by Laird Barron
“I asked my aunt how it was that the next door neighbours were fat and well dressed, while the rest of us were constantly patching up the tatters than hung off our emaciated bodies. And how was it that, when German soldiers carried out their ‘inspections’, they tore through all the houses—including ours—shouting, kicking things over and showering down blows on anyone who didn’t get out of their way fast enough; and yet, when the same soldiers went next door, they joked and chatted with the owner, got drunk with him, and came out clutching food or a bottle of vodka, or sometimes a watch, a piece of jewellery.
“We don’t speak about it, my aunt told me. Just make sure you stay away from them. Well, being told to stay away from something usually has the opposite effect on little girls, and—despite the horror of those times—I was no different. I spent all my spare time playing in the field at the back of the house and watching the neighbours’ property. Then, one evening, my curiosity was rewarded.
“That day, a German patrol had swept through the street, looking for food and valuables. They were in a filthy mood, as nobody had anything left. They trashed our house and hit my uncle across the face when he was unable to give them anything of interest. Finally they went next door and left several hours later, singing and laughing. I figured they wouldn’t be back again that evening, so I risked venturing outside.
“The sun had just gone down, but a strange light lingered. It was magic hour, and the field and marshland beyond it glimmered golden-blue. The peculiar light brought out all the blues and purples in the field, so that the cornflowers glowed like luminous azure eyes in the grass. I looked over the tumble-down bit of fence that separated my cousins’ land from the neighbours’, and my heart skipped a beat. Out in the neighbours’ field, a brilliant swathe of bright blue shimmered in the shadows. At first I thought it was mist rising from the damp grass. But it was too solid to be mist and, when it moved, I realised that it was a human figure.
“As quietly as I could, I headed towards it. The figure was small and slim, and I finally worked out that it was a girl—a girl in a blue coat. And then it dawned on me that I’d seen that coat before. The girl turned suddenly, as though sensing my presence. She froze for a moment, then started to run back towards the neighbours’ house.
“Wait! I clambered over a rotted piece of fence and gave chase. As the girl fled, the hood of her coat came down, and a flurry of matted black tresses flowed out behind her. Despite how thin she now was, I was almost sure. But how could it be? How could someone I’d grieved for every day for three years be alive and fleeing from me through a field that was rapidly turning a murky grey?
“The girl was evidently weak, but she had a head start, and I realised I wouldn’t catch up with her before she reached the neighbours’ house. Desperate, I took a risk and called out. Mindla? Mindla, wait! She heard me and stopped dead. She turned towards me slowly, her whole body shaking from the exertion of running barely fifty metres or so. She was emaciated—skeletal almost—no longer the chubby-cheeked twelve-year-old that I’d loved and looked up to, but a gaunt teenager with haunted, hollow eyes. Abruptly magic hour ended, and we were in darkness. We stood facing each other, trembling. Then a small gasp escaped Mindla’s cracked lips and, as I rushed towards her, she slumped into my arms.
“From then on, Mindla and I met every night at the border of the two properties in which we were reluctant lodgers. I learned how Mindla had returned from the bakery on that day to find her mother and sister gone. The Polish family next door told her that it wasn’t safe for her to stay in the street as the Germans could return at any moment to look for stragglers. She managed to get to the factory where her father worked, but all the Jewish workers had been taken away. So she hid in a series of attics and basements in Międzyrzec, moving on when each hiding-place became unsafe. Finally there was nowhere else to hide, so she left the town one night with a young Jewish woman and her fiancé. They’d tried to survive in the forest, hiding in a hollowed-out tree trunk by day and scavenging for food when it got dark, but when winter started to draw in, the cold and hunger became unbearable. They came across another group of Jews trying to survive in the open, who told them that a Polish peasant was taking in Jewish girls for payment. Mindla knew she wouldn’t survive winter in the forest, so she decided to take a chance. She still had a couple of gold coins that her mother had sewn into the lining of her coat when enemy soldiers had first entered the town, so she followed the instructions given and made it to the peasant’s house.
“The man told me to give him everything I had, Mindla explained. In return he would hide me and feed me . . . But now he says there isn’t enough food, so I only get a bowl of soup and a piece of bread a day. During the day I lie hidden behind straw on a kind of shelf above the animals, at the back of the house. That way the Germans don’t see me when they come. Sometimes the soldiers stay for hours, drinking homemade vodka with the man and his son. I have to lie very still. I get cramps in my legs, and sometimes bugs crawl on me.
“Mindla told me about two other Jewish girls who’d been hiding in the peasant’s house when she arrived. They’d fled their home village of Rudniki when the roundups started, but the rest of their family had been taken away. One day the peasant and his son came for the sisters in the middle of the night, and Mindla never saw them again. When she asked what had happened to them, the peasant’s wife told her to mind her own business, and the peasant said that a relative of theirs had come and taken them away. But Mindla must have had doubts as to the girls’ plight because she kept returning to them in our conversations.
“I told Mindla that I would ask my mother if she could stay with us. No, said Mindla. I won’t put your lives in danger. I related our conversation to my mother, and she said that Mindla was right; we didn’t have the privileges that the next door neighbour had—unlike his house, ours got searched from top to bottom—and, in any case, there were no hiding-places in our house. So Mindla and I met outdoors, sometimes in the pouring rain. I lived for those meetings. I put aside what little food I could, as did my mother. We didn’t tell my cousins what I was up to. The fewer who knew, the better. Sometimes my mother caught me sneaking out at night. She was very afraid for me, but she didn’t stop me.
“One night Mindla was late to meet me. Finally she appeared, looking paler and more frightened than normal. She usually managed a wan smile and a few words when she saw me, but this time she was withdrawn and silent. It took me a while to get her to admit what had happened. The farmer had become tired of hiding her and feeding her. He said that he wanted payment. I said that I’d already given him everything, and he said ‘Not everything.’ Mindla cried as she told me that the man had tried to force himself on her. She was only saved because her screams brought out the man’s wife, who called her ‘an ungrateful little whore’, and dragged her husband back to bed. I don’t think I fully comprehended what Mindla was telling me—at twelve I was very naive about the ways of the world—but I knew that my beloved friend was in trouble and that I had to do something. Let’s run away together, I told her. Let’s go right now—tonight. Mindla looked at me with love and sadness. I’ve never seen such sadness in anybody’s eyes. We can’t run away, she told me. There’s nowhere to run.
“That night I had a terrible nightmare. Mindla was standing by the marsh at the bottom of the field. She was only in her underwear. She reached out to me and at first I thought that she had that same sadness in her eyes, but as I drew closer, I saw that her eyes were gone.” Bronislava paused. I had been engrossed in her recollection, and the sudden silence startled me. I looked at her, but she avoided my gaze. She turned away and pretended to blow her nose, but I could see that she was wiping her eyes.
“The next night Mindla didn’t come,” she finally said, then fell silent once more. I waited in vain for her speak. After what seemed like a long time, but was probably only half a minute, I finally asked her what had happened.
“I waited for hours,�
� she said. It was raining and very cold. Eventually my mother came out and found me by the fence, soaking wet. I contracted pneumonia and nearly died.” Another pause.
“What happened to Mindla?”
“She was never seen again.”
“Well, what do you think happened to her?”
“I don’t think. I know what happened. They killed her. The farmer and that son of his. As soon as I saw my Mindla’s blue coat stretched over the grotesque body of that woman, I knew that they’d killed her.”
“You saw the farmer’s wife wearing Mindla’s coat?”
“Yes. When I was well enough to get out of bed, I looked out of the window and saw her parading around shamelessly in it. It had always been too big for Mindla. I remember, she’d seen that coat in a shop and fallen in love with it. That was just before war broke out. She persuaded her mother that she’d ‘grow into it’ and eventually her mother gave in and bought it for her. But Mindla never grew into it. Instead of filling out like other girls her age, she’d been starved and the coat always hung off her. But it was too small for that awful woman—she couldn’t even do the buttons up, and yet she strutted around in it as though Mindla had never existed. God knows why she wanted it—it was tattered and badly worn, but it was a pretty colour, and the woman was greedy.
“I flew out of the house before my aunt could stop me, and I confronted her. I asked what she’d done to Mindla. The woman shouted at me to mind my own business. Her husband came storming out of the house and told me that if I didn’t shut up, he’d make sure that something very bad happened to me.
“The next thing I knew, German soldiers came storming into my cousins’ house. They beat up my uncle and tore up the floorboards in the kitchen. The next door neighbour had told them that we’d hidden grain under the floor. They didn’t find anything, and the farmer got a clout round the earhole for making them waste their time, but he’d made his point.
“I didn’t confront him again until the war was over. The communist authorities weren’t interested in the wild accusations of an adolescent girl—or her mother. In any case, the farmer was a man of influence. He had grown wealthy on the suffering of the unfortunate souls he had exploited and, although the other residents on the street viewed him with distaste and went out of their way to avoid him, he didn’t care. He now drank with the NKVD, and, when the Soviets left Poland to the Polish communists, he drank with the chief of police. It was made very clear to me that if I continued with my accusations, things would end very badly for my mother. By the time the communists were overthrown, the farmer and his family were dead. The man and his wife died of natural causes, but not until they had buried their only son. It’s said that he was drunk and—for some inexplicable reason—wandered out onto the tracks beyond the field at the back of his parents’ house, where he was hit by a train.” The old lady paused, and I thought that she’d finished her story. I tried to think of something appropriate to say, but after a moment’s hesitation, during which she seemed to be sizing me up, she carried on.
“Sometimes I dream about her,” she said. “Sometimes, especially in autumn and in early spring, when the mist rises from the marshy ground, I see her walking along the ditch at the far end of the field. Mostly I just hear her crying . . .” The woman broke off, tired and sad. I could tell I wasn’t going to get much more out of her. She fixed her rheumy eyes on me, and seemed to wait for my full attention. I placed my glass of tea carefully on the table and returned her gaze. Something in her tone changed; became more urgent, almost pleading. “I’ve waited fifty years to tell her story to someone who would listen,” she finally said. “To someone who could tell her story to the world and . . . right the wrong.”
I lowered my eyes and finished my honey cake, weighing up whether or not to tell my down-to-earth editor the story of the girl in the blue coat. As I sipped the last of my tea, I already knew that the ‘ghost story’ wouldn’t make it into my research notes . . . I know what you’re thinking, but, in any case, it wouldn’t have made a difference; my boss dropped the Międzyrzec story. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with my report—quite the contrary; I’d managed to find two credible eye witnesses of the so-called ‘ghetto liquidations’, during which the Jews who had been rounded up or enticed out of hiding with promises of immunity were robbed, beaten and murdered, or herded onto trucks and driven to the local train station for transportation to the gas chambers of Treblinka and Majdanek . . . No, my research had been thorough, as ever, but the ghetto liquidation story was abandoned in favour of the Chelmno death camp; aerial photography had uncovered a hitherto unknown mass grave in the nearby forest, and my boss was keen for The History Magazine to be the first publication outside Poland to cover the find.
And so I forgot all about Międzyrzec, and the old lady, and the girl in the blue coat. Until fifteen years later—when I was working as a war correspondent for Reuters in war-torn Iraq. I’d been stationed with the US regiment I told you about for over a month. We’d been lucky: the territory that came under our patrols was fairly quiet, and the worst thing about the posting was the heat and the desert wind. No matter how carefully you covered up, you could always taste sand in your mouth, and the grit would irritate your nose and make your eyes run—despite the shades we all wore virtually around the clock.
Then one night I saw her—the dead girl from Międzyrzec. She stood in the mist at the bottom of the old woman’s field, looking at me with eyes of death and sorrow. The cold blue-grey of that Polish landscape couldn’t have been further from the blistering yellow of the desert into which I awoke, and yet no amount of burning desert dust could dispel the horror I felt. That day the convoy I was travelling with drove into a trap—a double whammy, if you like—of a landmine and a car-bomb driven by a suicide bomber, who died on the spot, along with five of the soldiers who’d become my friends over the past few weeks. Nobody escaped without injury; some of us lost limbs, one young man from Idaho lost an eye, another boy lost part of his jaw. I was lucky; I escaped with shrapnel in my knee and cuts to my back and arms. But it shook my confidence in my indestructibility—for a while, at least.
With all the blood and guts and horror of the aftermath of the attack, I forgot about the girl in the blue coat once more. But she came back. Whenever I became complacent, whenever things were going a bit too well, or when I simply forgot about my own mortality, she came back. Don’t get me wrong, people weren’t blown up around me every time I dreamt about her, but each time reminded me of the unpredictability and cruelty of the world we live in; of death which will one day come for all of us, and of the fact that she’s still waiting—waiting out there in the cold, the damp and the dark for her story to be told . . . And I’ve been dreaming a lot lately.
I see I’ve rendered you speechless. Well, I’m sorry. Like the old lady in Międzyrzec, I’ve waited many years to tell that story. I realise it doesn’t quite fit with the image of the tough old reporter that we’ve created together, but you must promise to allow me to tell it to the world as I’ve told it to you today. You know it now. And, believe me, if either of us is to have any peace in this world or the next, then it must be told. Promise me.
“His words, not mine,” the ghost writer looked his publisher straight in the eye. “So you see, we have to keep it in. It’s what he wanted.” It was a plea more than a statement.
“Nonsense!” the publisher scoffed. The writer’s sentimentality and inexperience were starting to annoy him. Perhaps it had been a mistake to give the Johnson gig to someone so young. “Don’t you see? A supernatural yarn about a dead girl goes against everything else you’ve written. It’s out of character, it’s completely inconsistent with the rest of the book; it will alienate our readers and ruin Johnson’s reputation.”
“You don’t understand . . .” the writer implored.
“But I do understand. I understand that including a drugged up old man’s fantasies in what is to be his legacy to the world wouldn�
��t just be unfair to Frank; it would be a total violation of the trust he placed in all of us to tell his story.” The publisher studied the writer closely. The young man’s face had blanched and he was starting to sweat. “Look,” the older man’s voice softened a little, “Frank Johnson was hard as nails. Not a fanciful bone in his body. If he’d been in his right mind the last time you saw him, he’d never have said what he said. He was a tough, unshakeable war correspondent who did a dangerous and responsible job, and did it well—you know that better than anyone. Now his reputation is in our hands. And there’s no way this publishing house is going to destroy his legacy for the sake of some crazy story that he told you in his last days, high on morphine.”
The writer had lowered his gaze to his hands, which were clasping and unclasping in his lap like the death throes of a beached fish. When he raised his eyes again, the publisher was shocked to see in them a look of desperation and—perhaps—fear. When he finally spoke, his voice shook, and for a moment the publisher had the worrying notion that the writer was going to burst into tears.
“You don’t understand,” the young man practically begged. “I’ve . . . seen her.”
“What?. . . Who?”
“The girl.” The publisher stared at the writer uncomprehendingly. “The girl in the blue coat.”
“What do you mean? Where?” The publisher wasn’t sure what disturbed him more: the writer’s evident breakdown or the fact that he now found himself alone in a room with a madman.
“In my dreams . . . Nightmares.” The writer looked down at his now motionless hands. “She walks along the ditch at the bottom of a field. It’s cold. It’s lonely. When the wind blows in my direction, I can hear her crying. And then she looks at me . . . I see her every night . . . Her eyes are like death. Full of betrayal and sorrow that can never be healed. Grief not just for her own short, painful existence, but for all those whose bones or ashes lie in unmarked graves. I can’t stand her eyes. The desolation in them gets inside you. It makes you wish you were dead. Makes you wish you’d never been born . . .” The publisher was too stunned to react and, after a moment’s pause, the writer carried on. “I don’t know how Frank Johnson lived with it . . . He was a . . . strong . . . man.” The writer raised his eyes once more, but did not meet his boss’s incredulous gaze. His attention was focused on the window at the far end of the office, behind his listener’s back, where something—a gust from the air-conditioning unit perhaps—caused the reinforced textile strips of the cream-coloured blind to stir and rattle softly against the glass pane. He added quietly, “I’m not . . . that . . . strong . . .”
