Page 23 of The Storyteller of Krakow

I hesitated too long to answer and Janek pounced.

‘Look, Lena, why don’t you go and have a lie down. Zosia and I will go off to the mess, get some food, and bring you some. And I’ll entertain Zosia for a bit. How’s that?’

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ Zosia answered for me. ‘Go and rest, Lena. We’ll be back soon.’

That night, I lay on my bunk and replayed the moment Janek had looked at Zosia and then at me, like he was moving pieces on a board. I had spent the past year being pushed – by uniforms, by orders, by hunger, by the plain fact that a young woman alone doesn’t get to decide very much in wartime, and I could feel him trying to make himself one of those forces. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself he was only being kind in the way he understood. But my stomach didn’t believe me.

A week later, the camp began to buzz with a different kind of fear. Not the fear of sickness or frost, but the fear of movement. Lists went up. Names were called out. Men in better coats than ours shouted instructions as if we were cattle again, and perhaps we were. We were told we were going south, out of Uzbekistan, out of this waiting place, and that we would be taken to Iraq, where the British were and where Anders’ Army was meant to become something real. Training. Proper rations. A chance to fight the Germans eventually in Europe, instead of rotting in the dust. They said it like it was a gift, but I had learned by then that every gift comes with a rope attached.

I tried to picture Iraq. It sounded hot. It sounded far. Mostly, it sounded like another place I would not be allowed to stay. Since Piotr died, my life had become a line drawn across continents, each dot on the map a place where I had been hungry or cold or afraid. Siberia. Uzbekistan. Now Iraq. Always the same story: someone else decides, and you go, because the alternative is worse and because the war keeps roaring on in the distance, dragging everyone along behind it.

When the day came, we left at dawn, stumbling out with our bundles and our tin cups. Janek had our papers in his pocket. Of course he did.

He kept a hand on my elbow as we walked as if I might suddenly float away without him. Zosia stayed close on my other side, quieter than usual, her mouth set.

At the port we were put onto a ship with more people than sense. The smell hit first: diesel, sweat, old food, the sour panic of bodies packed too close. I had never been on the sea before. I imagined it would feel like freedom, open space and clean air. Instead, the deck rolled under my feet, and my stomach turned traitor.

I spent the first night with my face pressed to the rail, retching up nothing but bile while the wind slapped salt into my mouth. Around me, others did the same, leaning over, lying down, praying. Some didn’t get up again. In the morning, there were blankets on the deck that hadn’t been there the night before, shapes too still beneath them, and men who lifted those shapes as if they were sacks of flour and carried them away without ceremony. I watched and thought: even when you are ‘free’, you can still be disposed of.

They told us, as if repeating it made it kinder, that this was the route: out of the Soviet mess, down to where the British could feed us, train us, point us at the Germans. Iraq was not home. It was a staging ground. Another camp, another set of tents, another language in my ears.

By the time land finally appeared, a thin line on the horizon, I felt emptied out; scraped clean by the journey. I was weak too, could barely walk, could only keep a small amount of water down, and leaned on Janek to help me off the boat, glad of his strength and closeness for once.

But I do remember, walking onto land, finally, I remember thinking that even if I lived to be old, if I survived this, if I got strong, some part of me would still be on that endless road, being pushed from place to place by forces that didn’t know my name.

8

JANUARY 2014, KRAKÓW

Willa Nadziej (Hope Villa residential home)

I dreamt of the dead. They did not claw at me nor frighten me. They came as they had been in life, reenacting real memories we had shared. They acted their parts, line by line, movement by movement, unaware in that moment that they were no longer alive. Unaware that one movement, one thing to be said, might have changed their destiny. Sometimes we were back in our house, Piotr at the piano, and it looked and felt as it had in life and when I told Zosia about it. It made me yearn to stay there with them, but I could not because in those dreams I was me. I was me then, and they were ghosts of the past creating a chasm between us. I stood in those dreams and watched them in our shared memory: my father, my mother, Piotr. I tried to act my part as if we had all been alive again, but I knew too much and always ruined this experience by telling them in my dream that they were dead, and that I blamed myself for Piotr enlisting – for changing the quiet, shy boy that he used to be.

They looked at me in shock. Eyes wide. Mouths open. I always waited patiently for them to speak, to forgive me, to tell me I had the history of us upside down, back to front.

No sound came.

No words of reassurance.

I was left watching their fear until I woke.

When I did wake, I found I was tired even though it was past the time I usually roused.

It was no different for me after thinking about the past over the few weeks since I had first met Hana. Each night, my parents, Piotr, those from the gulag whose names escape me, those on the boat have visited me, each of them not knowing they are dead until I tell them. It has tired me beyond belief and has kept me much indoors and away from my usual café escapades in town.

I had seen Kasia over the weeks, harried on most days, and noticed a clean white circle on her left ring finger, and realised that she had recently taken off a ring. Was that what was worrying the child – her father gone, a mother alone? Why was she so quiet, so pensive, so like Piotr, and why could I not stop thinking about her?

I wondered if it was boredom, but also the tiny chance of seeing her little girl, the one with a pale face, and obsession about the bear, that made me itchy with anticipation. Maybe it was just something to while away the time in here before I became the next Bogdan.

Finally, one Wednesday, I saw her again, Hana, Kasia’s daughter. I went to the dining hall – unusual for me as I preferred to escape and go to my café for breakfast or lunch, taking my dinner in my room alone. But this day, I woke late, disturbed by dreams of the past: of Piotr, who asked me to help him; of my parents, their thin, white faces as they dug through the snow, digging their own graves.

When the dreams, and I say dreams and not nightmares, as they were the honest truth, had ended, I woke at 5 a.m., sweating with the bedsheets wrapped around my legs. By six, I finally fell into a black hole of sleep, waking to find that it was nine thirty and that my stomach was rumbling from an intense hunger that I had not felt in years. But I was still tired, too tired to go to the café, so I followed the scent of burned toast and sulphurous eggs towards the dining room.

I wanted to sit alone, but there were no tables free, and I found myself wedged between the overly sentimental Agnieszka and Stanisław, a taciturn man who rarely spoke, but when he did, he meant business. And then, opposing me, Grażyna, a woman who was slowly losing her mind, and who grinned at me as I sat down with my breakfast of slightly charred toast and runny scrambled eggs.

‘Lena, not like you,’ Agnieszka said and inched a little away from me, then raised a coffee cup with her claw-like fingers, her gold-bangled wrist singing a tune as she moved.

‘Slept in,’ I said.