When We Fall

by Carolyn Kirby

  ‘He wants me to stay here, I think.’

  Perhaps she should. The thought of coming face to face with Ewa and her cornfield curls is unimaginable. Stefan turns to Vee with an easy smile but his words come back like bullets.

  ‘Not a chance. We leave here together.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the city, or at least to the isolation hospital close by. I have already told him that we need two bikes.’

  Poznań, Poland

  Saturday 14 July

  Men in brown coats lift the bed with Ewa still on it and carry her into the blinding outdoors. As the bed’s metal legs are lowered on to dead grass, Ewa tries to smile at the grey-bearded face above her feet. But the orderly will not look at her. He must think a smile from the dying unlucky. Or perhaps Ewa’s ravaged features are too repulsive to behold.

  She turns her face to the light. Sunshine is supposed to be a cure. But the suffocating white air presses down on her like a pillow. Midges hover in a tang of creosote. Crows shriek. From the sweat on nearby faces, Ewa knows that the day must be sweltering but beneath the thin blankets her own sweat is icy. Breath bubbles through her lungs – in, in, in, and then damply, out. Exhausting as it is, she must concentrate on this process. She must not, above everything else, cough. She closes her eyes.

  Then a hand is on hers, shaking. Did she sleep? She must have. Her eyes open. Not far off, women in blue aprons are carrying a stretcher along one of the meandering mud paths between the huts. Their load is covered with soiled tarpaulin. It does not look heavy.

  Ewa’s hand is shaken again and she moves her eyes to a face. A woman. One of the so-called nurses.

  ‘Mrs, Mrs.’ The woman has a thick Ukrainian accent and will not stop shaking Ewa’s hand. If only she had the strength to pull it away. ‘Your husband is here.’

  Ewa cannot make sense of the words. What in God’s name does the woman mean? But then, swimming in front of her, are Stefan’s eyes. The rest of the face is hidden behind a white surgical mask looped over his ears. This is not how she usually sees him in her dreams. But the collar of his open-necked shirt is beautifully white so she knows it cannot be real.

  ‘Ewa… Ewa.’ The dream is speaking to her in Stefan’s voice. ‘Ewa… Ewa.’

  The heart-stopping blue eyes travel, horrified, over her face. And a rubber-covered finger touches her cheek. The rubber is warm. Real. Perhaps this is not a dream. But Ewa clenches her teeth and turns her head away. She wishes, more than anything, that Stefan would remove his finger from her skin. Whether in a dream or real life, she cannot stand for any man to touch her now. Even her husband. A cold teardrop runs into her hair.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  He looks shocked. Is it the question or the language? She would prefer never to speak German again but the nurses are nearby. Even some of the patients have recovered enough to be nosy and she guesses that none of them speaks anything other than Polish.

  ‘I’ve come for you, Ewa.’

  One corner of her mouth smiles. ‘Looking like this?’

  ‘You will get better.’

  ‘I will die.’

  ‘No.’

  It must be Stefan. He never listens. Even now he wants the last word.

  Air irritates the stickiness in Ewa’s lungs. But as he is here, there is a question she has been meaning to ask, one that will not go away.

  ‘Was it you…?’

  His eyes above the mask frown. ‘Yes, Ewa, it’s me, Stefan. I am here.’

  ‘Was it you that killed Haller?’

  ‘God, no! Ewa… what are you talking about?’

  ‘I saw the shot, from the woods. You were there.’

  Stefan’s face is still for a moment and then he blinks. ‘And you think I killed Haller?’

  She does her best to shrug.

  ‘And so you think that I am the traitor? That I told them about the Dakota?’

  ‘Were you?’

  He sighs. ‘Ewa… how can you…?’ His voice folds in on itself, and then something in his eye changes. ‘Ewa, listen. Who else did you see beside me in the woods that night?’

  She tries not to breathe too deeply. ‘Robak?’

  ‘Yes, Robak. Tomasz Puźniak. He is still there, at the farm. And he knows where you are.’

  Again she tries to shrug but Stefan shakes his head.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know, Ewa, what is happening here. Everyone who ever had any connection to the AK is being picked off. By police arrest or straightforward murder. For some reason, though, Tomasz has escaped. You must be careful.’

  Ewa cannot make sense of his reply, cannot quite remember the sequence of those long-ago betrayals. And if Robak wants to kill her, he will need to be quick. This thought makes her want to laugh but the spasm in her throat is horribly close to a cough.

  Stefan strokes a rubberised finger along her hand. ‘Ewa… I am here to finish what I started last time. If any of that evidence has survived, I must take it to the Peace Conference in Potsdam without delay.’

  ‘The suitcase…’

  ‘Yes, the suitcase. Ewa… is there any chance that the suitcase still exists?’

  She turns her face away. ‘You and Beck were in it together, weren’t you?’

  He sighs. ‘Ewa, I have a chance now, perhaps the only chance there will be, to show the truth to the world.’

  ‘And you think the world will care?’

  ‘The truth is so terrible that it must. And once the Allies know the truth…’

  ‘You still care about your dead comrades more than about me.’

  ‘No, Ewa, no. Once this is done, I will come back to you, I promise.’

  She whispers. ‘You always say that.’

  ‘And I always do, don’t I?’

  Tears gather in his eyes, but she turns her face away.

  She has no energy left to think of anything else that Stefan says, only about what is happening inside her chest. He must go. He must leave her to her phlegm. Stefan and his suitcase mean nothing compared to the terror of a cough.

  ‘Ladies’ changing room. The grille behind the cubicle.’

  He frowns for a moment then nods. ‘The swimming pool… I will be quick and then I will come back and get you.’ He leans closer and speaks slowly so that she can hear every word. ‘And you should know, Ewa, that our marriage is registered with the Royal Air Force and the Polish government in London.’

  She tries not to sigh too heavily. ‘I was pregnant, you know.’

  Her words come out as a gurgle of spit.

  ‘What?’

  She tries again. There may never be another chance.

  ‘In the women’s camp they took it out of me. Put it in a bucket. I heard it cry but they told me I was a silly bitch… how could it, at six months?’

  He rips off the surgical mask. His face is thinner, older. He has a moustache. But his face makes sense. This, she realises, is how she should have been imagining him if she had allowed herself to believe that he might be alive.

  ‘Ewa? What are you saying?’

  But now she feels the horror starting in her chest and she must concentrate. She will need all of her energy to ensure that the cough expels an efficient volume of phlegm without causing her to shit herself or vomit in the process. She wishes that Stefan would just go away, but he keeps talking.

  ‘Listen, you must believe me, Ewa. I swear it was not me who told them about the Dakota. Things went very wrong that night, but I had to try and safeguard the only proof we have about who slaughtered our countrymen. ’

  Stefan’s face comes very close. She wishes she could tell him to take those piercing blue eyes away. Phlegm is starting to bubble and gather at the top of her lungs. She must focus on her breaths – in, in, in, out, out. This is so absorbing that for a moment Stefan’s face disappears.


  ‘Ewa… I swear…’

  She makes her mouth and nose into a shrug. Spittle runs over her lips. She must ration her words. There are not many left.

  ‘I’m sorry I called off the Dakota…’

  ‘No, don’t be sorry, you saved it by doing that.’

  ‘And I never fucked Beck. I know you think I did. But I never fucked anyone except you. Not until the Russians came to the camp to liberate us.’

  ‘What? Jesus Christ, Ewa…?’

  But the bloody phlegm is gathering in her throat. She should stop talking. Calm herself, minimise the attack. The cough is wheezing and worsening. She turns her head away. And in that moment she sees a stranger’s face appear at the corner of the hospital hut. It is a woman’s face – a striking olive complexion and calm hazel eyes. She looks dependable and honest. She looks foreign.

  Stefan turns to the woman and Ewa sees the recognition in his eye. Then Ewa knows. This is her. The English pilot. She is of average build and not especially pretty. But there is no mistaking her foreignness or her profession. The sheepskin flying boots give her away.

  In a thwack of rubber, Stefan strips off the gloves and grabs Ewa’s hand but she cannot move her eyes from the foreign girl. And in her shock, Ewa loses control of the cough.

  Goo creeps from the top of her lungs into her throat. She retches. Then the spluttering begins. She claws at Stefan, trying to lean forward and he takes hold of her racking body, horror spreading across his face.

  ‘Schwester,’ he shouts, not realising at first that it was the wrong language. ‘Nurse!’

  Across the grass, a big woman in a blue apron is coming towards them with an enamel bowl. But by now, Ewa has decided what to do with the lethal spit swilling around in her mouth.

  ‘Nurse!’

  Stefan shouts again, but as he does so, Ewa tilts back her head and with careful aim, sends a stream of blood and fatty mucus into Stefan’s eyes.

  ‘Scheisse!’

  He cannot help himself. At moments like this, his first language is always closest to the surface.

  He stands up and steps back, letting the Ukrainian woman through with her bowl and her back-rubbing and her soothing words in a mongrel dialect. Ewa submits to the firm hands but in the corner of her vision, she sees Stefan wiping his face with a big white handkerchief and the foreign girl going up to him, her serious face perplexed. Then they turn to go.

  A spasm grips Ewa’s throat. What has she done? Come back, she wants to shout, come back. But the cough has her in its stranglehold, stifling her voice, suffocating her. She wants to reach her hand out to Stefan, to get up, to run after him but the cough convulses her body, pinning her to the bed. Every shred of effort she has left goes into holding limply on to the bowl.

  He is about to turn the corner now and is almost out of sight. Wait! Wait, Stefan, I love you! I will never love anyone but you! The cough, though, swallows her words and then regurgitates them in an acid torrent of bile.

  In the momentary lull of expectoration, Ewa snatches another glance at the corner of the hut. But there is only a black wood wall and the dead sky. Stefan is gone. And Ewa knows then, with an iron thump of certainty, that no matter how long she might live, she will never see her husband again.

  Poznań, Poland

  Saturday 14 July

  The track is rutted so Vee has to push the bike away from the rows of black huts that now look more like a riverside scout camp than an isolation hospital. Stefan is beside her but they do not speak. And once they are beyond the sagging trees and through the chain-link fence on to asphalt, he mounts up and begins to ride.

  The mounds of rubble grow taller and the winding gaps between them narrower as they cycle into the city. Vee stares at the way ahead thinking only of what she will say to Stefan – that she did not mean to spy on him, she had simply been strolling around the huts for something to do. That is what she is trying to tell herself too.

  In truth, once he left her with the bikes and went to find Ewa, Vee could not keep still. She did not go looking for Stefan and Ewa. And she assumed that visitors would do their visiting inside. But at the end of a row of single beds lined up on the grass outside a hut, she saw them.

  As Vee turned the corner, she saw that Stefan was not wearing the surgical mask they had given him and he was clutching the patient’s hand without any gloves. The figure on the bed was so slight that she seemed part of the bedding. Then her hollow face turned and her sunken eyes fixed on Vee. In that look there could be no doubt that Ewa knew who she was.

  Despite the rough road surface, Stefan is pedalling fast between piles of debris. Nothing in the city is undamaged. Apartments, offices, shops, have all collapsed and become cut-through ruins or heaps of rubble. There are plenty of people around though, all of them pushing or carrying something – handcarts piled with straw, brushes and shovels, suitcases. A few are smartly dressed with briefcases or with summer sandals and hats. Everyone is intent on where they are going next.

  When she chanced on Stefan with Ewa, Vee had tried not to stare but her eyes refused to be polite. They had moved, magnetically, from Ewa’s face to her hand and in particular to the plain metal band on her ring finger. The sight of it gave Vee a jolt and made her dart backwards and out of Ewa’s view. But as Vee thinks of it now, the bad taste that was left by the sight of the ring lessens. Because the plain band was on Ewa’s right hand and so it cannot be a wedding ring.

  Stefan glances over his shoulder and makes a hand signal to turn to the left. Brakes squeal. The ground is strewn with glass, brick and scrap metal so the bikes must be pushed. Vee is at last glad to be wearing her flying boots.

  They head for a thick-walled building that towers above the rubble embankments. Apart from shell-scars to the grey render, this is the first edifice that seems intact. Stefan leans his bike’s handlebars against the wall and signals Vee to do the same.

  ‘Wait here while I look around the other side.’

  She nods, glad to postpone the discussion, unwanted yet irresistible, about what the dying woman in the isolation hospital may or may not mean to him.

  Dust and drains infuse the heavy air. The pulverised street is deserted except for a woman in a halter-neck top and a man’s cap who is painting a solitary door. Afternoon sun has perforated the haze and Vee puts her hand to her brow, squinting at the half-collapsed apartment block. The front wall is open like a dolls’ house; one room is still decorated with flowered wallpaper, another furnished with a hefty sideboard. At the base of the block, the woman painter dips her brush into a pot of black paint.

  Stefan returns and beckons Vee towards steel doors at the back of the sturdy-walled building. He pulls on a rusty chain, clanking the padlock. There is nothing else anywhere near worth locking up.

  ‘Vee, have you a file, for nails?’

  Has he never noticed her fingernails? She shakes her head.

  ‘Or a hair pin?’

  There is a kirby grip wedged into the seam of her trouser pocket. With a snap, Stefan breaks it in half and slides a look at the woman with the paintbrush, but she is engrossed in her work. As the woman picks up her pot and moves away from the door, she leaves a glistening black swastika and a single word: świnia. Stefan pushes the kirby grip into the lock.

  ‘There.’ The freed padlock is in Stefan’s hand. He opens the doors. ‘Bring the bikes inside.’

  Before Vee enters the doorway, she sees that the woman painter has reached the corner of the street and is dragging a crate towards a spike of stone façade that is still upright. She is just able to reach the paintbrush high enough to daub the letters of Becken Strasse into a black smudge.

  As the steel doors close, Vee’s eyes adjust to the dim light. It is some sort of disused engine-room. Slatted shadows stripe the glass-strewn floor. Stefan moves to the louvered door and pushes it open. Tall windows bleed blue light into the cavernous
vault beyond.

  At first, Vee cannot make sense of what her eyes are seeing but it seems that the yawning void in the floor is a huge empty swimming pool. Turquoise paint peels from the plunging sides and the arched metal steps lead only into air. At the bottom of the deep end, broken chairs and crates litter a puddle of slimy black water. Above a broken diving board, the apex of the soaring dome is as blue as the skies behind a cold front.

  Vee shakes her head. ‘It’s a very grand building for a swimming pool.’

  ‘It was not a swimming pool until the war.’

  ‘What was it before?’

  ‘I don’t know the English word. Synagoga. For Jews.’

  ‘A synagogue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beneath the blue dome, the balcony is filled with rows of benches for spectators. A whiff of chlorine lingers.

  ‘Why would anyone go to the bother of making it into a swimming baths? In wartime too?’

  ‘To clean the stain of Juden. With water and chemicals.’

  ‘What on earth…?’

  But Stefan is picking through twisted metal and smashed wood below the spectator gallery and does not seem to hear. He tries one of the doors beneath the balcony and pushes against something heavy on the other side. The door scrapes ajar and Stefan squeezes himself into the slit then disappears.

  Somewhere nearby, water drips. Vee sits at the edge of the deep end, legs dangling high above the murky puddle. 4.5m, the mosaic tiles say, whatever that is in feet. How wonderful it would be if the pool were still full of cool water and she could immerse herself in its cleanness, floating on her back to stare up into the blue dome. Perhaps then she would be able to think straight.

  Suddenly outside, not very far away, there is a boom. Vee flinches and looks up. A car backfiring? Or gunshot? Her heart tightens. Who would know? Her gaze falls back to the blue concrete void below her and she realises that she has inched a little closer to it. A little too close. What a stupid way that would be to die, after all of the other times she has come close – a fall from fifteen feet rather than five thousand. She stands up and moves away from the edge. It was a mistake, she can see that now, not to ask Stefan before they came here exactly what he was up to. It is a mistake to be here with him at all.