Pam Jenoff - The Winter Guest

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 and bile.