* * *
Where every minute of every day she has envisioned a tall gate, an arched doorway, a sturdy stone church sheltering her child, Róża finds mounds of brick and rubble. The only thing she recognizes here is a twisted lamppost. Her hands wrap around it as her stomach heaves and her knees buckle beneath her.
How could this be?
Róża has the overwhelming urge to lie down, her body a deserted crossroads. She’d survived—she’d even found friendship and love—while Shira was here in this bomb zone. Why hadn’t she thought to come for her right away, as soon as she saw that children could live in the family camp? Why had she ever waited?
Her rapturous melody morphs into a monstrous atonal accusation, punctuating her shame. A dizzying series of crescendos—the scream of shells, the collapse of buildings all around—ends with a falling chord that searches, desperate, for the music that will complete it. It finds none.
Róża feels around in her pocket for the cyanide pill.
* * *
At bedtime, Zosia cannot find her shred of blanket. She looks beneath her mattress, in her dresser, even in the secret drawer Sister Alicja recently allotted her for saving bits of food for her mother. How can it have disappeared like this? She looks again under her pillow and between the sheets at the foot of the bed, beginning to feel panicked. Did Adela or Ula dare to take it? They haven’t caused her trouble since before moving convents, since she caught them raiding the larder. Eventually Zosia notices that her sheets are freshly laundered. Maybe her blanket got taken up with the afternoon wash?
She rushes through the corridors where the statues and dark portraits are still strange to her. She stops just short of the washing room, humid and slick and soapy, when she spots Sister Olga and Mother Agnieszka.
Neither would approve of her late night errand, so she conceals herself behind the open washroom door and strains to listen as Mother Agnieszka tasks Sister Olga with various arrangements for next Sunday’s service. A guest organist will be coming for the feast day, she is saying. Zosia’s mind runs to the propers of the liturgy until a sharpness in Mother Agnieszka’s tone brings Zosia back to her errand and to fragments of their conversation.
“What are you holding in your hands? Sister Olga, is that Zosia’s blanket?”
“Yes, and I want to show … omething odd at the seam. These stitches—”
“Never you mind about a little girl’s … I’m here to talk with you about … for Sunday.”
“But—”
Zosia’s fingers float to the kerchief knot at the nape of her neck and she remembers: her mother sewed in the same rhythm she braided: long threaded strokes punctuated by a gentle tug.
“Sister Olga, I understand … don’t like to launder the children’s personal … If a child’s security blanket got caught up with the sheets … mistake. I’ll take it now.”
“But what if … a code?” Zosia hears something unexpected in Sister Olga’s voice: a tinge of fear. “Do you think … haps show the commandant?”
“Absolutely not! Now I insist … back to folding laundry. The light down here is … and your imagination … wild tonight.”
At Zosia’s communion ceremony, Sister Olga had muttered something about shoddy baptism records. Zosia had stopped midstride—what baptism records?—but Mother Agnieszka nodded her forward and she’d marched up the aisle in her pretty white dress.
* * *
Zosia rushes back through the corridor and climbs into bed, her breath unsteady. Tears come now, not only because Sister Olga may have discovered what her mother took pains to hide but because no matter how she tries, she can’t fully recall her mother’s face. The features come to her disjointed and shifting, as if viewed through an ever-turning kaleidoscope—her soft, worried eyes the color of midnight; the hollow dip just below her collarbone; the small mole marking the rim of her cheek—yet Zosia can’t put the pieces together in her mind, can’t remember her mother.
What she can vividly remember is hiding—burying herself beneath hay. Pursing her mouth tight and inhaling soundlessly through her nose. Suppressing a swallow, stifling a sneeze. Ignoring an itch, a cramp. Constricting her bowels. Not seeing into the far or even the middle distance, but staring at the hay and boards inches from her eyes. What she can vividly remember is how her mother pleaded with her, needed her, to disappear.
Zosia positions herself in the bed so as to hold completely still through the night. The start position makes all the difference: shoulders and head lined up straight, never tilted to one side, never crook’d in an arm.
She wakes with a start as dawn’s light filters through the high window. Her blanket is back on her pillow. She thinks of stowing it beneath her mattress or under the blouses in her bureau. But then she thinks of Olga searching the children’s room.
She remembers how, when soldiers first came to Gracja, her grandmother buried silver candlesticks and precious photographs in coffee tins in their garden. Zosia slips out of bed and, as quietly as she can, patters to the storage shed. She takes a small spade and at the edge of the courtyard, beneath a privet, she digs a hole. Before lowering her blanket into it, she inhales the must that lingers beneath its soapy scent and runs a finger over its edge, over and across and over again, tracing the distinctive bulges that spell out her history: her mother’s stitches, the braille of her childhood. The air is damp and chilly. Zosia covers her blanket over with soil. She sets down a flat rock, a single daisy on top of it. For the rest of the day, her fingers hold the scent of wet earth.
Chapter 40
“Get up, quickly! You passed out.” A woman’s voice, a hiss.
Róża squints against the morning sky, the acrid stench of her own vomit.
She feels rough hands upon her, someone attempting to drag her from the rubble. Her body aches. Slowly she turns her neck. A white-haired woman with eyes like the sea grips Róża’s shoulders and tugs; then she scurries around to clasp her ankles. Róża is leaden.
“You’ll be killed!” The woman yanking at her is old and blocky and strong.
“Just leave me be.”
“There are soldiers still about, I tell you. If someone sees you—”
Róża’s eyes roam the rubble in the burnt orange of dawn. Why is this woman trying to help her? She doesn’t want to get up. She wants to close her eyes.
“Pani Byczek will be the first to summon them. She’s always patrolling for transgressors. You must come with me!”
Róża is too depleted to fight this Good Samaritan, whatever her motive. She clambers to standing and lets herself be pulled, tripping over broken brick and stone, as the lady shepherds her down the block and around the corner.
“In here.” The lady presses her into what looks like a locksmith’s shop, cool and dim and smelling of shaved metal. Past a long counter covered in key molds and gauges and pins, a single bulb casts a circle of light upon a table. The lady motions to a chair and Róża drops into it, her raw, ripped feet aching.
The lady disappears, and when she returns with a bowl of watery soup, Róża nearly spills it down her chin in her eagerness to eat it. It tastes like a garden, the rooted earth.
“When was the city bombed?” Róża’s voice is as shaky as the spoon in her hand.
“About two weeks ago.”
“Is it possible that anyone from the orphanage survived?” The cyanide pill waits in her pocket.
“I don’t know.”
A sudden, darting rage: Maryla should never have brought Shira here. The nuns should never have taken her in. It wasn’t safe! How could they have agreed to hide her here, when it wasn’t safe?
Shame rears up inside her again. It is her own fault. She should never have let Shira go in the first place. She labors to breathe.
“Where are you from?”
Róża doesn’t answer.
“Do you realize there are people here who would shoot a Jew on sight?”
She knows. So why didn’t she let me die on the broken stone? Róż
a doesn’t say anything.
The lady sighs and takes hold of Róża’s trembling arm.
“You can’t be out in daylight, that much is for certain. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?” She leads Róża to a mattress tucked in the corner, draped by blankets.
As soon as Róża lies down, she falls precipitously to sleep. But minutes later, she wakes, panting for air, blinking away images of ruffled feathers, cupped hands.
The lady is sitting in a tattered chair nearby. “I’ll make you some hot water while you rest.”
But Róża won’t rest now. She stares down at her own hands. They are dusted white from the convent rubble.
Part 3
The mother, too, hears music in her head. The melody is discordant and accusatory. When she covers her ears with her hands, a different tune—a lullaby—asserts itself, more painful for its sweet, rocking lyricism.
The lullaby tells of a hen who sets out for a glass of tea to bring home to her waiting chicks. It is the girl’s favorite, and it is accompanied by the lilt of a kept promise:
The hen returns.
Chapter 41
Summer 1944
The Samaritan’s name is Lidia, and she is one of a small network of Celestyn women who, under cover of darkness, shuttle Róża to safe cellars and attics and any number of abandoned buildings with locks that are broken or can be picked. Each presses bread into Róża’s hands and conveys the latest news: Minsk has been liberated; the Soviets have taken Vilna. But none knows whether any orphans survived the bombings at ul. Poniatowskiego 33. At the time, everyone was hunkered in shelters amid the rain of wall plaster and the cartwheels of ceiling fragments, emerging afterward to find the entire city block destroyed.
Róża wakes each morning, herself in ruins. Lidia fetches her, forces a bowl of thin broth upon her, and occupies her with work assignments in the locksmith shop until another day passes.
Róża is half-grateful. She has no interest in befriending Lidia, who is both odd and intrusive in addition to generous; whose surveillance and taskmastering keeps Róża from acting on her impulse to step out of the shop, wander the open streets, wind up shot.
They copy keys for the safe houses in the area. Lidia’s only outside contact with the operation is a puffy-faced man named Aleksy who delivers boxes of spare lock parts with keys concealed in false bottoms and retrieves them days later, all keys in duplicate, once again hidden.
Róża is a quick learner. She masters the key cutter and works with thick filing sticks to create the copies. Dust shavings float in the air. Her fingers stain dark gray, and she tastes iron on her lips day and night.
Several weeks pass in this way. Lidia fetches Róża before morning’s light and escorts her out beneath evening’s darkness. Best not to stay too long in any one place.
With the constant work comes an inkling of purpose: a rhythm in her hands as she and Lidia methodically cut and file the keys, then stow them away; a thump in her chest as Aleksy leaves the shop with another box wedged in the crook of his arm. One afternoon Róża points to a pile of spare blankets in the corner and says, “If I sleep here, we can work at night also.” Lidia nods, her pale eyes shining.
Their resistance efforts—and the hot iron Lidia occasionally uses to smooth jagged bits of metal—prompt Róża to think of Chana. Chana told Róża how she once used her mother’s clothes iron to finish a crème brûlée (incidentally, her most delicious egg dish), unleashing the fury of her mother and Miri—who had a date with Ari Bauer that night and had planned to press and then wear her nicest pleated skirt. Chana insisted the sugar would burn off and the iron would be good as new, but it was wrecked, repurposed for caramelizing projects only.
As she remembers it, a tightness rises from the pit of Róża’s stomach and catches in her throat as the image of Miri, splayed on the forest floor, calls up the stubborn flare of refusal to accept Shira’s death.
So long as she hasn’t seen her girl’s body amid the rubble, can’t she cling to the possibility that Shira is still alive?
* * *
Late summer, Russian tanks roll into Celestyn, signaling the liberation of the city. Lidia peels back a corner of the shop’s black window covering to see the streets fill with people, shouting and hugging, kissing and crying. Bells from every church in the city begin tolling and toll on and on without ceasing.
Róża ventures out, apprehensively, her Semitic looks exposed in broad daylight. She can’t find her footing amid the chaos and ruin, the jostling of people who stare at her and step widely out of her path as she passes. Her whole body quakes as she walks, as she poses questions on her lips. She is determined to find out what she can about the orphans of Siostry Felicjanki.
Some call Róża “kike” and stiffen and bristle around Lidia, turning heel in scorn. Yet one kindly woman who refused to evacuate a flat near ul. Poniatowskiego tells Róża of carriages circling the convent gate hours before the bombings. Another reports a nun leading a line of small girls along the cobbles. Róża pulls the photo fold from her pocket, torn and water damaged. “Please. Do you remember seeing her among them?” She points, with a shaking hand, to the faded photograph of Shira.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
* * *
Róża goes from ministry to ministry, inquiring about the possibility of a Jewish girl hidden within the Felicjan orphanage. She meets with pitying looks and discomfited head shakes, but no useful information. Eventually she returns to the ruined convent area, mounds of rubble streaked pink by the dusk sky.
More than anything, she hopes to find someone who will tell her that the convent was evacuated, that the orphans were moved to safety before the bombings. Instead she meets a woman who witnessed two nuns and their wards caught in the destruction.
“I saw it with my own eyes. Those poor little children. The nuns too. Bless their souls.”
The lady crosses herself. Róża squeezes her eyes shut.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it’s possible that any of them survived?”
The woman describes what she saw. A little boy’s body lying among the rubble. A nun’s veil billowing in the dust. Róża can’t accept it. Carriages were circling, and there were girls out near ul. Felicjanek. Perhaps Shira was injured, not dead. Róża sets out for the local hospital ward—corridors lined with limp, lopsided people, blinking up at the wavering lights—but does not find her there.
* * *
A Registry of Jewish Survivors opens in Celestyn. Róża pores over lists and sublists. Lidia accompanies her despite mounting pressure from neighbors—many of whom had appropriated apartments, furniture, and valuables left behind when people were taken—to stop helping “the Jew.”
There is no single compilation of names, so they have to search each list separately. There are stacks of them. They sit at a small table, piled high with papers. Names that bear any resemblance—the given names Shipra, Shir, Shiraz, Shirel, Shirli; the surnames Choda, Chodorkow, Chodorowski—drive Róża to despair. They are never paired up right, and the ages are way off, and she wonders: Did the sisters of the convent ever learn Shira’s real name?
“It’s no use. We’ll never find her this way.”
“You’re certain you don’t know the name they gave her?” Lidia asks.
“No.” She takes the bent, mud-stained card out of her pocket. “This was supposed to be enough.”
Róża can feel her face grow hot. She grips the table to steady herself. How could she have been so thoughtless, so stupid, as to not ask Shira’s assigned Christian name before letting her go? Róża buries her face in her hands.
Upon returning to the locksmith shop, they find shattered windows, the floor stippled with glass.
Róża hastens to pick up the shards. “I need to leave you. You’re not safe with me here.”
Head bowed, Lidia reaches for a broom.
* * *
When Russian soldiers sweep through the convent,
Mother Agnieszka closes the children into the kitchen. Adela boldly pokes a finger into a bin of flour and tastes it, puckering her lips. Mother Agnieszka does not chide her. She doesn’t seem to notice the children at all. Her head is cocked toward the high window, her face alive with tremors as she listens for the sisters, scuttling through the halls, shutting themselves into their rooms.
Zosia hears the pounding of boots along the back corridor as soldiers move through the nuns’ quarters; the yank of a bedroom door; a sister’s high-pitched cry. Zosia steps nearer to Mother Agnieszka, but she’s in her own shivery trance, fingers circling rosary beads, lips muttering silent prayers.
Eventually Sister Alicja arrives. She is the palest Zosia has ever seen, her habit in disarray, and her hair—which Zosia has never seen, the color of honey—pokes out sloppily from her headdress. She huddles with Mother Agnieszka, staring toward the courtyard with unfocused eyes.
Zosia thinks of her mother lying flat in the center of the loft, lost to the crossbeams and rafters. Henryk hustling down the ladder and out of the barn. Her bird burying low in her cupped hands. She floods with confusion. From overhearing the sisters’ whispers all these past months, Zosia thought that the arrival of Russian soldiers would mean the end of the war. The chance to find her mother.
“Is the war over?” she asks.
Neither answers, so Zosia continues.
“Can we go back to our convent? Is it safe now, Sister Alicja?” If only they could return to their convent, she might be reunited with her mother, with Pan Skrzypczak.
Sister Alicja turns to Zosia, her expression dark. “No, Zosia, I’m afraid it is not at all safe.”
The Yellow Bird Sings Page 16