He sat down at his desk in the den. When he had first started writing, his purpose was to solve the mystery of his family. Shortly before Aunt Klara died in 1967, she had sent him a packet of very old letters she’d managed to hang onto even during the war. Buried them in a box in a distant corner of the yard. When she survived the war, she dug them up and hid them under a floorboard. To get past the censors, she’d given them to a German visitor who’d taken them out of Poland and mailed them to Michael.
Those old letters were what had got him started. His curiosity instantly aroused, he’d never looked back. Most of the letters were written by his father’s grandmother, a delightful old bat who had died at the turn of the century at the respectable age of eighty-three. They were dated from the mid-nineteenth centruy, most of them on the occasion of a birth or death. One especially detailed letter about the family from his paternal grandmother filled in the blanks of his father’s sketchy version. With that letter in hand, he’d begun digging into archives and public collections in Paris and London — and had made some startling discoveries. If he were right, his family did indeed stem from some very royal blood. There was only one problem: in order to accommodate his theory, history would have to be rewritten. No big deal. It would be a novel. A very small royal someone who had died in all the history books would have to be resurrected. Both Polish and Russian scholars would have to rewrite texts. A whole new area of scholarship would be born. He was willing, rather eager, to start that little revolution. He had almost all the proof he needed. Only Halina’s contribution, that was what was left, and everything would fall into place.
In order to reach a wider audience, he had decided to write the book as a novel. With the understanding that characters and events were historical. Let the scholars come after him. It would only sell more books.
Apart from the satisfaction of his discoveries, a startling thing had happened to him somewhere along the way to writing his book. In his headlong plummet into the eighteenth century, he had grown to love the characters he had plucked out of history while they were still young enough for him to understand, before they grew into legends. He hoped he had done them justice.
It enthralled him to find lives that formed a complete arc. He could look back on them and know how they lived, loved, thought, from the mounds of letters and biographies they had left in their wake. He knew them a lot better than he would ever know his own father, a man who gambled and drank too much and neglected his family, a ghost during Michael’s boyhood. Except for his affair with Halina. That episode in his father’s life was concrete for Michael, too real. The war changed everything. People’s real natures crystallized and became set in stone. Some became heroes. Some became killers. All of them struggled to survive. Then after the war, the gulag began a new life of suffering for Michael’s family. With his entertainments withdrawn and their lives in danger every day, his father turned into a real father and became a man who cared perhaps too much. One day when starvation pulled at his stomach, Michael stole some potatoes. When the guards came after him, his father confessed to the theft. Three prisoners were awarded a piece of potato in their soup that day for punishing the thief. Michael’s father survived the beating but in his weakened condition developed pneumonia and died. During the dozen years Michael had been working on his book, he felt his father peering over his shoulder as his pen skidded across paper.
He opened the drawer of the desk and pulled out an envelope. His heart skipped a beat every time he read the letter inside.
Dear Count Oginski,
We’re all very excited here about The Stolen Princess and have chosen to publish it as our Polish history book this year. It will appear as part of a short list, which includes a book on the history of the Ukrainian Catholic church, a volume on Russian icons, and a biography of Peter the Great. As a small press publishing books of Slavic interest, we are able to issue only one book on Poland every few years and have chosen The Stolen Princess from among several worthy submissions.
We only require the documentation of which we spoke, regarding the validity of your connection to the historical principals in the manuscript. Once we are assured of your family connection, we will go ahead with publication.
Sincerely,
Vladimir Golovin, Slavic House Press
Michael gazed out the window that looked over the back, the bright blue pool, the end of the yard falling away toward the ravine of the Humber River. The validity of your connection to the historical principals. That all depended on Halina, who had the proof in her hands. She had to honour her part of the agreement or Janek would not just blithely open his wallet. Michael would have to remind her of her promise.
chapter six
Sarah lingered inside the screen door watching through the glass as Michael stooped over to get into the little sports car. Rebecca slid in behind the wheel. After a minute the car pulled out of the driveway, its windshield glittering beneath the streetlamp. Sarah felt uncomfortable letting her go off with a stranger, though he seemed a decent fellow. In her lifetime she had seen people who seemed decent turn into monsters in an instant.
When she returned to the dining room Natalka was clearing off the dishes.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, picking up the last cup and saucer.
“I want to help,” Natalka said.
Her pale face was beautiful, the round smooth forehead, her neck a graceful arch beneath the white hair pinned into a roll. When she moved, her stomach bulged beneath her loose shift. Halina had explained about the enlarged spleen, said her daughter was very self-conscious about it.
Sarah avoided looking down. “You must be tired. Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?”
Natalka followed her into the kitchen. “I don’t want be alone.”
The odd thing was that that was exactly what Sarah wanted. She felt awkward with Natalka, partly because she was a well-known musician, partly because she was Polish. And Polish anti-Semitism was legion. She wondered if it was still thus, considering there were no Jews left in the country. Though she had never thought of Halina as anti-Semitic, so she was unlikely to have passed it on to her daughter. Halina’s attitude to people was non-denominational: if they could help her she didn’t care which God they prayed to.
She gave Natalka a wan smile and turned on the tap in the sink to begin washing the dishes. Natalka picked up the dishtowel and took each plate out of the drainer as it was deposited.
“These are so pretty,” Natalka said. “What kind flowers they are?”
“They’re wildflowers. I like them too. There’s a daisy; there’s clover. A poppy.”
Natalka smiled shyly. “Mama talk about Janek and Michael,” she said. “Not much about you. She only tell me about you when we are coming. She said your parents were good to her.” She placed a dry dish on the counter. “How she knew them?”
Sarah rinsed the soap off a cup and placed it in the drainer. “She worked in their store.”
Natalka was in the middle of lifting a plate when she stopped, holding it in midair. “Worked in their store?”
Her eyes waited also. Sarah hoped she wasn’t spoiling some revision of history Halina had devised for herself.
“It was a jewellery store on Ulica Stradomska.”
Natalka nodded with recognition. The well-known street led to the hill where Wawel castle towered over the city. Sarah still remembered it from her childhood.
“Your mother was very beautiful. I think people came into the store sometimes just to look at her standing behind the counter. She was a few years older than me and I looked up to her. Then we both got married and we didn’t see each other much after that. She went to work for one of her husband’s relatives. When the war broke out my husband and I fled Kraków.”
“What about rest of your family?”
Sarah stared at the dish she was soaping up. The sponge in her hand. It all began dissolving like picture trouble on a television, sound trouble, all she could hear was the rhyt
hm of her own heart. And how could that still be going when she had lost everything? When she had lost Rayzele?
A noise brought her back. Natalka placing a dry dish on the counter.
“I’m sorry,” Natalka said, concern clouding her eyes. “My mother was lucky,” she said. “She had parents in the country, so she went there. Where you went?”
Sarah rinsed off the dish and automatically picked up another, swallowing the lump in her throat.
“We just got on a train and went. Anywhere. The city was filled with Nazis. We were desperate to get away. Together with my sister and her husband, we headed to Neipolomica, not far from Kraków.”
“Yes, I know it. There’s a large park there.”
“But we were young and stupid and we wore our city coats and fashionable hats. You know what the peasants look like with their babushkas. We stood out like sore thumbs. Everyone on the train knew we were Jews. So when we got off, someone had already denounced us. The police were waiting for us. They took us to their jail.”
Sarah glanced sideways to find Natalka engrossed in her story.
“Lucky for us the commandant there knew my father. They’d been in the first war together, in the same outfit. My father always sold him jewellery wholesale. The commandant came to us in the middle of the night. He said he was letting us go as a favour to our father, on condition that we disappear and never come back. He told us to take the ferry that went up the river, that was our best bet. So before dawn we rode up the Vistula to a place my brother had run to. But he and his wife were being hidden by a farmer, there was no room, so we only stayed there a few days. Then we walked to a town where they had a spring. You know, a kind of resort where people go for the water. But it was empty because of the war, so they let us stay in these small rooms with wood stoves. We worked there picking potatoes. They paid us in potatoes.”
She felt like her feet were straddling forty years and would collapse beneath her any moment. She rinsed the last saucer and turned off the water. “I haven’t thought about this for a long time. These aren’t happy stories.”
“Please go on,” Natalka said. “I like to listen.”
Sarah picked up another tea towel and took a dish out of the drainer. “It was always cold at night, so we needed wood for the stoves. When we could, we went to the forest near there to pick up the dry branches from the ground. One day, two men came riding through the forest on horses toward us, my sister and me. You could see one was the master and one the servant. The lord was on a huge horse, and dressed in a beautiful flowing sheepskin jacket and high boots, like from another century. The other horse was smaller and the steward carried everything — bags, rifles. They must’ve been hunting. The lord said ‘Don’t they know they aren’t allowed to be here.’ Something like that. Then the servant repeated it, as if we hadn’t heard. I said to the master, ‘We’re just picking up the dead wood.’ The servant very sternly said, ‘You don’t speak to Jany Pan like this. You speak to me.’ Jany Pan. I always remembered that. ‘His Excellency,’ I guess you would translate it. We were too insignificant to even speak to him directly.
“The master said, ‘This is a private estate. They can’t just come and take what they want.’ I still had nerve then, it was before we went to the camps, and besides, I found the situation ridiculous. I said, ‘We’re cleaning your forest by removing the dead brush — we’re not taking anything.’ The servant said to the man that we must be the Jews working on his estate. Then a strange thing happened. The lord suddenly said, ‘Ah, Zydy. They can go.’ And they turned their horses around and rode away, the large horse leading the smaller one. The servant turned around with a nasty look, like he wanted to make sure we weren’t going to throw something at them.”
“You were afraid?”
“Not of them. What could they do to us? We’d already lost everything. This was before the Germans overran the smaller towns.”
“What happen then?”
Sarah began putting the clean dishes away into the cupboards. “We walked from town to town, always one step in front of the Germans. In Stopnica we heard that some wealthy Jews in town had offered the Germans money if they took the younger Jews to work in a labour camp. Instead of a death camp, you understand. So we volunteered. My sister didn’t want to go. But when she saw us heading for the truck at six in the morning, she followed with her husband.”
“Your sister survived?” Natalka asked.
Sarah smiled. “Against all odds. I still remember when a year later we were transferred from the labour camp to Buchenwald. She somehow got her hands on two coats, though it was August. She wore one and carried the other on her arm. As soon as I saw that we were going on a train, I knew there was no point taking anything. She wore extra clothes beneath to have for later. I just went with what I had on my back. When she saw I wasn’t taking a coat she was angry. She said, ‘Don’t ask me to give you anything later because I won’t. I’m not going to wear myself out carrying this, then give it to you.’”
Sarah shook her head slowly, hating the memory. “They separated the men and women then when we got to the railroad siding. The men went on a different train. I didn’t see my husband again until after the war. We were in cattle cars for three days. No food, no water. No toilets. You can’t imagine the smell. We were packed like sardines, standing up, with no room to sit down. Women died around us. When we got to Buchenwald, the first thing the Germans did was to take everything away from us. Everything. The clothes on our backs, the combs in our hair, our photos, even our wedding bands. Then they put us in the showers. We were afraid it was gas, but then real water came out and we all just laughed with relief, like crazy people. Malka wouldn’t talk to me after that for a long time, as if it was my fault she lost her coats.”
A dish slipped out of Natalka’s hand while she was depositing it on the counter and made a loud clatter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
What was it about Natalka that drew out those memories stored almost out of reach? She had never talked to Rebecca so openly. Yet there was one thing she had never told anyone. Only Yusek had known and Yusek was gone.
Much later that night, when Sarah was finally asleep, she left the safety of her bed, her adopted country, the continent that had shielded her for thirty years, and floated like a wraith into Kraków again. She drifted down through the charged night past the rooftops of Ulica Miodowa, past the fourth-floor window where she used to stand watching the people stroll down the narrow street. Black now. Empty. Where is everyone? Is dinner ready, Mama? A gust of wind blows her up the street. Can no one hear me? They must still be at the store. With only her will, not her feet, which she seems to have forgotten somewhere, she makes her way across Ulica Dietla to Stradomska. A street she’d trod upon daily for nearly twenty years. Yet she doesn’t recognize it. The road and sidewalks have been torn up, revealing substrates of earth buried for centuries. Chunks of concrete swim amid sand and brick in a frenzied jumble that might be the entranceway to hell.
The storefronts hang back in deep shadow. Mama? You can go home now, I’m here. She is sure this is the one, but where are the rings set with amber, the necklaces sparkling against velvet in the window, the gold bracelet she coveted? Closer. Get closer. She gazes into the black, searching the vacuum. Where’s Rayzele? her mother’s voice echoes from inside. Suddenly a sweet weight fills her arms and Rayzele blinks up at her, eyes large with fear. Sarah hugs her to her chest, memorizing the pressure of her body, determined not to lose her this time. When Sarah looks up, shadows have swallowed up the shop and are coming for her. The void opens like a yawn and begins to suck her in. She is not ready.
She yanks herself away, lurches toward the limestone hill at the top of the street where Wawel perches, its towers lost in the black sky. Look at the pretty castle, she says to Rayzele, but when she looks down her arms are empty. I will not lose you again, she screams into the void. She knows where Rayzele is and she heaves herself along the foot of the hill with all th
e speed she can muster, but the liquid air slows her down. She is swimming in slow motion toward the sound of her baby’s breathing. But the wind howls to drown it out, makes her look up at the castle, where the ghosts of Polish kings stare down at her severely from the battlements, muttering judgment beneath their beards, their crowns sharp with portent. Beside them hovers a wondrous woman Sarah recognizes, though she’s never seen her before. She is Esterka, the Jewish love of King Kazimierz the Great of six hundred years ago, masses of black curls framing her mournful face as she wrings her hands. She wrings them for Sarah. There! She points away toward the old town. Hurry, before it is too late.
Sarah glides along Ulica Grodzka. She knows the old town lies ahead, but the darkness deepens the further she drifts. The buildings lean toward her, she can smell their breath as she passes: the sourness of greed, musty treachery. So you’re back, they murmur in her ear. What did you think you’d find? You don’t belong here. Her hands push them away in waves like a swimmer. Her feet kick and propel her through the soupy black night. She will not give up until she finds her.
The dark disorients her, she could be staring into her own heart, when, without warning — a light. A sharp splinter of light cuts into the black distance. She sails toward it as if it is the harbour. The light becomes a crack between the jamb and a door. Becomes soft weeping. She touches the thick wood of the door, but it will not budge.
Rayzele! she cries.
Her fists pound at the door, her pulse pounds at her temple, her heart pounds in her chest, Rayzele! Rayzele! Rayzele! until the door creaks open another fraction and it becomes hard to look into the light. Her eyes cannot bear it, but she must struggle to keep them open. The light becomes crystalline, diamonds aimed at her eyes.
Rayzele! she cries. I’m coming!
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 29