by Pam Jenoff
“Assuming they were looking for the same thing as us.”
“Assuming. So maybe if we try the places they didn’t get to …” She wove her way through the maze of boxes toward the far end of the attic. The light was dimmer there, making it difficult to see. She noticed something smaller then, wedged between the last stack of boxes and the wall. A trunk, she realized, reaching for it. But her reach was too short. “Help me, will you?”
Jack came to her side, his arm pressed against hers in the narrow space. “Let me,” he said.
She stepped back and he pulled the trunk out and dragged it back toward the window, where the light was better. “Is it locked?” she asked.
He pulled hard on the clasp at the front until there was a loud popping sound. “Not anymore.”
As Jack returned to the box he’d been searching, Charlotte knelt down, then opened the trunk and peered inside. It was filled with photographs, mostly loose, some in frames or albums. She began to rifle through them. The albums contained the older pictures, Dykmans family ancestors, she presumed. There were photographs of Hans and Roger and Lucy, too, as infants, then growing through the years. A normal, happy family, or at least they had been, until the war destroyed everything. And they hadn’t even been Jewish.
She picked up a pile of loose photographs. There was one of Hans and a striking, dark-haired woman in a white dress standing before a fireplace, holding hands. A clock with a dome of glass sat on the mantelpiece behind the couple.
“Was Hans married?” she asked Jack, holding up the photograph. “I don’t remember reading anything about a wife.”
He nodded. “Briefly, in the years before his death. But I’m not sure what happened to her after he was arrested.” He looked down at the box he’d been searching once more, then stood up, brushing the dust from his pants. “This is pointless,” he declared. “I mean, what is it that we’re looking for exactly? A photo, a document, or something else? We don’t even know that there’s anything here worth finding at all.”
“There has to be,” Charlotte replied defensively. She searched for some evidentiary support for her assertion, but found none.
“Anyway, it’s getting late,” he added.
She looked past him out the window. Beyond the gritty rooftops and the trees, the sun was sinking into the mountains, faint in the distance. She blinked in surprise. “What time is it?”
Jack looked at his watch. “Almost seven.”
She blinked. “I had no idea we’d been at it so long.”
He stood, stretching. “We’ll have to come back and continue in the morning.”
“But you just said this is futile.”
“And maybe it is. But we’re here, so we might as well finish what we’ve started.” His expression was dogged. “I booked us hotel rooms in Katowice for the night, so we should try to find a cab and make our way back there.”
Why not Kraków, she wanted to ask. For the same drive, they could have enjoyed decent food and a stroll through the Old City rather than a bad hotel restaurant by the industrial airport. But she did not want to sound like a tourist. “All right,” she said, replacing the photographs. “Let’s go.”
They found Beata cutting some fresh flowers outside in the garden, which stretched expansively behind the house. “We needed to stop for the day,” Jack explained. “But we’d like to come back and look some more tomorrow morning, if you don’t mind.”
Beata nodded. “Certainly. Come with me.” She led them through the backyard to a small cottage. This must be where she lives, Charlotte realized. As Beata opened the door, then stepped aside to let them in, Charlotte hesitated. Katowice was a good hour away, and that was after they somehow found a taxi. She just wanted to get to the hotel, take a hot shower, and sleep. Exchanging glances with Jack, she could tell he felt the same way. But it would not do to offend the caretaker when they wanted to come back and search again tomorrow. Perhaps she was even going to give them a key to let themselves in the next morning. Reluctantly, Charlotte stepped inside.
The cottage was more spacious than its compact exterior suggested. A single room with a high vaulted ceiling, it had a small kitchenette at one end and a neatly made futon at the other. In the middle, a long table had been set for twelve, a collection of mismatched chairs crowded tightly around it. “Sit, sit,” Beata urged before disappearing through a door into what could only be the washroom.
“What are we doing here?” Charlotte whispered to Jack in a low voice.
“I don’t know.” He gestured toward the table with his head. “Must be a dinner or party of some sort.” He pulled out a chair for her. “We’ll stay for just a few minutes and then excuse ourselves.”
“Oh, Jack …” She wanted to tell him that there was no such thing as a brief social call at Polish gatherings, that one drink meant six and a casual stop by someone’s house invariably resulted in staying long into the night. She recalled going out for lunch with friends at Kraków’s main market square one day and the next thing she knew the whole night had passed. She’d woken up in the morning with very little recollection of how she’d gotten home and some fuzzy memories of a nightclub that were so strange she thought she had dreamt them. Even the performers at Polish concerts were obliged to return for about six encores as the audience remained on their feet, clapping methodically, refusing to leave.
Before she could speak, Beata reappeared in a floral dress. “This is very kind of you,” Charlotte began to demur, “but we really must—” She was interrupted by the ringing of a doorbell. The caretaker hastened to greet her guests.
A steady stream of people of various ages, arriving alone or in pairs, poured through the front door, and as they crowded around the table Charlotte doubted that they could all possibly fit, but there miraculously seemed to be a chair for everyone. When they were seated, Beata produced a bottle of vodka from the freezer and it was passed around, shots poured. Charlotte’s “nie, dziękuję” was ignored, the tiny glass before her filled to the brim.
“Na zdrowie!” someone proposed, raising his glass in Beata’s direction, and as the group erupted into an off-key but enthusiastic rendition of “Sto Lat” (“May You Live to Be a Hundred”) Charlotte realized that it must be the caretaker’s birthday.
She turned to Jack, and was surprised to find him watching her. He smiled then, and there was a softness to his eyes that she had not expected. Her cheeks flushed.
She raised her glass in his direction. “Cheers,” she said, then looked away, downing the liquor with resignation. It was the first real drink she’d had since leaving Philadelphia and she welcomed the searing burn, putting at a distance for a moment all that had happened.
Soon trays of deli meats and cheese were produced, along with cucumber and cabbage and beets in sour cream, always sour cream. Charlotte took some of everything that came in her direction, hungry and uncertain of when they would have the chance to eat again.
Underneath the table, Jack’s leg brushed against hers. She looked up. Was he trying to tell her something? But he was gazing off in the distance, seemingly distracted.
As they ate, introductions were made in Polish, too rapidly for Charlotte to follow. A white-haired man across the table gestured to the younger woman beside him, attractive despite the fiery shade of unnaturally red hair that seemed to still be popular here. “Moja ona.”
My wife. Charlotte checked to make sure she had heard him correctly. The man had to be fifty years her senior. “Are you from Wadowice?” she asked in Polish, wondering if he had perhaps known the Dykmans family.
He shook his head. “No, I’m from Przemyśl.” Charlotte nodded, recalling the small city on the Ukrainian border. “My wife and children were taken to Auschwitz, so after the war I came here looking for them. I never found them but I stayed.”
“Are you Jewish?” She hoped he wouldn’t mind the question.
“No, Catholic, but that didn’t seem to matter when the Nazis cleared our town. Anyway, sometime later I me
t Jola.” He patted the hand of the woman next to him.
Much later, Charlotte hoped. Jola would not even have been born when the war ended. “And we have a son, Pawel,” Jola added in accented English. “He’s ten.”
Charlotte stared at the elderly man. It was hard to believe he had a child so young. Well good for him, she thought, taking in his proud smile. Everyone deserved a second chance.
Jack’s leg met hers again, and this time it stayed. It’s the crowded table, she told herself, making it hard to keep a distance. Heat rose within her and she struggled to focus on the conversation. We should leave. She was more eager than ever now to escape the too-warm room. But she knew it was impossible. It would be easier to climb out of a quicksand pit wearing heavy Wellingtons than to flee the hospitality of their well-intentioned host.
“So you are visiting the Dykmanses’ house?” a man to her right asked in Polish.
“Yes.” She waited for him to press her for the reason but he did not. People in this part of the world, still scarred from the decades of Communism when one kept one’s head down to avoid trouble, tended to ask less of strangers and mind their own business.
She wondered then if it bothered these people that Roger, now a foreigner, was reclaiming such a big house in the midst of their town. “It’s lovely really,” a woman seated across the table said, seeming to read her thoughts. “For Pan Dykmans to come back and spend so much time and money restoring the place. It was an eyesore for so many years.”
The man to Charlotte’s right made a strange guttural sound, somewhere between a cough and a snort, signaling something other than approval. “Like the Jews,” he mumbled.
Charlotte’s cheeks flushed. Poles were supposedly past the war. Some even professed a newfound interest in Jewish life and culture, at least in the big cities. But here in the provinces when the alcohol flowed and they thought they were among their own, the anti-Semitism that had lain dormant in the intervening years flared up. She wanted to tell the man that the Jews had only been permitted to reclaim the properties that were not occupied, and those were mostly the synagogues and cemeteries and community centers no one wanted. But Jack put his foot on hers beneath the table, willing her to be silent. He was right, she realized, biting her tongue. Why waste her breath when nothing was going to change the entrenched views here?
Jack’s hand brushed against her leg, rested. She inhaled sharply. Was he hitting on her? Highly improbable, she concluded. It must be the vodka. She considered pulling away, then decided against it.
“The Dykmanses were good people,” Jola said. “At least that’s what my mother said.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My grandmother and Pani Dykmans, Hans and Roger’s mother, were close.” Jola paused, glancing self-consciously from side to side, as if aware for the first time of all the eyes upon her. “Well, everyone knows about Hans, the work he did during the war. But Roger, he was another story.” Charlotte cringed, wondering if maybe the information was something she didn’t need to hear about her client. “Roger was a good friend of my mother’s older cousin. He was a kind man, according to her. Just very quiet.”
“A loner?” Jack suggested.
But the woman shook her head. “Not necessarily. I mean, he kept to himself—especially after he met Magda.”
Charlotte and Jack exchanged glances. “Magda?” She repeated, feigning surprise.
Jola looked around the table again, as if afraid to say too much. “Magda was a beautiful young woman. They met when Roger was a student at the university in Warsaw, I think.” Wroclaw, Charlotte corrected silently. “Roger only had eyes for her. That was a very well-kept secret, though he confided in my cousin once when he was home from university. You see, Magda was married.”
Charlotte looked down the table at the caretaker, Beata. Had she set up the meeting with Jola purposely? Perhaps knowing they were trying to find evidence of Roger’s innocence, she had arranged for them to meet the one person who might be able to help. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, she decided, watching Beata’s simple face, now gone slack from the vodka.
“What happened to Magda?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know. Taken to the camps, I would guess, along with the other Jews.”
Charlotte’s breath caught. Surely Roger could not have been in love with a Jewish woman and yet conspired with the Nazis to have all of those children killed. This bit of information, more than anything else that she and Jack had learned so far, seemed to speak to their client’s innocence.
Suddenly Charlotte grew very warm and nausea rose up within her. “Need … air …” she managed, pushing back from the table and rushing to the door. Outside, the cool night air rushed against her face and she gulped it in greedily, fighting the urge to vomit.
A moment later, Jack was at her side. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, too embarrassed to speak. What had come over her? Was it the alcohol or Jola’s story, or something else entirely? “Fine,” she said at last. “I thought I might be sick. I think it was the shots of vodka on an empty stomach.”
“Heady stuff, especially on top of jet lag,” he agreed. “It was a good exit strategy, anyway. You must be exhausted. Which brings us to an important point: Where are we going to stay tonight?”
“I thought you said you reserved us a couple of rooms in Katowice.”
“I did, but it’s after eleven, and I don’t think we’re going to get a cab at this hour.”
She resisted the urge to rebuke him for his lack of planning. “We could see if someone could give us a ride …” But she did not finish the thought. If they went back inside they would be cajoled into staying for more vodka, the party likely lasting well into the night. And there was no one in that gathering who was in any shape to drive them anyway.
“What about there?” Jack suggested, pointing toward the Dykmanses’ house.
She paused, looking up at him. “Are you seriously suggesting that we stay here?”
“The house is empty,” he retorted, annoyed by the challenge. “Do you have a better idea?”
In point of fact, she did not. “I’m assuming it’s locked.”
“Let’s go see.” They walked back and pushed against the solid oak door, which did not move. Polish houses were not like the quickly assembled particleboard dwellings back home. They were made with granite and stone, built with painstaking care over many years and passed down. It was not uncommon for three or four generations to live under one roof.
Jack disappeared around the side of the house. Charlotte followed and found him working at the edge of a large window. “What are you doing?” He pulled harder and for a moment she was afraid that the glass might break, but he tugged again with a grunt and the window slid open. With great effort, he climbed over the ledge, hoisting one leg, then the other.
“But—” she started, surprised. She had not imagined breaking and entering to be part of his skill set.
Charlotte expected him to reach back and offer a hand to help her over, but he disappeared into the darkness. She waited outside alone for several seconds, hearing the laughter spill forth from the caretaker’s cottage, certain that they would be caught at any moment. But then Jack appeared around the side of the house, gesturing toward the now-open back door.
Inside, the darkened house was eerie and still. A chill ran up Charlotte’s spine, and she fought the urge to feel for a light switch, not wanting to attract attention from the outside.
“I don’t feel right staying in their beds,” she whispered.
“Too risky,” he agreed. “Let’s go to the attic. I saw a mattress there.”
As they climbed the ladder, Charlotte wondered how they would find their way around the cluttered attic in the dark. But moonlight shone brightly through the lone window, illuminating the boxes in pale gray. Jack moved around the now-familiar space with ease, pulling out a mattress from against one of the walls and clearing some of the boxes to one side to make a space for it.
And awkward, she thought, to say the least. She took off her shoes and sat down. As she lay on her back, she tried to maintain a few inches of distance between them. The room began to wobble slightly from the vodka and she placed one foot on the floor beside the mattress so that it wouldn’t spin.
He turned toward her. “Is it hard for you, being here and working on the case?”
“Because I’m Jewish, you mean?” She stared up toward the ceiling. “It used to be. The first time I came to Poland in the early nineties, everything was so gray and old. It looked like something right out of the war. And the signs of the past were everywhere—the police sirens, the concentration camp site I had to pass on my way to the archives. It was hard not to see life as a graveyard.” The words seemed to spill out as she recalled the images she hadn’t thought of in years. “But eventually I had to put it in context or I would have gone crazy. It still crept up on me though. You expect to feel something the first time you walk through Auschwitz. But maybe not the fiftieth and that’s when it gets you.”
“That’s nearby, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Half an hour, forty-five minutes from here, tops.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m always conflicted,” Charlotte continued. She was rambling, she knew, but the answer to Jack’s question was not a short or simple one. “I mean, I’m the descendant of Holocaust victims. My mom’s whole family died here. But when I came back, I found that the truth was so much more nuanced than I ever expected. The people you wanted to call evil had humanity and the heroes were flawed. There was gray everywhere. That’s what I found so appealing about the work. The broad brushstrokes of history were misleading. I really felt that by studying and recasting things in a finer light, I was doing more of a service to the truth and to those who died. But as for Roger …” She paused, turning to face him. “It’s too soon to tell, I think.”