Lilac Girls

  We were sorry to leave, for we were treated like royalty there, feasting on princess cake and pitepalt dumplings with butter and lingonberry jam. Once we regained our strength (both Zuzanna and I were up to forty kilos), many of us wanted to get home to wherever that might be. Poland. France. Czechoslovakia. A few women with little left to go home to stayed in Sweden to start new lives. Some waited to see what would happen with the proposed new elections in Poland before they ventured back. We’d heard the repressive Soviet law enforcement agency NKVD was in charge in Poland, but Zuzanna and I never hesitated. We ached to see Papa.

  While I was grateful beyond words for my rescue, the stronger I became, the angrier I got. Where was the joy at being rescued? I watched women around me recover, eager to resume their old lives, but for me, the rage just grew, black in my belly.

  Once we’d made it to the northern coast of Poland by ferry, a driver met us at the landing. He was a young man from Warsaw, one of more than one hundred former Polish Air Force pilots who’d joined Britain’s Royal Air Force and risked their lives fighting the Luftwaffe. He was only a few years my senior, but at twenty-two, I had the limp and posture of an old crone.

  He reached for Zuzanna’s cloth sack and helped us into the car. I felt the leather of the backseat, cool and smooth. How long had it been since I’d been in an automobile? It may as well have been a spaceship.

  “So what is happening in the world today?” Zuzanna said once we were under way, opening and closing the little metal ashtray in her door handle. I opened my own and found two crooked cigarettes stubbed out there. What they would have given for those in the camp!

  “Heard what’s going on with the government?” the driver asked.

  “There are to be free elections?” Zuzanna said. We drove through the port of Gdansk, bombed heavily during the war.

  “The government-in-exile wants to come back,” the driver said. “So the Polish Workers’ Party says there will be a vote.”

  “You believe Stalin?” I said.

  “The Polish Workers’ Party is—”

  “Stalin. Just what we need.”

  “They say we’ll be our own free and independent country. People are hopeful.”

  “Why do we keep believing liars?” I asked. “The NKVD will never let go.”

  “Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” the driver said.

  “That sounds free and independent,” I said.

  Zuzanna and I slept much of the way to Lublin and woke once the driver stopped at our front door.

  “Time to wake up, ladies,” the driver said as he pulled on the hand brake. We sat in the backseat and stared at the bare lightbulb next to our front door, bright in the darkness, inviting a frenzied party of fat moths and other bugs. At Ravensbrück prisoners would have happily eaten those.

  “Can you believe we are here?” Zuzanna asked.

  We stepped out of the car as if we were arriving on the moon. I circled Zuzanna’s waist with my arm. She leaned against me, and her hip bone knocked mine. The pain in my bad leg spiked as I climbed those beautiful front steps.

  We had sent Papa a telegram. Would he be waiting with poppy-seed cake and tea for us? I turned the old porcelain knob of our apartment door. It was locked. Zuzanna fished the extra key out of the old hiding place behind the brick. Still there!

  One step into the kitchen, and the realization knocked the wind out of me: My mother was gone. The room was dark, save for a small lamp on the kitchen table and the halo of a candle flame on the fireplace mantel. Too-happy yellow curtains hung at the windows, and a new family of red canisters stood on Matka’s wooden counter. Yellow and red. Matka loved blue. Someone had hung a painting of a field of wildflowers over the wall where Matka once pasted her bird pictures. A few sparrows peeked out from behind the painting, the mucilage holding them to the wall yellowed with age. I walked to Matka’s drawing table. Someone had laid it flat and covered it with a cheap lace tablecloth, atop it a Virgin Mary picture from a shrine in Gietrzwald and a china frame containing a picture of an old woman waving from a train.

  I stepped to the mantel, to Matka’s picture there, the one where she looked quite serious and was holding her little dog Borys. Someone had set a black bow beneath the photo, the curled ends hanging down off the mantel. I felt dizzy standing there looking at my mother’s solemn face as it danced in the candlelight. A dog barked in the bedroom, and Zuzanna caught her breath.

  Felka?

  “Who is there?” Papa said, creeping down the hall from the back bedroom.

  He came toward us in his striped underwear. His hair, thinned and gray as a squirrel’s coat, poked out in all directions, a black revolver I’d never seen before in his hand. Felka emerged behind him, her tail beating quite a rhythm. She was all grown up and fatter than the last time I’d seen her, right in that kitchen with Matka.

  “It is just us, Papa,” Zuzanna said.

  Papa stood as if struck dumb, his mouth open. How had he aged so? Even the hair on his chest was gray. Felka came to us and ran back and forth from Zuzanna to me, digging her wet nose into us.

  “We’re home,” I said. My eyes pricked with tears. Papa opened his arms wide, and we went to him. He set his gun on the counter and hugged us both as if he would never let us go. How happy we were to be there in his embrace! Zuzanna and I both cried on his bare shoulders.

  “Did you not receive our telegram?” I asked.

  “Who receives telegrams these days?”

  “You got a letter about Matka?”

  “Yes, the handwriting on the envelope looked like hers, so I thought it was a letter from her. But it was a form letter. They said it was typhus.”

  I took his hand. “It wasn’t typhus, Papa.”

  “What then?” He was like a small child. Where was my strong papa?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He stepped back, hands on his hips. “But were you not together?”

  Zuzanna led Papa to a kitchen chair. “They moved her to a separate block, Papa. She worked as a nurse—”

  “And drew portraits for the Nazis. That’s what got her killed. Getting too close to them.” Why did I say such a thing? I knew too well that her bringing me a sandwich that night at the movie theater had gotten her killed.

  Zuzanna knelt next to Papa. “You received Kasia’s letters. How did you know how to read them?”

  “It took the whole postal center to figure it out. We knew there was some sort of code, but none of us knew how to read it. I dabbed water on the first letter. But then we figured it out. I told certain people, and they got the message to our underground in London, who spread the word. But it was Marthe who said we should iron the letter. That it was a trick from a book she knew.”

  Marthe?

  I knelt at Papa’s other side. “Thank you for the red thread.”

  “I got the word out as best I could. Did you know the BBC broadcast it? What they did to you both…” Papa dissolved into another pool of tears. How hard it was to see our strong papa crying!

  I took his hand. “Have you seen Pietrik? Nadia?”

  “No. Neither of them. I post the lists every day. Red Cross Center does too. I wish we’d known you were coming.” Papa took up a linen dishcloth and dried his tears. “We’ve been frantic with worry.”

  We?

  Zuzanna noticed her first, in the shadows of the bedroom doorway, a thickset woman in a dressing gown. Zuzanna went to her and put out her hand.

  “I am Zuzanna,” she said.

  A woman in Papa’s bedroom?

  “I am Marthe,” the woman said. “I’ve heard so many nice things about you both.”

  I stood, took a deep breath, and considered the woman. Marthe was a few inches taller than Papa, her dressing gown belted with twine. Brown hair worn in a braid hung down over her lapel. A country woman. Papa had certainly lowered his standards.

  Marthe came to stand near to Papa, but he made no move toward her. “Marthe’s from a village outside of Zamosc
. A great help to me these years you’ve been away.” Papa looked embarrassed Marthe was there. Who wouldn’t, introducing his girlfriend to his dead wife’s children?

  “Why don’t we sit?” Marthe said.

  “I would like to go to bed,” I said. It was like a swap out at the market. My eyes went to Matka’s picture on the mantel. Did Papa not miss her? How could he do it?

  Papa waved me to him. “Sit with us, Kasia.”

  Marthe sat on Matka’s favorite chair, the one she had painted white, with the calico pillow seat. I watched Zuzanna bond with Marthe. Papa looked on, happy to see them connect.

  “I wish we could offer you something to eat, but we just finished the last of the bread,” Marthe said.

  Papa felt the stubble of his beard. “It is worse than ever now. Since the Russians came, there is barely any food at all. At least the Nazis kept the bakers in flour.”

  “So we’ve traded Nazis for Stalin?” I asked. “Even trade if you ask me.”

  “I get on well with them,” Papa said. “They have let me keep my job at the center.”

  “Let you?” I asked.

  “You can get all the Russian cigarettes you want now,” Marthe said, a little too brightly. “But few eggs.”

  “It is just a matter of time before we are all calling one another ‘comrade,’ ” I said.

  “We’ll get on just fine,” Zuzanna said.

  “They are looking for former underground members,” Papa said with a pointed look at me. “They took Mazur last week.”

  A volt of current went through me, and all of a sudden I could barely breathe. Mazur? He was Pietrik’s childhood friend, a most skilled agent at the highest ranks of the underground. He’d read me my AK oath. A true patriot.

  Big breath in, big breath out.

  “I’m done with all that,” I said.

  “They took us from the camp on a Swedish bus,” Zuzanna said. “You should have seen it as we crossed the border to Denmark, all the people gathered there with welcome signs. They were very nice to us in Sweden too. We flew the Lublin Girl Guides banner someone had found in the Ravensbrück booty piles as we drove in, and you should have heard the cheers. We spent the first night on the floor of a museum.”

  “With dinosaurs with big teeth crouched over us,” I said. “No different from the camp.”

  Zuzanna fetched her cloth sack. “Then we stayed with a princess at her mansion. Look what they gave us before we left Sweden.” She opened the sack, set a white box on the table, and opened it. “They gave each of us one. Tinned sardines. White bread and butter. Berry jam and a piece of chocolate.”

  We had each taken only nibbles of the food, saving it.

  “And evaporated milk?” Papa said. “It’s been so long.”

  “How kind of them,” Marthe said. “I have a flour ticket I’ve been saving. I can make—”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” I said.

  Papa bowed his head and ran his fingers through what was left of his hair.

  “I am sorry about your mother,” Marthe said, standing.

  “It looks like it,” I said.

  “Kasia,” Papa said.

  I picked up the white chair, the cushion still warm from Marthe’s rump.

  “Good night, Papa,” I said. “Good night, Zuzanna.”

  I carried Matka’s chair toward my room, passing the mantel, careful to avert my eyes from Matka’s picture there. It was too hard to look at her face, a new knock to the belly every time. I entered my room and closed the door. No mistress of my father’s would park in my mother’s seat, no matter how much help she was to him.

  1945

  I followed the nurse into the house and saw an ambulance attendant in the kitchen at the end of the hall. Even from the front door, I could see the potatoes scattered on the floor, the shine of olive oil on tile. How could I have left Paul alone after Dr. Bedreaux’s warnings?

  As we neared the kitchen, I saw Paul seated at the table, a nurse taking his pulse. A gush of warmth rushed through my arms.

  “You’re okay, Paul. Thank God.”

  Paul looked at me. Had he been crying? “We tried to phone you. Can you believe it, Caroline? It’s almost like a dream.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “They rang the doorbell,” he said. “It’s all so…surreal.”

  “Who rang the doorbell, Paul?”

  “Rena.”

  “Rena rang the doorbell? You’re not making sense.”

  “They just took her upstairs.”

  “She’s back?”

  My voice sounded distant, foreign.

  Paul rubbed a spot on the tablecloth. “She has been at the American Hospital.”

  Did he seem happy? Not really. It was all so confusing.

  “She hasn’t been able to talk much. Seems a German family took her in.”

  I slumped against the doorjamb.

  “How wonderful,” was the only thing I could think to say. “I’d better go now.”

  I turned to leave.

  “Caroline, wait,” Paul said. “Where are you going?”

  “This is all so overwhelming.”

  “I know. I am sorry, Caroline. Rena has been in the hospital for weeks, too ill to speak.”

  I am sorry. I hated those three words. How many times had people said that when Father died? Je suis désolé sounds beautiful in French, but it only made things worse.

  “Well, I have to go home,” I said.

  I needed time to think and didn’t want to break down in front of him. After all, a woman was alive and had not died a tragic death in a concentration camp. She was no doubt tucked into Paul’s bed upstairs as we spoke.

  Paul stared at the potatoes on the floor. “Yes. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I mean home to Connecticut,” I said.

  “You can’t go home now. This is a shock for all of us.”

  “I can’t think straight. I have to go.”

  Why didn’t he throw his arms around me and beg me to stay?

  “We’ll talk tomorrow and figure all of this out,” Paul said, still rooted in his chair.

  Somehow I made it out to the car and back to Mother’s apartment, where I committed myself to voluntary confinement, mostly in bed, dressed in pajama bottoms and Paul’s shirt I’d worn home from his house. The kitchen phone rang a few times until I took the receiver off the hook and left it dangling. “Si vous souhaitez faire un appel, s’il vous plaît raccrochez et réessayez,” said the recording over and over again until there was a series of short beeps and then nothing.

  The door buzzer rang several times a day, but I didn’t answer it.

  I self-flagellated by day—allowed my hot tea to cool and then drank it tepid and overmilked—and steeped myself in could-have-beens. Could have been lasting love. Could have been a wedding. A baby. Had I really hocked half of Mother’s silver to nurse another woman’s husband back to health? Betty was right. I had wasted my time.

  One morning Mother let herself into the apartment and planted herself in my bedroom doorway, her umbrella dripping on the carpet.

  Mother. I’d forgotten she was due to arrive.

  “It’s pouring out there,” she said.

  Good, I thought. At least others were inside and as miserable as I.

  “Heavenly day, Caroline, what is wrong? Are you ill? Why don’t you answer the phone?”

  I may not have been French, but was I not allowed to take to my bed and marinate in my own despair?

  “Paul’s wife came back,” I said.

  “What? From the dead? How is this possible? Where was she all this time?”

  “I don’t know. Some hospital.”

  “That is incredible,” Mother said. “Well, you have to pull yourself together.”

  “I can’t,” I said and pulled the duvet up over my shoulders.

  “You are taking a bath, and I’m making you tea. A bath makes everything better.”

  There was no fighting Mothe
r. And she was right about the bath. I emerged in fresh pajamas and sat at the metal garden table in the kitchen.

  “I knew this would never work,” I said. “I’m not meant to be happy.”

  Mother brought me a Mariage Frères Earl Grey tea bag in a cup and a pot of hot water.

  “Sorrow is knowledge—”

  “Please, Mother. No Byron just now. This whole thing has been a ridiculous fantasy. How did I let myself get so carried away? I should have known. I had to try so hard to make it work.”

  “Just because he has a wife doesn’t mean you can’t be with him,” Mother said. A few hours in France had thrown her moral compass for a loop.

  “I suppose. But why is it always so hard, Mother? There’s always some catch.”

  The doorbell buzzed.

  I reached for Mother’s wrist. “Don’t answer it.”

  Mother went to the door anyway, an action that made me regret inviting her to France.

  “Whoever it is, I’m not here,” I called after her.

  Mother answered the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as Rena.

  Oh God, Rena. Anyone but her.

  Mother came back to the kitchen with Rena in tow and then left us alone. Rena stood in the doorway in a cotton dress that clung to her like wet laundry, showing the ridge of her collarbone and a hollow the size of a soup bowl below.

  “Sorry to interrupt your tea, Caroline,” she said, a tired schoolgirl, all eyes and sunken cheeks. “I tried to call.” Her gaze drifted to the dangling receiver.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Rena shifted in her shoes. “Paul is sorry as well. Tried to call you too…”

  “Please sit,” I said.

  Rena ran one finger behind her ear, as if to tuck a piece of hair there—an old habit, it seemed, for there was no hair there to tuck.

  “I will not take up too much of your time. Just wanted to say how sorry I am.”

  “Sorry?” I poured hot water over the muslin bag. The scent of bergamot orange triggered a violent craving for one of Serge’s violet scones.

  “For how this all turned out,” she said.

  “No need to apologize, Rena.”

  “Maybe I will sit. I won’t be long.”