Page 19 of The Storyteller of Krakow

I murmured that I did, and let him then talk on about himself.

But what I really wanted to do was to spit my anger back at him and watch it land. I wanted to tell him he didn’t get to decide what I was, or who I belonged to, or how I should behave. But the wanting and the doing were two different things. My courage had always been loud when I was safe at home with people I knew, like my parents and neighbours. Here, though, it went quiet.

Janek just had this way of making me feel childish, ungrateful, as if any resistance proved I didn’t understand how the world worked. And the more I tried to steady myself, the more uncertain I became about my judgement, about my worth, about whether I was, in fact, as helpless as he said. I didn’t have a name for it then. I only knew that when he was pleased, the air in my lungs felt easier, and when he wasn’t, everything in me tightened, waiting for something I couldn’t predict.

It was simply easier to agree. To let it be for now. I didn’t have the age, the wisdom, or even the energy to keep fighting it. So, I let it be.

If it hadn’t been for a new arrival, I am sure I would have gone insane, much like my father had. It was a woman called Zosia who drew me back into a form of myself.

She came in the autumn, as the chill at night brought me closer to my memories of the gulag, but the heat in the day made it almost pleasant to sit under my tree and watch.

I remember seeing her face, drawn and frightened, as she received her rations and then looked about the barn for somewhere to sit.

I knew that look. I am sure it had been etched on my own face, and as she stood, a bowl of soup in her hands, her eyes roving about looking for a smile, a welcome wave, I stood, marched up to her, and said, ‘I’m Lena. Stick with me.’

It surprised me, at how I did it. At how this one small thing meant I was going against Janek and reclaiming something for just me. I felt a little wobble of uncertainty, then pushed it aside. She was new. She would talk to me, and I would have this one person, whether Janek liked it or not.

Her face immediately relaxed with relief, and she gave me a little smile and duly followed me to my bunk.

‘You’re on your own?’ I asked as she sipped at her soup, her eyes not managing to stay still, flicking from one face to the next.

‘I am,’ she squeaked.

‘Me too. My parents died. My brother too.’

She nodded. No more was needed.

‘I have Janek, though,’ I told her as she ate. ‘He’s really annoying sometimes, but he gets me extra food. If he tells you to not talk to me, just ignore him.’

She nodded again. Another sip of soup and I wondered if she had really taken in what I was saying.

I found, then, that I became like Janek. I began to talk and talk, filling in her silence until she felt the need to stop me.

‘They say we will be going in March, to Iraq. I don’t know much about Iraq myself, but others say it is warm there, probably as warm as here, but they said there’ll be more food, actual places to live. Janek has signed me up to be a driver even though I’ve only driven once, back in Poland. It didn’t go well. You?’

‘Nurse,’ she said. ‘I used to be one.’

‘You still are one,’ I said.

‘How old are you?’ she asked, suddenly looking at me with those shifty eyes.

I sighed. ‘Eighteen. No one really thinks I am because I’m slight. I didn’t use to be this thin, you know, but the gulag.’

‘Same,’ she said and broke her gaze from mine and looked down at her chest. ‘I used to look like a woman. Not now!’ Then she laughed, shook her head and began to cry.

All the emotions came at once. I knew that too. It still happened to me. Whenever I bathed, I could hardly bear to look at my flattened chest, my ribs that jutted out, the strange pockets of sagging skin all over my body.

It was shame that I felt about my body. Shame, regret, anger, sadness. It was all there, all the time, just lurking under the surface waiting for a moment to be released.

‘We’ll be back to ourselves one day.’ I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, mimicking Janek and what he had done to me.

‘You stay with me, and we’ll be all right.’

Zosia and I did stick together. She had been lucky to get in the barn; two other women had died and were ferried off to the building that I had first thought was a warehouse, but which in fact was an infirmary.

She didn’t think she had been that lucky, but as the weeks marched their way further into the end of the year, and the cold wind whipped at the sand, stirring it up into large clouds of dust, and as it whistled and rattled at the thin slatted wood, she realised life was better in here than it was in the tents.

Zosia and I got closer the way starving people do: quietly, and without ceremony. We queued for water together and shared the weight of the tin between us when one of us started to shake. We picked at seams and lice and pretended it was normal intimacy. At night, when the barn went dark and the wind found every gap in the boards, we lay on our bunks and talked in whispers, like children afraid of being caught awake by their parents.