I have a thought a doctor shouldn’t have. The rumour is that over in Silesia, people are eating each other. Dimmi wouldn’t last a week there.
‘Let me get it looked at,’ I say, reaching for the lock. ‘All our work is guaranteed.’
That’s true, it is. Gabriek insists on it. Which is pretty generous when your business is fixing up stuff that’s been bombed.
Dimmi’s father hands me the lock, and the key we made for it.
‘Let the boy go,’ he says to Dimmi. ‘It’s guaranteed. The quicker we get it mended, the better.’
Dimmi gives a big angry sigh and puts his face closer to mine.
‘Here’s my guarantee,’ he says. ‘If that lock’s not mended by tomorrow, I’ll kill you and your father.’
Dimmi’s father doesn’t say anything.
I nod to show them I’ve got the message.
Dimmi doesn’t know where we live, but he knows we can’t stay off the streets forever.
In the good old days, when I was a little kid, nobody would kill two people over a lock. But the bossy girl was right. Times have changed.
I’m hoping one day they’ll change back. And I want me and Gabriek to be around when they do.
So I hope this lock can be mended.
Gabriek, please, don’t drink too much this morning.
* * *
I don’t like going home in daylight like this.
Darkness is safer. People can’t see where you’re heading. And if you’re being followed it’s easier to give people the slip in the dark.
But this is an emergency.
With a bit of luck I’ll be home before Gabriek has his breakfast vodka. So he can fix the lock. Get Dimmi off our necks.
All this fuss over a simple repair.
Why couldn’t Dimmi and his dad have just said to themselves, poor Gabriek, when he worked on this lock he was probably sad from missing his dear dead wife and probably drank too much vodka and overlooked a bit of bomb damage. Easily fixed. No need to make a big fuss with violent threats and oxygen deprivation.
But no.
Which is typical of how things are these days. People’s friendliness and manners are as wrecked as these streets.
What’s that noise?
Gunshots.
That’s exactly what I mean. I bet that’s people losing their tempers over something stupid. A bit of one person’s rubble falling into another person’s soup or something.
Hang on, I don’t think it is.
Those people running out of that building look like they’re worried about something more serious than rubble in their turnip broth.
Oh.
That boy’s fallen over. He’s not moving.
The running people are leaving him behind.
I look around. I can’t see the people doing the shooting. They must be going another sneaky way through the ruins to cut the running people off. It’s a trick those Poland For The Poles thugs use a lot.
I hurry over to the boy.
He’s lying on bits of a bombed bathroom that are scattered where a kitchen used to be. He’s almost as pale as the pieces of tiles and the pieces of sink.
‘It hurts,’ he says in a small scared voice.
He’s bleeding badly.
In the distance, more gunfire.
I give my glasses a quick clean so I can see what I’m doing. I hunt through the boy’s clothes, trying to find where the blood’s coming from. There’s so much of it you’d think it was from everywhere. But that’s not possible, not with the boy’s coat still in one piece.
He looks about seven. His pulse is very faint.
I find the gunshot wound. It’s in his thigh.
I wish Gabriek was here. Mostly so he could help me do a clean and heat. These ripped veins and arteries need burning shut with a hot blade.
I also wish Gabriek could see this. A little boy bleeding to death in someone’s kitchen.
Would he still say don’t get involved?
The bullet went in and out so there are two wounds and I have to stop the bleeding fast and I don’t have time to make a fire myself.
Think about what you can do, Gabriek always says, not about what you can’t.
I grab a bandage from my medical bag, and the disinfectant bottle and my scalpel. I cut the boy’s trousers and pull the cloth away from the wounds.
The boy doesn’t move or make a sound. I think he’s gone unconscious.
I cut the trousers more, a long strip of cloth which I wind round the boy’s leg above the bullet holes. I knot it as tightly as I can. Then I pour disinfectant onto the wounds.
The boy doesn’t open his eyes or yell. This isn’t good. The disinfectant is cabbage vodka, which hurts a lot.
I bandage the wounds as tightly as I can.
Blood comes through.
I’ve only got one bandage left. I cut another strip off the boy’s trousers, wrap that over the wounds, then tie the last bandage on top.
Blood still comes through.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
It comes out almost as a sob, which is not how doctors should talk. But I can’t help it. The boy still hasn’t opened his eyes.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ says a gruff voice.
I look up.
A man is standing over me. He’s looped with ammunition belts and is holding a machine gun.
Two other armed men are behind him.
They’ve all got Poland For The Poles badges on their jackets.
‘Time to move on,’ says the first man. ‘Next patient’s waiting.’
He grabs me with one hand and yanks me up.
‘No,’ I yell, trying to get back to the boy. ‘I haven’t finished.’
The man pulls me further away.
‘You did your best,’ he says. ‘That’s all anyone can do. And it’s more than a Fritz deserves.’
He shoots the boy.
I scream and hurl myself at the man, trying to rip his eyes, his lips, anything.
The other two men grab me and slap me and a sack is jammed over my head. I’m flung over what feels like someone’s shoulder and my ankles are gripped so tightly all I can think about is the pain.
Which is a relief.
That’s the good thing about pain.
It helps you when you can’t bear to think about other things.
, I hope, I’ll know where these Poland For The Poles thugs are taking me.
Wherever it is, we’re going there by truck. I can hear the engine howling and whining through the sack over my head, and I can feel the metal floor shuddering under me.
We bump along some streets.
Fast, it feels like.
I start thinking about the boy. An innocent kid, shot by grown-ups he didn’t even know.
Barney and Genia and Zelda would be so disappointed if they knew the war was over and people were still doing that.
We stop.
I’m lifted down from the truck.
Well, dropped. Which isn’t good for legs like mine. I still get leg pain after the two years I spent hiding in a hole. But I’m not letting these pustules know that.
The sack is pulled off. I blink in the daylight. We’re in a courtyard, me and about ten armed men.
One of them comes over to me.
Stares at me.
Snorts.
Swears at the other men.
‘I said a doctor,’ he hisses.
The other men glance at each other.
‘At the food drop they say he’s good,’ says the one who shot the wounded boy.
The snorter, who must be the leader from the way the other men aren’t shooting him for being rude, snorts again.
‘He’s a child,’ he scowls.
‘I’m a surgical assistant,’ I say indignantly. ‘Six months with Doctor Zajak in a partisan unit in the forest.’
I don’t know why I said that. There’s no way I’m offering my services to these murderers.
The leader gives me another hard stare. He’s
not very old, but he’s going bald. His wispy pale hair looks like it’s trying to get as far away as it can from his angry face.
I try to stare back.
‘Bring him,’ snaps the leader to the other men.
They take me into a room off the courtyard. Lying on a table is a wounded man, whimpering. He’s got a broken leg. I don’t need to be an expert on bones to know that. I can see them sticking out of his thigh.
He’s bleeding badly. The men feeding him vodka aren’t doing a very good job of stopping the blood.
‘Do what you have to,’ says the leader to me.
One of the other men pushes my medical bag into my hands.
I hesitate.
My medical books say a doctor’s job is to care for human life. To heal everyone. To do no harm.
This man is in agony. His human life will be over if he bleeds much more. But if I stop the bleeding, what harm will he do when he’s back on his feet?
I need a book about difficult medical decisions.
I haven’t got one.
The thug leader helps out.
‘If he lives,’ says the leader, ‘then you live.’
I decide to accept the offer. Most people would. It just means that in the future I’ll have to do a lot of good things to make up for whatever the man on the table does.
The leader goes.
I get my scalpels out of my medical bag. At least Dimmi’s lock is still there.
While the men get the other things I need for a clean and heat, I try to stop my hands shaking.
I’ve never done a medical job this big before, not without Doctor Zajak to help me. What if I can’t do it? Doctor Zajak was very grumpy, but he never actually shot me if I got something wrong.
A couple of the men jam a leather gun holster into the wounded man’s mouth for him to bite on.
One of the others heats a scalpel blade.
About six of them hold the man down.
I splash vodka over his leg. I try to ignore his yells and sort out his blood vessels as best I can. Carefully, I sear the damaged ones closed. The man makes a lot of noise. I know he’s a killer, but I feel sorry for him because there’s worse to come.
‘This might hurt a bit,’ I tell him, which I think is the professional thing to say, but I don’t know if it’s actually going to help much.
I climb up onto the table. I take a deep breath. Using all my body weight and as much of Doctor Zajak’s knowledge as I can remember, I push the man’s bones back into place.
Sort of.
It’s the best I can do without plaster and a bone diagram book. He’ll live if he doesn’t rupture his throat with all the screaming. But he’ll be a cripple. Which isn’t all bad. It might give his victims the chance to run away.
My arms have gone weak with the stress and the responsibility. It takes me a while to bandage the man’s leg with boiled sheet strips.
‘You’re good,’ says one of the other men. ‘We thought we’d lost him. He fell down a lift shaft chasing a Jew.’
I don’t ask what happened to the poor Jewish person. I’m just glad they don’t know I’m one.
The men slap me on the back very hard and toast me in vodka. Then one nudges the others.
‘Gogol,’ he hisses.
They finish their vodka quickly.
The leader comes back in. He looks at the patient’s bandage and nods.
‘Are you a patriot?’ he says.
I realise Gogol is talking to me.
I hesitate. I’m not sure exactly what a patriot is. I think it’s somebody who kills other people for not being patriots.
‘Let’s see if you are,’ says Gogol. ‘Bring him.’
A couple of the men grab me.
I’ve got a horrible feeling there’s worse to come for me too.
We’re back on the truck.
They kept me locked up for a few hours, and now we’re driving around. I’m sitting in the front between Gogol and the driver. My head’s not in a sack this time so I can see where we’re going.
Streets.
Wrecked streets, empty and dark.
‘Our beautiful country,’ says Gogol, staring out at the broken buildings as we lurch and thump between them.
Is this the patriot test? I want to do well in the patriot test. If I do well, I’m hoping they won’t shoot me before I can get away.
But I’m not sure what to say.
Our country isn’t beautiful at the moment.
When I was a little kid, me and Dad used to build cities out of breadcrumbs on the table after dinner. Beautiful cities. One time Mum accidently opened the window and an entire city vanished. Just breadcrumbs blowing in the breeze.
That’s what happened to our country.
Except it wasn’t a breeze.
‘Our great and glorious nation,’ says Gogol. ‘Crawling with vermin.’
I try to look like I agree.
‘Nazis?’ I say.
Gogol scowls and spits out the truck window.
‘Forget the Nazis,’ he says. ‘Poland has been crawling with vermin for centuries. Germans, Austrians, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians. Now we’re cleaning them up.’
I hate it when people say things like that. Cleaning up is what you do to rubble blocking the street and rat poo on the floor. Cleaning up isn’t killing people.
I’m not sure if it’s patriotic to tell somebody a thing they might not know, but I’m going to anyway.
‘That wounded boy your men shot today,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t foreign, he was Polish.’
Gogol glares at me like he’s starting to think I might be vermin myself.
I stick my jaw out to make me look like a tough Polish patriot, and try to explain.
‘He spoke without a foreign accent,’ I say. ‘So he was born here.’
‘Of course he was born here,’ sneers Gogol. ‘That’s the problem. Outsiders have been spawning in our belly for centuries. When I shot his parents, and the slimy parasites begged for mercy, you could have sharpened a knife on their accents.’
I don’t think I’m going to pass the patriot test. If it goes on much longer, I think I’m going to fail it for being sickened by the testing person and bashing him on the head with a large lock.
‘Over there,’ yells a voice in the back of the truck. ‘Apes.’
The driver stops the truck with a skid.
Gogol’s men leap out.
In a nearby building, lights are flickering and the shadows of people are moving.
‘I’ve been after this pack for a long time,’ mutters Gogol.
He turns to me.
‘Wait here,’ he says. ‘Some of these vermin bite. Likely be more work for you tonight.’
Gogol jumps down from the truck and turns to me again.
‘Don’t think of running,’ he says. ‘You’re only alive because you’re useful. If you run, I’ll find you.’
He goes.
‘He will,’ says the driver, clambering out of the truck. ‘One morning you’ll wake up and smell bacon and he’ll be there, sitting on the end of your bed with a frying pan, cooking your feet.’
The driver goes too.
Gunshots and screams echo inside the building.
I don’t know what to do.
I want to go inside and care for human life. But I also want to care for my own human life, and disobeying somebody like Gogol feels like a very unwise medical decision.
That’s something else I don’t like about being thirteen. You’re not a kid any more, but you still get scared.
Doesn’t matter. You can still do things when you’re scared. I’ve seen partisan fighters hold off a whole Nazi tank while they were scared rigid and their urinary tracts weren’t coping that well either.
I’m going in there.
I open the truck door and jump down. And almost land on top of somebody. My heart valves lock. Gogol must have left a guard to shoot me if I try to get away.
I tense all my muscles to run. But the person staring
at me isn’t a selfish bully or a demented patriot or a murdering thug.
It’s a scared woman.
She looks as terrified as me. Her arms are wrapped round a cloth parcel. She holds it out.
‘Please,’ she says, with a strong accent. ‘Please.’
She pushes the parcel into my arms.
Before I can say anything she runs away. But she’s running in the wrong direction. Back towards the building. There must be somebody or something in there that’s very important to her.
Except what she’s doing is suicide.
Gogol’s men are coming out of the building. They start shooting. The woman weaves to one side, then the other.
Bullets hit her.
She spins and falls. Twists in agony on the ground. Shudders, then goes still.
I’m not staying still. I crouch low and head off in the opposite direction. My legs, which get even more stiff and painful when they’re scared, don’t make it easy. Running might be suicide for me too, but I’m not staying here. I’m not patching up another vicious killer ever and I don’t care if that makes me selfish or a bad doctor or both.
Gabriek’s been right all along. We should just take care of ourselves.
Don’t get involved.
Don’t take risks.
I reach a bombed-out building and clamber in through a hole in the wall and squat panting under what used to be a desk.
My chest hurts, mostly for the dead woman, but also because I’m so out of breath.
I realise I’m still holding the woman’s parcel.
No wonder I’m out of breath. It’s heavy. But I’m panting so hard the parcel feels like it’s moving.
Wait a sec, it is moving.
Something’s wriggling inside it.
Part of me wants to throw the parcel away and keep running. But I don’t. I start unwrapping it.
I’ve heard about this. People who love their pets so much they’ll do anything to save them.
I can’t leave a living creature to starve.
This must be a puppy. No way a cat would stay wrapped up like this.
I loosen the last layer, which is a tiny ragged blanket.
Suddenly there’s loud howling.
A small face is staring up at me, jaws open, furious. For a second I’m stunned. Then I put my hand over its mouth to try to smother the sound.
It’s not a dog, it’s a baby.