Page 10 of The Storyteller of Krakow

The evenings in our huts were not much better. We were given basic rations of wood and coal that we stretched and stretched to keep those iced whispers from the cracks in the walls and under the door to no avail. Eventually, the fuel would run out, and we would end up huddling, fully dressed against each other for warmth as we tried to sleep.

During that winter, I told myself if I ever made it out alive, I would never be cold again. I would make sure of it. I would constantly have access to steaming bowls of thick soup, of hot coffee and tea, and a roaring fire. Or I would live somewhere in the world where the cold never reached it – I heard Australia was the sort of place for that from Helena. She loved geography and would tell me about all the countries she had learned about, their culture, their food, and we would talk about them, pretending that we were there, in Australia, on the sun-drenched coasts of Italy, in California, ordering as much food as we could, telling each other that we were finally free and never had to be cold again.

But Helena died a few months into that winter. Frostbite got her, took away toes and fingers, and finally her. Soon after, Grzegorz died in an accident where a tree fell on top of him. Others said he was alive for hours before the guards allowed anyone to move the trunk away, calling out to his dead sister and to his dead parents as he lay there waiting to die.

I tried not to think about Grzegorz and the way he died, and to ignore the death that constantly surrounded us. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, I just didn’t know how to cope with it.

As the days turned into months, without Helena in our hut, I had no one to ask much about Australia, so I made things up. It was the only way to survive. I had to pretend – to live in my head, to not think about Mama or Piotr, to not think about the fact that I was probably going to die in this place. So, my comfort became my thoughts, and bit by bit, I stopped talking, stopped wanting to hear Father’s voice. I lived solely in my head, dreaming of a different life, because reality was simply too harsh.

In my stories there was often our home, back in Poland, but it was brighter than I ever really remembered it to be and hazy and colourful at the edges. It sat behind a curtain of birch trees, and the snow there was not the camp’s dirty crust but clean sugar that squeaked underfoot. If you spoke the right word at the threshold, the door would open by itself, and the heat inside would breathe out to meet you.

My mother and Piotr were there, of course, because in this house, our house, no one ever stayed dead. Piotr was in the parlour at the piano, his fingers sure on the keys. Then sometimes he would be at his chessboard, moving the black and white pieces about, smiling, winning his game.

Mother was there, everywhere. In the kitchen, in the sitting room – her scent, her warmth, drifted and lit up each room so I was always near her.

I repeated the story daily, changing small things, but never the core of it – they were still with me.

The gulag encouraged that kind of retreat. It was too vast to hold in the mind properly. The days were an endless white plain broken up by black sticks of trees and the thin, dirty line of huts; the nights were the same, only colder, the sky stretched so wide it looked like it could swallow you. The camp itself felt less like a place and more like a system. Work columns moving out in the dark, returning in the dark, bodies replaced as soon as they were gone, as if the land could grow prisoners the way it did trees.

In this world, it was not just me who made themselves as small as possible and kept themselves locked away in their minds. Some kept to their own corner and spoke to no one, saving their breath like we saved food. Others formed tight little knots not allowing anyone else in – two women sharing soup, men who stood together, backs against the wind, their eyes trained on each other. Me, I went quiet and stayed with my stories. I stopped giving away words I could not spare, and I stopped taking in other people’s voices because they made the world feel real, and I couldn’t bear it.

* * *

The months of winter in the gulag stretched further than those in Poland. Even when I knew it was spring, and the snow should be finally melting, here it did not. It was then that Father stopped talking so much, stopped trying to get me out of my head. Sometimes he would stare at the sky – the sky there was always huge and grey – and he would look as though he were calling someone in a dream. I knew he was thinking of Mother and Piotr and our home so many miles away.

The evenings were the worst. When the work was done and the wind lifted off the taiga that surrounded us, Father and I sat in that hut, in our respective silences, our bellies growling for food, our bodies aching, listening to the wind as it screamed through the dense forests. It frightened me, the noise. Strange, I know, that this is what scared me – not the deaths, or impending death – but that scream of the wind through the thousands of trees. I would have nightmares that it was a banshee, and each morning, when I set out to work, I had to tell myself it wasn’t real, that there was no banshee.

One evening, as the fire burned low and Father sat with his hands stretched to the weak heat, there came a scrape at the door and a woman from the next hut slipped in without waiting to be asked. She was one of those camp women who had become all angles, her cheekbones like hooks under the skin, but her eyes were still sharp.

I was about to ask what she wanted when Father looked up and gave a weak smile.

‘Come, come warm yourself,’ he told her.

Glad that this stranger had made Father speak, or at least be slightly animated, I nodded at her too.

She crouched by the pitiful fire, held her palms to the flame, and said, ‘You hear them tonight?’

I thought she meant the wind – the banshees.

‘The bears,’ she said then, glancing at me. ‘There are bears here.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there are,’ my father said. ‘I saw one once. Not here. At a zoo. Do you remember, Lena?’

I shook my head. We had never seen a bear.

‘Big ones, they are,’ the woman said. ‘There was an old woman in my village when I was a girl who used to say a bear never appears for nothing. If one crosses your path and doesn’t kill you, it means life hasn’t finished with you yet, and the bear knows it – they feel it – so they let you go.’ She grinned, revealing a mouth with only a few teeth left. ‘Silly peasant talk, that’s what you think?’

‘Not at all,’ my father said. ‘Animals. They know things. Of course they do. Say, Lena, you remember, don’t you, how we saw that bear at the zoo?’

He looked at me, confusion filling his eyes, and yet there was hope there, too.

‘I remember,’ I said. I had to give him that at least.

‘My brother saw one once,’ she continued, ‘years ago. Came home white as flour and told my mother it had stood up on its hind legs and sniffed him all over. He thought he was done for. But it dropped back down, turned and lumbered off into the pines. My mother cried and kissed his face and said, “Good. Then you’ll live long enough to be a nuisance.”’

The woman laughed. ‘He did, too. Married badly. Lost three teeth.’ She opened her mouth to show her own gaps. ‘Like me. I’ve lost more, though.’

‘We saw a bear once, didn’t we, Lena?’ my father asked again, looking at the old woman, then at me.