I ask him if he can sign a medical card excusing me from work. He says he thinks he can, but he needs to be sure. He gives me a hospital gown and tells me to go behind the screen and undress.
Then he lays me back on the table, puts on gloves, and examines me. Thoroughly. Much more thoroughly than the other doctor. And while he’s doing this, which is humiliating, four more doctors enter the room, and he starts talking. Lecturing in German. I think he’s teaching them, and he’s using me to do it. They listen carefully, crane their necks to see, take notes while I blush. And the doctor is not being gentle. He presses hard with his other hand, pushing into my abdomen. I grimace. I start to sweat. Their cold, clinical stares make me want to run and never stop. He really is hurting me.
And I am trapped. A specimen on the table.
The first doctor is still telling the others something about me. And one of them objects. To something. I can’t tell what. The doctor argues with him. They all argue. They have a fight that sounds like it belongs on the factory floor. Then the doctor finally takes his hand away, I breathe a sigh of relief, and Ilse is there, with her hair covered and a mask on. She’s holding a tray with a syringe. A needle about an inch long. They’re all still arguing, and my forehead breaks out in a sweat again.
What would I do for that medical card?
If I get it, then maybe I can keep Max and the others alive until something happens. Until the war ends. Until the Russians come. If I don’t get it, then they will be left on their own with Ilse and with Karin the Jew hater.
I think of Izio. And Mrs. Diamant. What would I have done to keep them alive if I could?
What would I do for Izio’s brothers? For my babcia’s sons?
What would I do for Max?
There’s only me between him and the Germans. Just like Helena stood between us and the police.
If Helena can stand it, then so can I.
Ilse comes and holds my hands, or maybe she’s just holding me still, and the doctor puts that needle right into me. Deep. It stings, and then it burns. Horribly. I cry out because I can’t help it. Then it’s over, and the other four doctors finish their notes and argue among themselves while I’m sent behind the screen to dress with shaking legs.
He never even said what he thought was wrong with me. And the awful part is, there wasn’t anything.
I leave much more slowly than I came, because now I really do hurt, and I can barely shuffle across the street.
But I have that doctor’s note clutched tight in my fist.
* * *
Helena and I wake up together in the morning. She is stiff and sore, can only see out of one eye, and never knew I was gone. She doesn’t speak; she only clings to me, like the day before. She wants to be carried. And I can’t. I have a strange, swollen place in my lower belly. Like I’ve swallowed an orange whole. I can’t straighten. It’s hard to walk. I can’t go to the toilet. So we stay in bed, and I let her hold her doll, and I stroke her head, but she always has one hand out, clinging. A fistful of my hair. A fistful of my nightgown.
The Light in Hidden Places Page 29