The Winter Guest

  He cupped his hand and drank from the bucket hurriedly. Then he splashed the water on his face, not seeming to mind as the icy droplets trickled down his neck. “That feels great.”

  He pulled off the sweater and unbuttoned his shirt. She blushed and half turned away; out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of his back where it met his shoulder, muscle and bone working against the bare, pale skin as he bathed. She sucked in her breath quickly, then held it, hoping he hadn’t heard.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs. “Pan Rosen...” she began, lowering herself to the ground as he dried himself with his torn shirt.

  “Sam,” he corrected. Sam. In that moment, he was not a soldier, but a man, with an open face and broad smooth cheeks she wanted to touch. He pulled on the sweater she had given him once more. “And may I call you Hel...” He faltered.

  “Helena,” she prompted.

  “Helena,” he repeated, as if trying it on for size. “That’s quite a mouthful. May I call you Lena?”

  “Y-yes,” she replied, caught off guard. All of the other children had pet names, Ruti, Mischa—but she had always been Helena.

  “Lena,” he said again, a slight smile playing at the corners of his lips. His shoulders were broad, forearms strong. Sitting beside him, she felt oddly small and delicate.

  She struggled to remember what she wanted to say. “What are you doing here, Sam? Are the Americans coming to help us?”

  “No.” Her heart sank. The talk of the Americans entering the war had been growing in recent months, whispered everywhere from the hospital corridors to the market in the town square. And if the Americans weren’t coming yet, then what was he doing here? “That is, I mean...” He broke off. “I really can’t say too much,” he added apologetically. Then he frowned again. “You must be taking a terrible risk coming here.”

  Not really, she wanted to say, but that would be untrue. “Everything is dangerous now,” she replied instead. In truth, finding him was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in years, maybe ever, and she had been eager to return. “Especially going to see my mother.” She told him then about sneaking in and out of Kraków, her near-encounter with the jeep. “Of course, if not for the German I would never have come this way and found you.” She could feel herself blush again.

  He did not seem to notice, though, but continued staring at her, his brow crinkled. “I wish you wouldn’t go to the city again.”

  Helena was touched by his concern, more than she might have expected from a man she just met. “That’s what my...” She stopped herself from telling him about Ruth, the fact that she had a twin. She did not want to acknowledge her prettier sister. “There are five children in the family, including me. I’m the one who has to go check on Mama. My father is gone and there’s no one else to make sure she’s cared for.”

  Helena’s thoughts turned to her mother. She’d actually seemed better today. For once she’d been awake and hadn’t mistaken Helena for her sister. And she had reached for the bread that Helena offered. For a second, Helena had hesitated; she had hoped to keep the extra food for the soldier. She was overcome with shame and had quickly broken the bread and moistened it. “Pani Kasia says that they’re going to kill us,” Mama had announced abruptly as she chewed, gesturing to the woman in the bed next to hers. She had an unworried, slightly gossipy tone as though discussing the latest rumor about one of the neighbors back home.

  Inwardly, Helena had blanched. She had worked so hard to shield Mama from the outside world. But the hospital was a porous place and news seeped through the cracks. “She’s a crazy old woman,” Helena replied carefully in a low voice. For months she had done her best to keep the truth from her mother without actually lying to her, and she didn’t want to cross that line now.

  “And sour to boot,” Mama added, smiling faintly. There was a flicker of clarity to her eyes and for a second Helena glimpsed the mother of old, the one who had baked sweet cakes and rubbed their feet on frigid winter nights. There were so many things she wanted to ask her mother about her childhood and the past and what her hopes and dreams had been.

  “Mama...” She turned back, then stopped. Her mother was staring out the window, once more the cloud pulled down over her face like a veil, and Helena knew that she was gone and could not be reached.

  “It’s so brave of you to make that journey every week,” Sam said, drawing her from her thoughts. His voice was full with admiration.

  “Brave?” She was unaccustomed to thinking of herself that way. “You’re the brave one, leaving your family to come all the way over here.”

  “That’s different,” he replied, and a shadow seemed to pass across his face.

  “How old are you, anyway?” she asked, hearing her sister’s phantom admonition that the question was too blunt.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Same as me,” she marveled.

  “Almost nineteen. I enlisted the day after my birthday.”

  “Did you always want to be a soldier?”

  “No.” His face clouded over. “But I had to come.”

  “Why?”

  He bit his lip, not answering. Then he lifted his shoulders, straightening. “When I joined the army, they sent me to school in Georgia, that’s in the southern part of the United States, for nearly a year. I had to learn to be a soldier, you see, and then how to be a paratrooper.”

  Helena processed the information. She had never thought about someone becoming a soldier; it seemed like they were already that way. But now she pictured it, Sam donning his uniform and getting his hair cut short. “Is that why it’s taking so long for the Americans to come?” It came out sounding wrong, as though she was holding him personally responsible for his country.

  But he seemed to understand what she meant. “In part, yes.” His brow wrinkled. “Some people don’t want us to enter the war at all.” How could the Americans not help? Helena wanted to ask. Sam continued, “Everyone has to be trained, they have to plan the missions...” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t say too much. It’s nothing personal,” he hastened to add. “I’m not supposed to talk about it with anyone.”

  “I understand.” But the moment hung heavy between them. She was a Pole and not to be trusted.

  “They don’t know,” he explained earnestly. “I mean, the American people know about Hitler, of course, and the Jews there are concerned for their relatives, trying to get them out. Until I came to Europe, I had no idea...” He stopped abruptly.

  “No idea about what?”

  Sam bit his lip. “Nothing.” Helena could tell from his voice that there were things that she, even in the middle of it all, had not seen. Things he would not share with her. “Anyway, our rabbi back home said that—”

  “You’re Jewish?” she interrupted. He nodded. She was surprised—he didn’t look anything like the Jews she’d seen in the city, shawl covered and stooped. But there was something unmistakably different about him, a slight arch to his nose, chin just a shade sharper than the people around here. His dark hair was curly and so thick it seemed that water could not penetrate it. “You don’t look it,” she blurted. Her face flushed. “That is, the Jews around here...”

  He smiled, not offended. “There are different kinds of Jews. Some, like the Orthodox, are more observant than others, and they dress differently.”

  That was not quite what Helena had meant, but she was grateful to let it be. Thinking of the empty streets and shuttered shops of Kazimierz, and what the nurse had told her about the ghetto and her sister about the Jews of Nowy S˛acz, she was suddenly nervous for him. Not just a foreigner, but a Jew. The full danger of his situation crashed down upon her. “Did they make you come?”

  “No, I volunteered.” He cleared his throat. “That is, the kind of work I do...” She wanted to ask what that was exactly, but she knew he wouldn’t sa
y. “It’s a really big honor and I raised my hand to be considered. At first they said no—they were worried that being Jewish I might let emotions get in the way.” His face was open and honest in a way that she liked, as if he could not hide a single feeling. So unlike here, where everyone kept their eyes low to avoid trouble. “Are you Catholic?”

  Helena nodded, picturing the worn old rosary Mama kept in her bed stand drawer, even at the hospital. She had insisted on dressing the children in their best clothes and going to Mass each Sunday. Helena always dreaded the stares of the other villagers, wondering where their father was, speculating that he was sleeping off another night of drinking. After Mama got sick and had gone to the sanatorium, Ruth had stubbornly persisted in herding the children to church. But then their better clothes became too small and threadbare to wear and after Tata died they stopped going altogether. “Everyone is here, more or less.”

  He did not speak further, but stared off into the distance. “What are you going to do now?” she asked finally.

  He paused. “I don’t know. Stay here for now, I guess. I don’t have much choice with this leg.” He finished the bread and looked at her with a serious expression. “When you found me, was there any sign of anyone else?”

  She shook her head. “No one. You were by yourself in the woods. No other people, no plane. And the night before, when I heard the crash, I never saw anything.” She did not have the heart to tell him about the force with which the crash had shaken their house, making the likelihood that anyone else had survived virtually nil.

  “No, you wouldn’t have. We flew in low with lights down. It was an engine problem, I think, maybe birds, that got us—not the Germans.” The distinction seemed to matter to him a great deal. “The plane was too low for our chutes to open properly. I doubt the others were as lucky.” Pain washed over his face. His own injuries had been awful, but surely his fellow soldiers had suffered worse. She was seized with the urge to put her arms around him and comfort him, as Ruth might Dorie when she scraped a knee. But offering comfort did not come naturally to Helena and she stopped, caught off guard by the unfamiliar impulse.

  He cleared his throat and took her hand in his. “You cut yourself.” The spot where she had caught her hand on the thorny bush while fleeing had reopened from the cold, dry air.

  She pulled back sharply. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It isn’t that.” She was ashamed of the rough calluses, the places where her knuckles had split from chopping wood. Ruth always scolded her to take care of her hands. She kept her own soft by wearing an old pair of Tata’s work gloves as she washed and cleaned, rubbing lanolin into her palms and pushing back her cuticles. Ruth took time to do the little things, as though it still mattered and there were young men looking for wives and not that Piotr, her last best hope, had disappeared into the abyss. For once Helena wished that she had listened.

  “May I?” He reached out once more. Helena nodded, then extended her hand, allowing him to cradle it in the warmth of his own. He examined it carefully. She felt silly having him worrying about such a little cut, when he was so much more seriously wounded. He dropped her hand and she wondered if he was repulsed by its coarseness. But he reached in his pocket and pulled out a small tube, uncapped it. “It’s a salve,” he explained as he squeezed some into his palm. “Hard to believe that I lost almost everything but managed to keep this.”

  “Plus your flashlight and your gun,” she replied pointedly.

  He blinked with surprise. “Yeah, that, too.” A moment of awkward distrust passed between them, then evaporated. He took her hand in his own once more, sending shivers of unfamiliar warmth through her as he rubbed the lotion into her skin.

  She pulled away again. “I can do it.”

  “Of course.” Sam held out the tube. He had strong wrists, flat on top with a few dark hairs curling toward the backs of his hands. She was suddenly mindful of her thick stockings, the darning where they had torn at the knee impossible to conceal.

  She finished rubbing in the lotion, studying him more closely now. “Your scar—is it from the war?”

  “No, I fell when I was younger,” he answered, a beat too quickly.

  She recapped the tube and tried to hand it back. “You keep it,” she said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t...”

  “Okay, then I’ll give you some more next time.” Next time. The two words hung in the air, waiting for her to refute them.

  She looked up, noticing then how the sun had dipped low. “I have to go.” She stood reluctantly. Talking with Sam had been such a reprieve from the dreariness of the rest of her life. “Do you need anything else?”

  “Some longer branches, if you wouldn’t mind. I can use them to make a crutch.”

  “I saw some out by the knoll.” She returned a few minutes later with several pieces of wood.

  “Thank you,” Sam said. “I didn’t expect... That is, I didn’t think people here would be nice.”

  “Oh.” She brought her hand to her mouth, feeling her cheeks flush.

  “That was thoughtless of me to say,” he recovered hastily. “You have to understand, the Jews who came to America from Poland, well, they left for a reason and maybe they didn’t have the best experience here, or leave with the best impression of the people.” He was talking quickly now, stumbling over his words. But it was more than just awkwardness, or embarrassment over what he had said. He was nervous. “Thank you,” he repeated, somehow making the words sound like something more. She nodded and started toward the door.

  “Please wait.” She turned back. “It’s important, you understand, that no one else know I am here.” His voice was grave and she knew he was talking about something larger than his personal safety.

  “I promise.”

  He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again and stood reluctantly. “Lena, wait...” She turned back as he struggled to stand, holding on to the wall of the chapel. “The trains,” he said. “Can you see them from where you live?”

  Helena hesitated, puzzled. She nodded. From the window of the barn loft where she had always hidden as a child when things got bad one could see the tracks. She went there still when she needed a moment of quiet. The trains had changed lately, increasing their frequency, seeming to move with grim determination. “You can tell a lot from the rail lines—how often they go, in which direction, what kind of cars they are carrying, if they are empty or full.”

  “I’ll watch,” she promised.

  She noticed the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin, which seemed to have grown thicker during her visit. “I can bring a razor next time,” she said, remembering her father’s, which sat in a tin cup in the cupboard, waiting for the soft peach fuzz on Michal’s upper lip to evolve.

  “You mean you’ll... That is...” He paused, conflict washing over his face. “No, you mustn’t come again. It isn’t safe,” he added, and she saw then that he was worried for her safety. He was setting her free, giving her permission to go and not come back. Could she take it? Her shoulders slumped and she was suddenly overwhelmed and saddened, by all that had happened and that she had taken on in coming here—and by the fact that she was now leaving him.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she replied firmly, not realizing that she was making the promise until the words had flown from her mouth. Then, before he could argue further, she turned and started down the hill.

  6

  After Helena disappeared into the forest, Ruth set Karolina down to play with wooden blocks by the fire and busied herself cleaning up the breakfast dishes. When she finished, she dried her hands and opened the cupboard. In the back, exactly as Mama had kept it, was the glass jar of honey. Ruth had discovered the jar when she was eight, and Mama (whose sweet tooth was her one weakness) had shared a bit with her in exchange for keeping it a secret. Ruth dipped
a finger in it now and then put it in her mouth, the familiar sweetness a reminder of happier times. How wonderful it had been to have something that was just hers, instead of split between her and Helena. Guilt surged through her. She should share it with the children, a rare treat for all of them. But then it would be gone. It was all right to keep this one thing as hers alone, wasn’t it? Better for them not to get used to such things, anyway, when they likely would not have any more.

  Checking on Karolina, who was still playing contentedly, Ruth poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the seat by the window. The wind whistled, seeping through the cracks. Outside Michal and Dorie continued to run, undeterred by the cold. As Ruth looked around the cottage, a sense of foreboding overcame her. “Things are changing,” Helena had observed cryptically the previous evening. Why did she say this as though it were a good thing? Ruth had liked the old world with its seasons and predictable expectations. Now everything was topsy-turvy, uncertain.

  She shifted uncomfortably, thinking of Piotr. The memory of his face had grown fuzzy in her mind since the last time he’d come to see her. She had taken the time that morning to roll her hair into a fine braided knot. “Ruth, you look like a princess!” Dorie had exclaimed. Touched, Ruth had glowed with a bit of nearly forgotten pride. “Princess” was Dorie’s highest honor, and one she had only bestowed on Mama—until now.

  Piotr had appeared across the field from town at one o’clock, as he had each Sunday, head bowed low against an autumn wind. He was not bad looking, Ruth had reflected. Taller than her by a head and broad-shouldered, he had thick features and colorless blond hair. Balled in one hand was the scarf she had knitted for him and she wondered why he wasn’t wearing it. She might have kept it for Christmas and given it to him as a gift, but she’d wanted him to have it exactly for days like this.

  “Cze´s´c.” He greeted her with an awkward kiss that did not quite reach her cheek. She waited for him to notice her hair, but he did not remark upon it.