‘What the hell are you doing in my house, you thieving brat from . . . ?’
Alicja was off. Ducking and weaving between chairs. Running away from the burly man whose shouts set the baby wailing, but she switched off the torch and fled into the dining room. She threw herself through the window, his curses ringing in her ears, and slithered down on to the gravel.
The night swallowed her. Her feet flew over the grass towards the ploughed field beyond, panic snapping at her heels. Still no moonlight to guide her but no moonlight to betray her either.
Where was Alzbeta? Where was she hiding? She released a low whistle as she ran.
Nothing.
Panic sank its teeth into her. Which way? Which way should she run?
‘Alzbeta!’
A light flashed just ahead of her. On, off, and on again. With a whoop of relief she set off towards it, stumbling in her haste. Above her the clouds thinned to a pale veil across the face of the moon, but suddenly she could see Rafal a short way in front of her, and Alzbeta and Izak a few metres behind with the sacks on their shoulders.
Alicja was running too hard to call out again but she raised a hand. She saw her friend’s mouth open wide, screaming at her. She couldn’t hear the words. The thump of her pulse in her ears was deafening.
She should turn. Look behind her.
That thought was still beating a path from her mind to her limbs when she heard the explosion. Its sound was brutal in the chill dark field. Thunder? Was it thunder?
That was when the pain hit. A thousand spears in her back. They knocked the breath out of her and hurled her face-down in the dirt. She tried to crawl. Towards the white light that flooded her mind but it faded to a pinpoint speck as blackness kicked in her skull.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DAVIDE BOUVIER
Davide Bouvier was not a sleeper. His nights were long and wakeful, so it was a matter of choice – as well as necessity – that saw him in the Administration office before seven o’clock in the morning. He planned on getting two solid hours work in before the rest of the offices started to fill up, so he sat down at his desk, pen at the ready.
He was most comfortable sitting or standing. His lungs functioned better. Lying down was the worst. He allowed himself a frantic coughing fit as no one else was within earshot and then opened a thick file. It contained the constant official requests that poured in from the Russian administration of the Russian Zone of post-war Germany. An avalanche of them. Hunting down the individuals they suspected of being answerable to them, rather than to the British or American authorities.
Davide viewed it as a rather vicious game of tennis. He blocked their requests, stamping the forms with a large Unknown Here, and batted it back to them. Only to find it slamming in return straight on to his desk with longer forms, larger signatures and on occasions a silky splat of red sealing wax with an elaborate crest impressed into it. Designed to intimidate. Some games he won, some he lost. Each one meant life or death to someone.
It was still dark outside but Davide knew that Colonel Whitmore would march in shortly, two porcelain cups of sweet tea on a tray, and he would greet Davide, as he did each day, with the same unfounded optimism.
‘Morning, Davide. Today we’ll knock ’em for six.’
Davide hated sweet tea. He had no idea who or what the colonel was referring to. And what the number six had to do with anything was a mystery to him. But he admired Whitmore’s unquenchable determination to get the job done.
‘Oui, mon colonel.’
Davide would give him a cheerful ironic salute. Sometimes a cup of tea went a long way towards getting things done in the unfathomable world of British etiquette. He smiled at the thought, coughed into his fresh white handkerchief – no blood on it yet – and he settled down to work.
He was deep into drafting a response letter to the latest Russian request when there was a knock at the office door. Only faint. More of a tap. And a shuffling of feet.
‘Come in,’ Davide said. Irritated.
The door opened slowly and a child slid round it, dark eyes bright with nerves. Davide recognised him at once, one of the urchins who ran round with Klara Janowska and her daughter. The Jewish kid with the scarred face. The child threw quick glances around the room, at the desk, at the filing cabinets, at the pot of parsley on the sill, eyes darting, checking for danger. He closed the door but kept one hand on it. Escape at his fingertips.
‘What is it?’ Davide asked kindly.
‘I have a message.’ His eyes found Davide’s. ‘For you.’
‘What message?’
‘Come.’
Davide frowned. ‘Who sent this message?’
‘Frau Janowska.’
Davide threw down his pen and jumped to his feet. ‘Tell me the complete message.’
‘Come. That’s all.’
‘Merde! What has happened? Is she in trouble?’
The boy snatched open the door but Davide was across the room before he could take to his heels. His lungs rumbled at the sudden exertion. ‘Where is she?’
‘In her hut.’
‘Is she all right?’
A tear slid out of the boy’s good eye. Davide stepped out into the early morning gloom, dragging the boy with him.
Whatever it was, it was bad.
Outside Hut C Davide bent double, heaving for breath. Coughing his lungs raw. His arms wrapped around his ribs, holding them together, as he stared down at the smears of blood in the dirt. The sun was rising now, spilling what looked like its own blood on to the road, rebuking Davide for being stupid enough to run through the camp at the boy’s scampering speed.
The huts and dusty thoroughfares were still quiet, with lights flicking on here and there as a new day of hope began in the camp. Davide harboured no hope for himself – he had lost his wife, his daughter, his family, his friends and his home in Oradour-sur-Glane on one violent day in June 1944 – but he harboured hope for Klara Janowska and her daughter. He quietened his breathing. Whatever was going on in Hut C he needed to appear calm. Panic was always simmering just under the surface in Graufeld – it was what Colonel Whitmore referred to as the status quo.
Davide straightened up, wiped his mouth and that was when he saw a slight movement off to his left. He focused his eyes in the semi-darkness and picked out the figure of a man, leaning against the outer wall of the hut down at the far end. His outline was blurred, but his clothes looked shabby. But then everyone’s clothes were shabby in this godforsaken place.
There was something about him, a watchfulness that made Davide notice him. In his hurry to find Klara he’d have thought no more of the man in the shadows – except for one thing. He was tall and had a way of standing that betrayed a history of command, of getting things done his way. It was there in the way he held his head, in the set of his shoulders. And what was his interest in Hut C?
It made Davide think of the German who Klara had described. A man who wore spectacles, she said. This man wore spectacles. And for a moment when his lenses caught the crimson rays of the rising sun, it looked as if his eyes were full of blood.
‘Come,’ the young messenger boy called out from the doorway.
When Davide turned back to the man, he was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DAVIDE BOUVIER
The girl lay in a pool of blood, face down on the bed. Her naked back was peppered with shot. There must have been more than a hundred pieces of lead buried in her paper-white skin and deep in her muscles. Davide felt his stomach turn at the sight.
Mon dieu! Who the hell would fire a shotgun at a child?
Klara Janowska was perched on the edge of the narrow bed, leaning over the motionless figure of her daughter, her concentration intent. She was wielding a knife. Its sharp tip was probing the swollen young flesh, nosing its way through the ripples of blood to extricate each piece of lead shot. But it was hopeless. It was the wrong tool. A big woman dressed in white was kneeling on the floor holding the child’s han
d and beside her a terrified boy stood close beside the bed holding up a candle. Vaguely Davide knew the woman from the laundry.
‘Klara,’ he said softly.
It took a moment. He could imagine her ears tuned to nothing but the faintest whimper or gasp of breath from her daughter, but the girl uttered no sound. Not even when the knife-tip slipped deeper under a pellet. She was stretched out on her stomach, her face twisted to one side, her huge blue eyes so wide open you could drown in them. There were streaks of scarlet on her temple and in her hair.
‘Klara?’ He placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘We have to move her to the infirmary at once.’
Klara lifted her face to him. Her cheeks were grey and rigid with shock. ‘No, Davide. Typhus is rampant in the infirmary.’ Her head was bound up in the usual drab scarf and there was a streak of Alicja’s blood across her forehead but her eyes burned with such rage that he knew she would listen to no one.
‘She needs a doctor, Klara. I’ll fetch a stretcher to—’
‘No.’ She paused in her knife work. ‘Would you send a daughter of yours there, Davide?’
There was no reply to that.
A spider’s web of rough ropes crisscrossed the hut at head height, so that sheets and blankets could be draped over them, giving a degree of privacy around each bed. But it was no more than an illusion. He lowered his voice.
‘I’ll do what I can.’
She rose to her feet. ‘Thank you.’ Her hand caught around his for a fleeting second. ‘Hurry.’
Davide had once seen a lynx in the mountains of Sweden on the trail of its prey. Its shoulders low, its head forward, its gaze fixed. Klara had the same look. The look of a huntress.
The colonel’s office door was locked, dammit. The one time Davide needed him to be there early, Whitmore chose to be late. Davide rattled the handle as if he could summon the camp commander out of thin air.
He was breathing hard, trying to clear his mind. Klara’s child was in pain, severe pain, and needed medical care. If he reported the situation to a doctor, Alicja would be forcibly admitted to the infirmary. Klara was right. Typhus had been brought into the camp and no amount of quarantine would contain it. Would he have let his daughter, his beloved Amélie, be taken to one of those wards?
The answer was no. Non.
He rummaged quickly in his desk drawer, pulled out the key he’d never used before and inserted it into the lock to Whitmore’s office. He felt a sense of betrayal doing it but pushed it to one side. He had to acquire medical equipment and the only way was through a requisition form. He was only a DP himself, a French national who was good at administration, but he had no actual authority here.
Inside Colonel Whitmore’s office he knew exactly which drawer to search. His lungs were pumping so hard, he could hear the whistle of air wheezing from his throat, but he worked fast. He removed only one requisition form, closed the desk drawer, straightened the chair to its usual exact ninety-degree angle and relocked the door behind him.
He picked up a pen from his own desk and with no hesitation signed the form: Colonel Jonathan Whitmore.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ALICJA
Alicja could smell the blood. She could hear Hanna’s triumphant clicks of her tongue against her teeth each time a lead pellet dropped from the medical tweezers into the bucket. Worst of all, she could feel the heat in her mother’s hands. As though a fire was burning in them.
Alicja wanted to run.
But her body lay as still as stone. It fought back against the pain. Against the touch of iodine. Against the certainty in her head that she was going to die.
So she let her mind run instead. Let her thoughts fly.
I remember I followed her one day in Warsaw. My mother. She didn’t know. She thought I was in our neighbour’s apartment playing dolls with their daughter Liljana. She was the same age as me, six, but Liljana knew nothing. Not even how to clean a K98 Mauser rifle or stitch a wound. I stitched Mama’s wounds that time she came home with a long gash in her arm. She said I was brave. I can still taste her blood in my mouth where I kissed it better. Four stitches. That’s what it took. Mama said I would make a good doctor. Silly Liljana knew nothing.
Liljana’s mother had six other kids, so she didn’t notice I was missing when I put my shoes on and crept out after Mama. I was quick and small. Like a mouse chasing a cat. She was fast in the back streets and silent. Whenever she kissed me goodbye she told me not to cling, that she had work to do.
What work, Mama, what work?
‘Kocham cię,’ she would say.
‘I love you too, Mama.’
But it never made her stay.
It wasn’t day and it wasn’t night. It was that hairline crack between the two when all the colour drains from the world, that was when I followed her in Warsaw. Through the bombed-out commercial district where the smart shoppers and businessmen used to crowd on to the red trams. All gone now. Down Jerozolimskie Avenue and into the rubble behind. She met a man in a café and I stood in a doorway opposite. One of the German soldiers who marched past stopped and gave me a coin because he thought I was begging. When he was gone I spat on his zloty and threw it in the gutter. I’ve never told Mama that I trailed behind her and the man after they came out of the café. It was dark then. But darkness didn’t scare me. What scared me was what they did.
They blew up a building.
I never found out what the building was but it had a Nazi swastika flag hanging outside. I watched Mama set the gelignite. I didn’t know then that that’s what it was, but I know now. The blast made my ears ring all the way home as I ran faster than a mouse. I hid in bed. She never knew.
Like she never knew about the other time. In the pitch dark, the city of Warsaw blacked out and airless. I saw the Kübelwagen come. I saw its lights cut the darkness into pieces. I saw the rifles nip at the throats of you and your friend. The shot, I heard your scream. The German rifle butt on your skull. The Nazi who tossed you like a lifeless dog into the back of a truck.
I thought you were dead.
They came for me next morning before it was light. The jackboots so shiny and sure of themselves. I stamped on one and they threw me against the wall.
‘You’re done,’ Mama announced.
‘Mein Gott, you are a brave girl,’ Hanna smiled and stroked my head with her big hand, as red as strawberries from all the hot water in the laundry. ‘My Rafal would have been screaming the place down.’
But it wasn’t true. I knew Rafal. He would rather pull his eyes out than let me hear him scream. Mama had sent everybody else away. She and Hanna sat me up, touching me as if I were made of glass, and they wrapped the bandages – the ones her French friend had brought us – round and round me, so that in the end I looked like a mended doll.
Mama sat me on her lap, wound her arms around me, and said, ‘You can cry now, sweetheart.’
But it was Mama who cried, not me.
‘Tell me what happened in the village,’ she whispered into my hair.
So I did. But I didn’t tell her about the ring.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I became a guard dog.
I kept Alicja on her top bunk and parked myself on the lower one. I sat there hour after hour, day after day, listening to every sound she made and I told people she had fallen off the roof of a hut and broken her ribs. Only Hanna, Davide and the three kids knew the truth.
The inmates had their attention on other matters. Word went through Graufeld Camp like wildfire that Colonel Whitmore was to be replaced as Camp Commander. Kicked out on his arse. The army was pulling out of overseeing the Displaced Persons’ camps, and UNRRA was taking over the reins. That’s the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in all its glory. God alone knows how badly we craved Rehabilitation.
But right now I didn’t care a damn who did or did not oversee Graufeld Camp. I had no intention of hanging around. All I had in my sights was getting my daughter well again. Each time I changed t
he dressings on her back, I called down curses on the head of Oskar Scholz. If it weren’t for him, she would not have been desperate enough to risk entering someone’s house.
I abandoned all else. Forget teaching mathematics lessons. Forget the cleaning rota. Forget the queues at the canteen. Forget every wretched thing. Except healing my daughter, my only child. I anointed her swollen flesh with iodine and watched its yellow smears circle each pellet hole. As I watched I wanted to circle Oskar Scholz’s throat with my hands, to press my thumbs down hard on his windpipe. If whoever pulled the trigger on the shotgun had been twenty metres closer, it would have blasted her lungs to bloody shreds.
‘I have his name, Davide.’
He didn’t even ask whose name. Just raised a dark eyebrow. ‘What is it?’
‘Jan Blach. That’s the name he was using last week. He may have others for all I know.’
‘If he’s registered as Jan Blach, I’ll find him for you.’
‘Merci, Davide. I am grateful.’
I laid a hand on his arm and for several minutes neither of us moved because he had a kitten curled in the crook of his elbow. The tiny creature was grey with a white face like a miniature clown and a ridiculously fluffy tail. I patted its little pink paw pads.
‘Where have you come from, little one?’
‘It has taken up residence in the kitchens, it seems. Just walked into camp from outside one morning.’
‘Shouldn’t you teach it that the aim is to get out of camp, not come in?’
He laughed, a lovely French sort of sound and it made me ask, ‘Don’t you want to get out of this hellhole, Davide? To go back to France.’
He gently placed the kitten on my lap. We were sitting in a scrap of autumn sunlight, right outside the window near my bed. I would hear Alicja if she called. Was she my kitten? My little golden-haired pet to cheer me up? If I didn’t have Alicja, would I even be here at all?
‘You must have someone to go back home for, Davide?’
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