The Winter Guest

  Ruth stepped outside and breathed in the crisp, coal-tinged air like a drink of water she had not known she needed. She had not realized how much she craved this bit of solitude, a few minutes just for herself. Their wounded goat, Bolek, one of the last two animals still living in the barn, limped hopefully to the fence and she patted his nose in silent apology for the lack of the treat he was seeking. She paused at the gate to arrange some twigs on the ground, pointing in the direction of the barn. It was a game she and Dorie played, Ruth leaving clues that led around the house and yard. Once they might have ended with the discovery of a piece of fruit or hard candy, but with none to be had she would have to come up with another sort of treasure.

  Closing the gate, Ruth gazed up at the hill where her sister had traveled a few hours earlier, trying to picture the hospital. They would make Mama well, though how they would go about it, she could not fathom. Helena was always so vague in her descriptions of the nurses and Mama’s treatment, and Ruth did not like to ask too much and admit that she did not know. But there was a plan, she had always believed, and that plan could surely not be to leave the children with neither parent. No, Mama would not be going to the Other Place with Tata. Not now.

  “The other place,” Helena repeated, with that one eyebrow arched, after overhearing Ruth using the expression to explain to Michal where their father had gone.

  “Heaven, or whatever you would call it, where they go after they die...” Ruth kept speaking, using too many words, spilling them on top of one another like a drink carried too quickly across the room.

  “I thought that was something you’d made up just for the children,” Helena replied. Ruth looked over her shoulder to make sure the little ones were out of earshot. “Surely you don’t believe it.”

  Ruth faltered. “Don’t you?” Helena had gone to church and sat beside her as the priest talked about heaven each week.

  “I believe we put Tata in the ground. And that is where he is.” Stifling a gasp, Ruth crossed herself. She had pushed away the image of the coffin being lowered into the earth, holding Dorie back so she didn’t throw herself in the hole after it. To Helena, dead was dead. They had not spoken of it again.

  Ruth continued walking along the narrow band of water that wound along the edge of town like a ribbon. Farther down, it passed between high banks of peat moss under a crude wooden bridge where children played in summer as their mothers washed clothes. It quickly disappeared around the bend where it widened into the gorge. When they were younger, she and Helena would climb the bluff holding hands and watch the logs travel downstream to the mill.

  An image flashed through Ruth’s mind of her and Helena standing in this very spot when they were seven. A snowstorm had come suddenly on their way home from school and Helena had been transfixed by the way the forest was suddenly coated in white. “Come,” Ruth had urged, tugging her toward home, but Helena stood still. Ruth’s gaze followed her sister’s upward to where the treetops and sky became one. They remained motionless, for how long Ruth did not know, hand in hand, the two of them alone in that snow globe of a world.

  “Dziewczyny!” Girls, a voice called like a sharp wind, blowing her into place. Only then had Ruth noticed the coating of ice on Helena’s face, and the way her own feet had gone numb. A neighboring farmer had found them and carried them home. They might have died, Mama scolded. But together they had not been afraid. How she wished for just another moment like that, the two of them alone in a white, silent world.

  At the adjacent Slomir farm, an old man pulled a wagon with both hands, taking the place where his horse had once been. Though his land was ten times the size of theirs, Pan Slomir had always looked enviously across the fence at their plush, fertile patch, which seemed to draw energy from the stream like a child from its mother’s breast. Now he glared at her, not bothering to mask his disdain. Ruth hunched her shoulders slightly to avoid making eye contact. Once she had loved the walk into town, soaking up the approving looks like sunshine warm on her face. She could almost hear him thinking: What would become of the Nowaks? It was a question that Ruth herself did not like to ask.

  Closer to town, she focused on the familiar things—the way the houses, set close to the road, slatted at exactly the same angle, the birds seeming to dart from rafter to rafter in identical patterns, as though performing a dance. Twigs and roots poked out persistently between the paving stones. Biekowice was not a place that one ever left. Children grew up and married and raised their families in the same house, or maybe their husband’s house if it had more room. Sons worked at the same jobs their fathers had before them. Marriage just above one’s original station was the best to be hoped for a daughter. Every ten years or so, some headstrong young person would head off to the city never to be heard of again. Rumors of doom and destruction always followed. There had been a story once of a girl who had left and found her fortune, but Ruth didn’t know her personally.

  She passed the school, now closed by German decree. A group of girls, twelve or thirteen years old, played around the wide base of a tree. Ruth envied the easy way they laughed and joked. She and Helena had gone to school for a few years when they were younger, before Mama decided to teach them at home. But the village schoolgirls regarded the identical twin sisters, who sat in the back of the classroom together holding hands, as an oddity. Helena had never seemed to mind much, deeming the other girls “silly.” Ruth would have liked to have been included in their secrets and games, though. She had never quite fit in here, felt an outlier from the others. But that couldn’t be right, for she had never been anywhere else. Was it possible simply to belong nowhere?

  She approached the main square. Market was a modest affair, a dozen or so canvas-covered tables smelling of carp in stale water and odd bits of too-old meat. Beside the stalls, Gorale women who had come from the sharp mountain peaks to the south sat on the ground, selling crude wool sweaters and salty sheep cheese from burlap sacks, their weather-hardened faces turned upward.

  At the dairyman’s stall, Ruth gave her most appreciative smile, hoping that he might move the wire over a bit to make the cut of cheese more generous. But he simply looked down at his work. She turned away, feeling foolish. Once her smiles seemed to buy everything. Now it was as if her prettiness had faded, making her a tarnished coin. It wasn’t just that, of course—the war had taken the men to the front. There were so many more women that even a tired old merchant failed to notice.

  She passed the dairyman the ration cards and moved on. Behind the vegetable stall, Pani Kowalska sorted potatoes and did not look up. She had been a contemporary of Mama’s and could not be more than forty-five, but the hair tucked beneath her kerchief was white and she had many chins, making her look much older. What was it about the women in the village who seemed to age overnight? One day they were young and beautiful, with the promise of a future before them, and the next they were crones. Mama had never made the transition—she had not had the chance before taking ill. But Ruth knew that one day she would wake up looking exactly as Pani Kowalska, and then any remaining hope for a future would be gone for good.

  She appraised the selection of fruits and vegetables. Even before the war it had not been good, the cool climate and short growing season inhospitable for vegetables like tomatoes and peppers. Now all that remained were a few mottled onions and potatoes already sprouting roots.

  “Three apples,” Ruth requested. An unfamiliar police car sat at the edge of the market, engine idling despite the lack of a driver. Ruth shivered uneasily. The fact that the provincial police had come to town had nothing to do with her, but it was different, and change seldom meant anything good.

  “Did you hear about the Garzels?” Pani Kowalska asked as she weighed the fruit on the scale. The mole on her nose, which seemed to have doubled in size since Ruth had last visited the stall, bobbed as she spoke.

  Ruth shook her head as though the woman were watching
. Life in a small village reminded Ruth of what a zoo might be like, though she had only read about such places. Homes transparent, lives exposed to one another. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, almost before it had happened. “Nie.” Ruth suspected that she did not want to hear the answer. She inspected the apples the woman handed her, which were mottled and bruised. She did not protest, knowing the rest in the barrel would be no better.

  Pani Kowalska wiped her hands on her skirt. “Gone.”

  “Perhaps they went to find Leopold,” Ruth suggested. The elderly couple’s son, just a few years older than Michal, had disappeared ahead of a transport of conscripted men to the front. The call-ups had taken place with alarming frequency of late, young men ordered to report for either military service or other forced labor for the Reich.

  “Not if he went to forest they didn’t.” Ruth did not want to admit that she was unfamiliar with the term. “To the woods to fight,” Pani Kowalska clarified unbidden. Ruth had heard the rumors of soldiers from the decimated Polish army who had gone underground to wage war against the Germans.

  Ruth searched for another plausible explanation. “Without him to work the farm, they must have decided to go to relatives.”

  Pani Kowalska shook her head, chins jiggling. “They left with the door open, all of their belongings still inside. Who on earth does that?”

  Who indeed? One would board up the house if truly going for a while and planning it—unless one did not want anyone to know or to attract too much attention.

  “And then there are the goings-on in Nowy S˛acz,” Pani Kowalska added, gaining steam even as she returned to sorting potatoes. “They arrested all of the Jews.” How had the woman heard such things? The news on the radio would not have spoken of them. But gossip, even about those they did not know, seemed to travel with the wind like pollen. “Good riddance, I say,” the old woman spat with more bile than Ruth might have thought she could muster. Ruth did not respond, but sadness tugged at her. Why did Pani Kowalska sound so angry about a handful of Jews in another town? Ruth did not have any particular affinity for the Jews, but it was the ugliness of it all that bothered her.

  “Christ killing heathens. Always driving down my prices,” Pani Kowalska added, as if answering the unspoken question. So that was the real reason. Her hatred of the Jews stemmed less from purported drinking of baby’s blood than the price of turnips.

  The Jews weren’t all hard-charging vegetable merchants, Ruth wanted to point out. “Surely just the men have been taken,” she offered instead.

  Pani Kowalska shook her head. “All of them.” What would the Germans want with the women and children? And what could they possibly do with so many people? Ruth’s arms suddenly ached for her brother and sisters. But before she could ask, the old woman looked past Ruth’s shoulder at another customer. “Tak?”

  Ruth stepped aside and surveyed the rest of the market. Taking in the flies that swarmed above the meat stand as though it were August, she decided to save the rest of their ration coupons for her next visit.

  At the corner, she spied a familiar figure approaching, a sallow, fiftyish women who stared vacantly ahead and carried her empty basket as though it bore rocks. Ruth started quickly in the opposite direction. Her foot caught on the curb and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell to the ground. Piotr’s mother turned toward her, then looked away quickly, no more wanting the encounter than Ruth did. But it was unavoidable. Ruth brushed her hands on her skirt and took a step toward the woman.

  A moment of silence passed between them. It was your fault, Ruth wanted to yell, seized with the urge to slap her sagging cheek. Piotr’s mother had welcomed Ruth warmly in her home, professing that Ruth was the daughter that she’d never had. But at the first opportunity, she had turned on Ruth, casting her out.

  “Dzie´n dobry,” Ruth greeted instead over the dryness in her throat, cursing her own lack of nerve. She eyed the stitching of the woman’s scarf, tighter and of a better quality wool than her own. Had she knitted it herself or was it a gift from Piotr’s new fiancée? Her pale blue eyes were a mirror of her son’s, but Ruth had not noticed until just now how cold and unfeeling they could be. “How is Piotr?” she asked, in spite of herself. His name stuck in her throat.

  A slight wince crossed the woman’s face. “He’s been sent to the front.”

  A knife shot through her and she knew in that instant he would not be coming back. Her eyes stung. “I’m sorry,” Ruth said awkwardly, as though she had been personally responsible for his conscription. She stumbled past Piotr’s mother and continued on, struggling to keep her back straight and head high. He was not hers to worry about anymore.

  3

  Helena reached the top of the forested hills that rose high above the city of Kraków. A fine perspiration coated her skin from the climb, causing the wool collar of her coat to itch unpleasantly. From here, shrouded by the tall clusters of perennially flush pine trees that pointed defiantly toward the sky, she could see whether the winding streets below were clear and it was safe to go down.

  The panorama of the city unfurled before her. Wawel Castle sat upon a hill, presiding over the sea of slate roofs and spires below. Months ago, the city had looked untouched from here, the cobblestone passageways timeless, save for a handful of cars. But the war now seemed everywhere. The streets were choked with trucks and soldiers, like the big black ants that appeared in the kitchen at the first sign of spring.

  After charting her course to avoid any checkpoints, Helena began the descent into the city. She emerged from the woods onto the path that quickly became a dirt road, trying to walk normally as the trees thinned and the houses grew more clustered. Closer in, the paved streets were speckled with harried pedestrians, darting between the shops, eager to scurry back to the safety of their homes. The air was thick with exhaust from a delivery truck idling at the curbside. Workers in overalls carried their dinner pails, eyes low.

  She crossed the bridge and started down ulica Dietla. Once Roma children had played instruments at the corner of the wide thoroughfare, open violin cases turned upward in hope of a few coins. But now only a hapless gray-haired babcia sat propped against the base of a building, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Her eyes were closed and toothless mouth agape, as though she might already be dead.

  Helena slipped into the crowd, her skin prickling as she viewed the city with more trepidation than ever. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window. Beneath her faded, nondescript coat, her dress hung like a baggy sack and her reddish-brown hair was hastily pulled back in a knot. Anxiety formed in her stomach. She looked like a girl from the countryside, “na wsi” as she had heard the city dwellers call it derisively—not at all like she fit in. Certainly a passerby would recognize any moment now that she did not belong here and summon the police.

  Steeling herself, she pressed onward. Twenty minutes later, she reached Kazimierz, which was the Jewish quarter, or at least what was left of it. There were no Jews in the village back home, and when she had first journeyed to the city, Helena had enjoyed walking through the streets here, smelling the chicken fat and dill from the butcher mix with the aroma of cinnamon and raisins from a nearby bakery. The loud voices, speaking a language she did not understand, had made Kazimierz seem like a foreign country. But the streets were nearly deserted now, as if the population of Kazimierz was dwindling, or simply too afraid to be out on the streets. Many of the shops were boarded up, windows that had not been shattered slashed in yellow paint with the word .Zyd. Jew.

  The building that housed the hospital had once been grand, its marble steps and tall columns suggesting a bank or perhaps a government office. Now its stone facade was black with soot and the steps covered with droppings from the pigeons that occupied the eaves. Helena walked through the vacant lobby, past the front desk nobody bothered to man anymore, down the lone gray corridor redolent with old plaster, urine an
d bile.

  When Tata had told them that he’d placed their mother in a Jewish hospital, the only facility with a bed they could afford, Helena had imagined somewhere dark and exotic, with shrouded men performing strange rituals. She had been surprised on her first visit by just how unremarkable it was—the white walls were bare and the nurses wore simple dresses and caps. The gowned patients were undistinguishable by faith, time and illness stripping away all social division. Save for the tarnished ornaments affixed to each doorway (mezuzahs, she’d heard them called on a past visit) and the occasional rabbi or other visitor in religious garb, one would not know it was a Jewish place at all.

  Helena crossed the ward. Though it was a dismal affair, there were little touches, light-filled windows and slightly wider-than-average beds that said the people who ran it had once cared. Nearing her mother, Helena’s heart sank. Mama had been a beauty, tall and slender with alabaster skin. Now her green eyes were clouded and her chestnut hair dulled to a lifeless gray. The skin below her cheekbones had caved in, giving her a ghoulish look. “Mama,” Helena said, touching her hand. Her mother did not move or respond, but stared vacantly at the ceiling.

  The elderly woman in the next bed listed to one side, her gown hanging open to expose a withered breast. Helena walked over to her and straightened the woman’s head, keeping her own eyes averted as she fixed the woman’s gown. “Excuse me,” Helena said gently, hoping she did not mind the intrusion. The woman blinked, conveying with the simple movement an ocean of gratitude and relief.

  A nurse moved swiftly at the other end of the ward, folding blankets, shifting patients from side to side with deft hands as she freshened the beds. Her name was Wanda, Helena recalled. She was more capable than most of the other staff, and kinder when time allowed it.