The Girl from Krakow
Page 39
Before she could answer, he came around behind her and bent over, his lips reaching hers as she turned her head up. He slid his hands from her shoulders to her breasts and felt the nipples harden through her khaki uniform shirt as she deftly unbuttoned it. At the same time she rose, pirouetting to face him. They began tearing their clothes off.
“So, we’ll get married and live happily ever after.” He stopped for a moment, but not to hear her answer. “Not here, not in Poland, and not as Mr. and Mrs. Tadeusz Sommermann.” He had not noticed that his proposal had been left unanswered.
“You have it all worked out?”
“No. I have only filled in a few of the blanks. It’s up to you to fill in all the others. We’ll live where you want, so long as it isn’t Poland. You don’t want to stay here, do you?” Rita shook her head. “And I don’t want to be Tadeusz Sommermann. I want to be Guillermo Romero. I’ll go anywhere I can become him again.”
Later they made love again, with infinite slowness, teasing and tempting, each bringing the other to the brink again and again, before finally spilling over the precipice together, punctuated by spasms from her, modulated by long moans from him. Then he collapsed on top of her. It was the way they had done it once, before the world had gone to war. Each quietly rejoiced in the reality that they had been able to do it still.
In the haze of smoke rising from two more cigarettes, they lay next to each other staring up at a ceiling, watching headlamps occasionally play across it. He spoke first. “Rita Romero. Has a nice ring to it, no?”
“Gil”—she was already calling him that, and he liked it—“I think I prefer my own name, Feuerstahl, Rita Feuerstahl, no matter what happens.”
He didn’t seem to notice the possibilities the statement implied, or if he did, he had decided not to respond to the provocation. “Shall I tell you how I managed to survive?” Gil was expecting a warm invitation to begin a romantic narrative that would occasion expressions of surprise, admiration, even enjoyment, and in the end satisfaction. But his words hung in the silence.
Finally Rita responded. “Not now, Gil. I think I know why you and I survived. That’s enough.”
Months later, working backward, Rita was sure her twins had been conceived that night in Gleiwitz.
The next morning, in two uniforms—UNRRA and Soviet Army Medical Corps—they left for Brno. It cost Gil a nice Swiss watch to get them both there in comfort, and another one to cross the Czech border at Bratislava. A few weeks later, Rita was working at the tracing desk in the Salzburg railway station, and Gil was the medical officer for six displaced person camps in the American zone of upper Austria. And they were living in the loveliest apartment in the city, requisitioned by the US Army from a Nazi family.
August 1947. Mirabelle Gardens, Salzburg, Austria. One could sit there all day, looking up at the castle under the hard blue Alpine sky. Rita listened to the fine white gravel crunch as people strolled, dogs scampered, and small children trudged, pushing the small stones ahead, their open-toed sandals making wakes behind. Late every afternoon she would bring her twins, pull each from the pram, and allow them to crawl, toddle, and begin to walk along the low hedges in the grassy rectangles that surrounded the fountain.
Rita sat at a distance rather greater than a young mother might have. The boys were not her first, and she knew toddlers were not fragile. A woman approached. “May I?” She pointed to the space next to Rita’s. Rita nodded without really looking up, and she sat down.
The woman took a book from her bag and laid it on her lap. It was Polish. Rita looked more closely at the cover. Lord Tadeusz, the epic poem Dani had been reading that first day they met at the Terakowski works in 1942.
The woman opened the volume at a place marked by a ribbon and began to read.
As she held a page down, Rita noticed her finger ends. No nails, none at all. It was too late to dissimulate her look of discomfort when the woman happened to glance at Rita. The woman flushed slightly and closed her fists, hiding the nailless finger ends.
Rita addressed her in Polish. “I know that book.”
The woman smiled. “It meant a lot to me in the war.”
“Me too.”
Now Rita looked up from her fingernails to her face. She was about thirty-five, thin, tall, with short, prematurely gray hair. So short it had to have been completely cut off and recently regrown. Delousing? Rita speculated to herself. The face was lined by experience, and there was a scar across the forehead. This woman’s war was worse than mine. There also was something else about her. Her mouth seemed slightly tilted to the right. A stroke, a birth trauma?
The woman closed her book and began to speak. “The Germans took them—the fingernails.” She opened up her hands again and contemplated the fingers.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I was in the Polish Home Army. They caught me. I wouldn’t talk. They took one fingernail each day. Then they let me go.”
“Very brave.”
“Not really. If I had confessed, they surely would have killed me.” She glanced toward the boy coming up the path toward them, who seemed to be about seven. “And then, he would have had no one.” Rita looked at the woman’s left hand. No ring.
The child had approached and was patiently waiting to speak. “Mutti, my sailboat.” The woman reached into the bag beside her and handed the child his toy. “Here you are, Stefan.”
“Thank you.” The child kissed the woman, went off to the pool in the middle of the garden, and launched his craft.
There was no doubt. You don’t forget your own child’s face, and it doesn’t change that much from almost three to seven. And then it all came back to her. The courier—the woman to whom Rita had handed over her son. The tilted mouth, the beautiful nails. The nails that had been pulled out, one by one. Rita’s feeling of admiration for the woman was instantly replaced by gratitude. Keeping Stefan, protecting him, raising him, had cost this woman so much. The boy before her was fine-looking and evidently happy. How could Rita ever repay her for what she had done at such expense to herself? The love this woman must have lavished on a child who was not hers. Rita could never pay this debt, but she would have to try. She began thinking how. But the ideas of recompense were flooded away by the urgency that the boy know Rita was his mother. Then came the need to shout his name, search his face for recognition, rush to the sailing pool, sweep him into her arms.
The woman hadn’t noticed the sudden joy in Rita’s face. She had closed her book and begun surveying the toddlers a few meters away. Then she spoke. “My name is Francis . . . Sajac. My friends call me Frania.” She offered her hand and smiled. “Making acquaintance on a park bench used to be frowned upon before the war. But it’s a different world, isn’t it?”
Before she realized what she was doing, Rita had taken her hand and returned the smile. “I’m Rita Feuerstahl. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” But she was just mouthing the words, her thoughts absorbed by all the wonderful complications of recovering her son. He would have to learn that he wasn’t Stefan Sajac after all. She would have to tell Urs. There wasn’t much he would do, far to the east, with a new family, on the wrong side of a border no one could easily cross. What about Gil? He wasn’t Stefan’s father, had never even seen the boy. Would he be a problem? It didn’t matter. But what about this woman Stefan had just called Mutti? She had to remain part of his life—and Rita’s.
She looked at the woman, whose glance had turned to Stefan circling the fountain to tend his sailboat. Then she thought, This woman, smiling with love for her child, has no way of knowing what she is about to lose. How would Rita assuage her for the loss she was going to suffer? How could Rita keep her as part of Stefan’s life?
Her new friend interrupted these thoughts. “I’m from Radom. What part of Poland do you hail from?”
How should Rita reply? She had only to mention the town she had sent Stefan from or the town she had sent him to. The coincidence would unravel in a few more questions, and
Stefan would be hers again.
Suddenly she realized she could not let that happen. He could not share the joy she was feeling. For Stefan the reunion would first be confusion, and then bereavement for the only protection and love he could really remember. He had been torn from his mother once already. And it was Rita who had done it. She would not take Stefan from his mother a second time. Then she felt again the pain of that loss, sending him away in the hope he would survive. She couldn’t inflict such pain on the woman who had sacrificed herself to save Stefan.
Rita repeated the woman’s question, “Where am I from?”
Then she knew what she had to say. “I’m from Krakow.” Gesturing toward her twins playing on the manicured grass, she continued, “Those are my boys. I hope they grow up to be as polite as your son.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2011 Jim Wallace
Alex Rosenberg has written many books about philosophy and science, including the widely reviewed Atheist’s Guide to Reality. He teaches at Duke University. The Girl from Krakow is his first novel. He and his twin brother were born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1946.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
IN MEDIAS RES
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART II
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART III
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PART IV
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PART V
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PART VI
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR