Page 11 of The Storyteller of Krakow

‘We’ve all lost things, I suspect,’ the woman said and stood. ‘More than just a few teeth. Be careful now. Just in case they’re about. The bears.’

She left, and I saw Father shake his head. ‘She seems mad,’ he said. Then, ‘Lena, we saw a bear once, didn’t we?’

That night, sleep did not come cleanly. It came in starts, in little drops, and each time I rose half out of it I thought I heard something beyond the wall of the hut: the drag of breath, the crisp complaint of snow under a weight, a soft knock that was not a knock at all but something brushing the wood from outside.

At some point, the room tipped, and I was no longer lying on the bunk. I was standing. The door was open. No memory of opening it. No thought of Father behind me.

I stepped out barefoot, though the snow did not burn. The forest stood ahead of me, black and blue in the moonlight, every tree trunk straight as a soldier. The wind had gone. That was the strangest thing – the banshees were quiet.

Then, from between the trees came a slow shape. It did not hurry. It did not need to. A bear emerged from the dark with snow powdered across its back and shoulders, its fur so thick it looked like the forest itself had decided to move.

It stopped a few paces from me and lifted its head. I saw the steam of its breath first, then the wet shine of its nose, then its eyes – small, dark, steady.

Every part of me knew I should run, but my feet rooted to the ground. The woman’s voice came back to me as clearly as if she stood at my shoulder: If one crosses your path and doesn’t kill you, life hasn’t finished with you yet.

The bear took another step. Snow compressed beneath its weight with a muffled crunch. Its head lowered, not to strike but to sniff, and I could smell it then: musk and earth and winter and something wild.

My hand lifted of its own accord. Foolish, childish, dreamlike – all of it. Yet there I was, arm outstretched in the blue dark as if greeting a guest. The bear huffed warm air over my fingers. I felt it, I swear I felt it, the damp heat of its breath against my skin. Then, impossibly slowly, it leaned closer until its face filled my whole world. I could see frost caught in the coarse hairs around its muzzle. I could see one pale scar through the fur above its eye. It looked at me as though taking stock, counting, deciding.

‘Go on then,’ I whispered, though I do not know whether I meant take me or leave me.

For one terrible second, it seemed the animal understood. It rose slightly, huge as a door in front of me, and I thought: so this is it. But instead of striking, it gave a low rumble from deep in its body, almost like distant thunder, and turned its head towards the trees.

I followed its gaze. Between the trunks, far off, I thought I saw light – not camp light, not the filthy yellow of our lamps, but the warm gold of windows at home. A house. Heat. Safety. Piotr at the piano. Mother moving from room to room. It was there and then it wasn’t. When I looked back, the bear had stepped past me. Its flank brushed my coat – or the hem of my nightdress, or perhaps only the air itself – and it began to move on. One pace. Two.

I turned to watch it go, suddenly desperate not to let it leave before I understood what it had come to say. That was when something cracked in the darkness behind me: a branch, or a floorboard, or the sound of weight against the hut wall. The bear stopped. So did I. We both listened. And then I woke with my mouth open.

The hut was black. The fire had collapsed into red eyes in the grate. Father slept on his bunk, turned to the wall. For a long moment, I could not move. My hand was stretched out over the blanket as if I had only just touched something. Outside, beneath the whistle of the wind starting up again, came a sound so soft I might have imagined it: one slow crunch in the snow, then another, then silence.

I told myself it was only a dream, only the woman’s story seeping into my head, only hunger making folklore feel real. Even so, when I stepped outside for work the next morning, I looked at the ground by the hut before I could stop myself, half expecting to find the mark of something large that had stood there in the night and counted me, then spared me.

* * *

Days kept wearing away, and we were told by one of the others that we could barter for seeds and perhaps food from some of the people who lived out here.

‘There are people here – actually living here?’ I had asked this woman, whose face was so sunken in on itself so I could not tell how old she was. I felt a glimmer of hope – if there were villages, could we not escape?

‘They are forest people,’ the woman said. ‘They are poor, strange creatures. Lived all their lives out in this place. Don’t know what a town is, a shop. They just farm and survive. Who would do that? They have little but will barter. Don’t think they will help you or take you in. They won’t. It’s been tried.’

I told Father of this potential to perhaps get more food.

‘Some get seeds so they can grow a few vegetables,’ I told him one evening.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

‘If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?’ I asked.

He looked at me, and yet almost seemed to look through me.

‘Tata?’ I tried. ‘Do you know who I am?’

He still stared, then gave a small nod.

‘I can ask the guards if you can go to the infirmary?’ I suggested. He was far worse than I had realised, and yet I knew that this would not happen. The infirmary was generally where you went to die, and no one would try to make a man whose mind was fast leaving him well again. But I needed him, in this moment, to think that there was hope, whether it be the thought of food, or the thought of a doctor, of medicine – he needed something to cling on to.

‘Seeds,’ he said. He nodded, then went to his bunk and curled up into a ball.

I covered him with a blanket and whispered to him that we would go on Sunday, when the others had said it was the best time, and we would eat like kings afterwards.