She didn’t ask for an explanation, which made me wonder what exactly she thought I’d been doing to open it up again. She cleaned it without a word and rewrapped it and washed her hands in the bathroom.
“We might not be able to move you this morning,” she said when she came back in. She took the cozy off the teapot and poured steaming tea into a milk-white porcelain cup. “The Germans have got the streets blocked off for their victory parade. Adrian went to see if he can find a way around.” She handed me the teacup and saucer. “Sugar and no milk, Mykola said.”
The tea was too hot to drink. I held the cup on my lap. I had that same terrible feeling that she could see right through me.
“Mykola talks too much,” I said sourly.
She uncovered the plate and waited a second for the steam to dissipate. “Trusts too easily, you mean.”
That was what I’d meant. It irked me that she knew. I tried to sip my tea carelessly and burned my tongue so badly that I nearly choked.
She chipped the top neatly off the soft-boiled egg, ignoring my difficulties. “Don’t discredit him,” she said.
“Ma’am?” I gasped hoarsely.
“This wasn’t easy for him—coming to us for help. He’s not naive. He knew the risk he was taking. But he loves you that much.”
That stung. I wondered whether she’d meant it to. I hadn’t been willing to take that risk. We’ve got an uncle in Kraków, I’d said. I don’t need your help, I’d said.
I looked away. There was a knot in my throat, and not just because I’d almost swallowed my tongue.
“Innocent,” I said, “not naive. Please let him go.”
“Eat this egg before it gets cold,” she said.
I fought the urge to throw the teacup at her. “Please. He’s never had anything to do with—”
“Aleksey,” she said.
I shut up. Half of me was so angry that the teacup was rattling. Half of me wanted to curl up against the pillows, pull the duvet over my head, and sob.
She took the teacup away from me before any form of disaster could strike.
“The less you tell me,” she said, “the less I have to lie when I’m asked. But if you could go to the Germans, you wouldn’t have come to us. I can put that much together myself.”
I braced myself, swallowing the urge to beg.
“We can’t go to the Resistance either,” I said.
I don’t know what I was expecting—a sharp intake of breath, a gun in my face, booted footsteps on the stairs—but what I got was a spoon.
“If you could go to the Resistance,” Mrs. Kijek said, “we’d have sent you with our friend last night. Eat the egg.”
26
It was midafternoon before Mr. Kijek thought the streets were clear enough to try taking the car out. I had no idea what he thought about all of this. His cold, well-bred face was about as expressive as a boiled potato. He didn’t talk except for one or two words in Polish to Mrs. Kijek every now and then. He and Mykola slung me between them and carried me down to the car like a sandbag, draping me across the back seat with my legs stretched out. Mykola sat on the floor, folded up small and tight with his arms looped around his knees. The car was a coupé, and slumped as I was, I couldn’t see much through the tiny windows except the fronts of buildings going by in a blur. I tried to follow the turns in my head, but I got lost around Piekarska Street. We were somewhere on the east side, that was all I knew.
I thought I’d be able to get my bearings when we finally stopped, but all I saw when they lifted me out of the car was the shabby, overgrown concrete courtyard of an anonymous brick apartment block. It looked like the kind of place where people got bullets in the backs of their heads late at night in the glare of car headlights. I tried to console myself with the thought that if the Kijeks wanted to put bullets in the backs of our heads, they wouldn’t have needed to bring us here to do it. Then I remembered that they wouldn’t be putting bullets in the backs of our heads anyway, if they were going to give us to the Resistance.
So I was half expecting Polish gunmen to be waiting for us when Mrs. Kijek unlocked the door of the flat, but it was just a drab, dark room, about the size of our own place in Zamarstynów, stuffy and sour with the smell of rot, empty except for some sheeted furniture and a pile of old mattresses. Boards were nailed over the windows, shutting out light and air. Exposed pipes ran in tangled clumps across the ceiling and down the walls. Some sort of animal—small cat or very large rat—had been in here recently, leaving a trail of faint, brushy pawprints through the dust on the floor. I saw Mykola eyeing the prints with grim resignation, like a gladiator facing down a tiger.
“We’ll come as often as we can,” Mrs. Kijek said quietly. She’d shut the door behind her. The only light was the little bit coming in through the thin cracks between the window boards. “I have a patient in this block. People are used to seeing me here. But this unit is supposed to be empty, so we’ll need to be careful.”
“No lights,” Mr. Kijek added in Polish. He must have understood more Ukrainian than he let on. “No noise.”
They dragged one of the mattresses off the pile and laid me down in a soft shower of dust. Mr. Kijek went out to the car and came back with a cardboard box. He placed the box gently on the floor, careful not to let it bump, and brought out a pair of pistols from somewhere under his coat. He gave one pistol to Mykola, one to me. He put a cartridge box beside me on the mattress.
“Ask them if they know how to use them,” he said to Mrs. Kijek.
He made both of us show him that we could fit the magazines in and take them out to reload. I don’t think he was happy even then—they were good pistols, much too good for us—but he seemed satisfied that we weren’t going to shoot each other by accident or slice our thumbs off with the slides. Mrs. Kijek took one last look at the dressing on my thigh to make sure the bleeding had stopped. Mykola knew the medicine dosages. He could change the dressing if he had to. There was food and water in the box, and an electric torch to be used only in an emergency. She would be back in the morning, around eight thirty, and she would knock four times when she came, short-short-short-long, so we would know who it was.
They locked the door from the outside when they left. They had to do that, I knew, but it was damn nerve-racking to hear the lock click and realize we were alone and trapped in the dark until the next time they came—the next time they decided to come. There was a part of me screaming that they weren’t going to come back at all. I didn’t really think they would deliberately leave us here to starve—I wasn’t at that point of panic, yet—but there were plenty of other, perfectly rational scenarios that were equally terrible. Maybe the streets would be too dangerous. Maybe they’d be forced into hiding themselves. Maybe they’d change their minds and sell us to the Resistance or the Nachtigallen after all.
Any which way, we were powerless.
I worried about it for a lot longer than I normally would have, mostly because there was nothing much else to do. It was too stuffy in that room to sleep. Mykola had pulled down another mattress and spread it out beside mine—strength in numbers against the rats. We were just lying there in the dark, not moving and not speaking, listening to the silence. I had time to worry through everything, rational and irrational. That door was too heavy to kick down—or I certainly couldn’t kick it down, and I doubted Mykola could. Easier to pry off the boards and go through the windows. If there was a fire, we probably wouldn’t have time to do either. Mr. Kijek was a puzzle, that was for sure. How much must he detest Ukrainians, if he pretended not to understand our language just to avoid speaking to us directly? Maybe he would hand us over without Mrs. Kijek knowing. All right, but why leave us the pistols? Maybe he’d taken out the firing pins. Maybe the bullets were blanks.
Screams broke the silence.
The first one made me jump. I must have been closer to falling asleep than I’d thought. Beside me, Mykola sat straight up as though he’d had an electric charge shot through him. Somebody
was screaming out in the street—long, ragged screams of pain, wordless but horribly human, choking off into whimpering sobs. I’d never heard screams like that before—not yesterday at the Brygidki, not any of the times I’d seen the NKVD pack some poor beaten, bloody soul off into one of their dreaded black vans.
A door flew open with a bang somewhere down the hall. It must have been the street door because the screams were suddenly louder. Booted footsteps tramped across the floor. Voices shouted indistinct commands. I could pick out words here and there. Whoever they were, they were shouting in Ukrainian.
Mykola hauled me off the mattress and dragged me by the arms over to the wall, behind one of the sheeted pieces of furniture. We huddled there, holding our pistols and our breaths. There was a burst of submachine-gun fire and a loud crash. They’d shot open the door of the flat next to ours. More screams now and the heavy thump of blows. Something or somebody was being dragged across the floor into the hall. Footsteps pounded up the stairs. The sequence was repeated on each floor in succession—submachine-gun fire, the crash of a door, screams, the muffled sounds of a quick and useless struggle.
The screams in the street had died away by the time the raiding party came back down. I didn’t want to think about why. We sat frozen against the wall, listening to them kick and drag their prisoners through the hall and into the street. Another scream tore through the air, muffled abruptly when the street door slammed shut.
Mykola let out a long, shuddering breath. His hand was on my shoulder, his fingers clenched so tightly that it hurt.
“Nachtigallen,” he said.
“Or just Germans.”
“Speaking Ukrainian?”
“Maybe those were translators.”
“Do you think they were looking for us?”
“I think they found whoever they were looking for. Otherwise they’d have knocked down every door.” I pried his hand off. I was shaking, and I didn’t want him to feel it. Those screams were going to stay with me. “Let’s see what we’ve got to eat. Everybody’s going to be lying low for a while after that. We can move around a bit.”
Mykola took the food box over to the window and held up the tins one by one against the light, trying to read the labels. “It’s all in Polish.”
“What did you expect, idiot?”
“This is milk,” he said. “I know that one. And fish. We’ve got fish.”
“Just ‘fish’?”
“That’s what it says. Ryba.”
“I find that worryingly vague.”
“What is w-i-e-p-r-z—oh, pork. I knew that. B-u-r-e-k … bureki…”
“Beets,” I said. “Buraki. Burek is ‘bastard.’”
“Tinned bastard. My favorite.”
“This is painful. We’re going to be here all night, the rate you’re going.”
“We’re going to be here all night anyway. It’s not like you have anything better to do.”
“Eat,” I pointed out.
He squinted at another tin. “I’m sorry for calling you a fascist bigot.”
“That comes in a tin?”
“I didn’t mean it,” he said.
It was an odd time to be making an apology, and an odd apology for him to be making at any time. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d come straight out and said I’m sorry about something.
“I know,” I said.
“Do you think they knew? The Kijeks?”
“What, that there’d be a raid?”
“Mm.”
“I don’t see how they benefit, if that’s what you mean.”
He shrugged. “They get rid of us. Nobody asks any questions.”
“I think there were easier ways to do that, if they wanted to do that,” I said.
27
“There was a raid last night,” I told Mrs. Kijek, when she’d taken the thermometer out of my mouth. “Ukrainian militia, or Germans with Ukrainian translators.”
She took the thermometer over to the window and held it up to the light. “Yes. I know.”
“I think they had specific targets,” I said. “They didn’t even try our door.”
“Did you just wake up?”
“Ma’am?”
“Your temperature is a little high.”
“He’s been awake,” Mykola supplied unhelpfully. “We didn’t sleep much.”
I shot him a death glare, which he probably didn’t see. “Ma’am, if they’ve got this block marked as a Resistance cell, it could be dangerous for you to keep coming. They’ll be watching to see if they missed anybody.”
She wiped the thermometer and put it back in its case. “They weren’t looking for a Resistance cell. They were looking for Jews.”
My head was hurting more than I was going to admit. It took me a second to grasp what she was saying.
“A pogrom?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it? The Germans?”
She brought me one of the water bottles. “Drink. We need to bring your temperature down.”
“Ukrainians?”
“Drink, Aleksey.”
“Is it Ukrainians?”
“You can drink this now,” she said, “or you can come with me to the hospital and take an intravenous solution. Do you know what that is?”
“Something unpleasant,” I guessed.
“Fluids pumped directly into your veins through a tube. It’s your choice.”
She wet a cloth with what was left in the bottle afterward and made me lie down with the cloth on my forehead. She slipped a spoonful of something syrupy onto my tongue.
“Four hundred milligrams,” she said, showing Mykola the bottle, “every four hours until the fever breaks.” She unfastened her wristwatch and gave it to him. “Make sure he drinks.”
“She didn’t say when she’d be back,” Mykola remarked quietly, when the click of her heels had faded away. He slid her watch gravely onto his own wrist. It hung loose around the top of his hand.
“Slipped her mind,” I said. I was bitter and aching, and I was pretty damn sure things didn’t slip Mrs. Kijek’s mind. She wasn’t going to be back. Ukrainians were dragging Jews out of their own homes and killing them in the streets. She wasn’t going to be back.
“I meant to ask her if you could still take the codeine while you’re taking this.” Mykola studied the label of the syrup bottle. “You’re not hurting too bad, are you?”
“No,” I lied.
* * *
I spent the rest of that day drifting in and out of sleep. Mykola woke me up every four hours to give me the syrup and make me drink. I woke up once to gunfire—a lone submachine gun, somewhere off in the distance—and once to the rapid patter of footsteps going up and down the stairs. Scrapes and crashes and thumps echoed through the walls.
“Looters,” Mykola said softly. He was sitting up facing the door, pistol in his hand.
I woke up once in absolute darkness and silence, sweating. Mykola was asleep beside me, curled up tightly on his mattress with the corner of another mattress pulled over his head. I don’t know how he did it. I was dripping sweat as if I’d just come off my shift on the ice for Czarni. I tugged his arm over to look at the time.
“What is it?” His voice was thick with sleep.
I held his wrist up in front of my face, trying to catch enough light on the face of the watch to read the hands. Not quite midnight. I let go of his arm.
“Fever broke,” I said.
“That’s good.” He was too tired to make a joke about it.
“Did Mrs. Kijek come?”
“No.”
I wiped sweat from my face with the backs of my hands. Stupid to ask. I knew she wasn’t going to come.
“Sorry for waking you up,” I said, but he was already asleep again.
* * *
“We’re going to be out of water tomorrow,” Mykola said, the next night.
“How about food?” I asked.
He took a quick count, tipping the box toward the window as he rummaged. �
�Two tins of mystery fish, a tin of pork, a tin of carrots, a jar of apples, and three more tins of milk.”
“So four or five days. A week if we really stretch. Two weeks at most until we’re drinking piss.”
“Something like that.”
I kneaded my temples. The fever came and went—worse during the day, better at night—but my head and throat ached perpetually. I suspected the only reason we hadn’t run out of water already was because Mykola hadn’t been drinking his share, since I was pretty sure I’d been drinking more than mine.
“All right,” I said, “three options. One—we stay here, ration everything as carefully as we can, and wait for things to settle down. The Germans keep rolling eastward, the Nachtigallen roll right along with them, and all we’ve got left to deal with in a couple weeks is the occupation. The downside is we’ve used up our entire food supply in the meantime, which means we’ve got to run the risk of resupplying here in Lwów before we even think about the mountains.”
He was perched on the corner of a sheeted table, swinging a foot thoughtfully. “Second option?”
“We make a break for it now.”
“How?”
“Same as we would then. The windows.”
“They’re stationary. They don’t open.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded. “I think this used to be a furnace room. Something that didn’t need open windows anyway. We’d have to break them.”
“So let’s hypothesize. What’s the worst thing that happens if we break them?”
“Nachtigallen catch us, torture us, and shoot us.”
“All right. What’s the first worst thing that happens if we break them?”
“Somebody hears us.”
“But probably not Nachtigallen. We could be three blocks away before somebody figures out what’s going on and finds some Nazis to tell about it.”
“I could be three blocks away,” he said.
“And that’s assuming they even want to turn us in.”
Traitor Page 17
