Page 20 of The Storyteller of Krakow

One evening she slid onto the bunk beside mine and opened her hand. A sweet sat there, wrapped in paper, the kind you could suck for an hour if you were patient.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,’ she said, and tipped it into my palm. ‘For you. A thank you for taking care of me.’

I unwrapped the sweet and put it on my tongue. It tasted of sugar and something sharp; lemon, maybe.

‘Tell me something,’ she said, settling back against the straw. ‘Something… not here. I’m sick of hearing about rations and lice and people’s feet.’

‘That’s all there is,’ I said.

‘No,’ Zosia said. ‘I mean before. Before all this. You must have done something normal once. You must have gone to a party. A dance. Don’t tell me you never danced.’

‘I danced,’ I said. ‘Once.’

‘Once,’ she repeated, delighted, as if I’d confessed to a crime. ‘Go on. Where? When? Was there music or was it just someone scraping a fiddle and everyone pretending it was romantic?’

I should have told her instead about Siedlce, about the orchard and the boys and my brother’s trousers round his ankles, letting her in on my shame about that day. Or I could have told her about the one dance I had with my father who tried to teach me and gave up in fits of laughter after witnessing my ungainly feet. But I didn’t; I didn’t want to talk about me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It isn’t interesting.’

‘It matters to me,’ Zosia said. ‘If you won’t tell yours, I’ll tell mine. Deal?’

I nodded.

‘It was my cousin’s birthday,’ she said. ‘A proper party. In a grand hall. There were tables with white linen. Silver forks and knives. Nice, you know? My cousin, well, her family, they were rich and rubbed shoulders with the upper classes. It made me nervous going to the party.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Why?’ She laughed. ‘Because I thought I’d make a fool of myself. My cousin had loaned me a dress, nice – too nice for me – and I felt, I don’t know, like not like myself. Anyway, I’d been there for an hour, maybe less, stood at the side while everyone danced – you know, proper dancing, and this man comes up. He’s tall, clean, hair slicked back like he’s in a film. And he bows.

‘“May I?” he says, then whisks me onto the dance floor.

‘And because I was an idiot, and because the music was perfect, and because the night was so – I don’t know – magical I suppose, I convinced myself I was dancing with a prince.’

‘A prince,’ I repeated. ‘Prince of where?’ I laughed.

She slapped my arm lightly. ‘Don’t ruin it. In my head he was foreign. French, or maybe British. He smelled of soap. He held my hand like it was made of glass. We danced and everyone watched us and I decided that he definitely was a prince and he had chosen me.’

‘And then?’ I said, because now I was invested despite myself.

‘And then the lights came up and he turned out to be the postmaster’s nephew,’ she said. ‘He bowed because he’d seen it in a film. I curtseyed like a fool. My sister never let me live it down.’

I laughed, properly, and it felt wrong in my throat, like using a muscle I’d forgotten I had. Zosia beamed at me, as if she’d fed me. I held that little scene in my mind, the ballroom, the neatly laid tables, the elegant women and men in suits. I liked this story. A neat beginning. A neat end. No bodies by the tracks.

We lay back, shoulders almost touching, and listened to the barn settle. After a while Zosia said, ‘You told me something the first day.’

I kept my eyes on the rafters. The sweet had melted away; only the taste of sugar remained.

‘You said if Janek ever tells me not to talk to you, I should ignore him,’ she went on. ‘Why would he say that?’

‘He’s just – I don’t know, protective of me.’

‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘Where is he – you haven’t introduced me to him yet?’

‘He’s actually been away,’ I said. ‘The day you arrived, he left with others in a truck to get supplies.’