Page 57 of The Storyteller of Krakow

17

1944, APULIA, ITALY

The moment my boots hit the dock, I felt the salt-laced air slap me awake. The smell of the port was sharp, diesel and wet wood mingling with the sea air. It made me just as nauseous as I had been on the ship.

I took a deep breath, letting the cold air fill my lungs. Behind me, Anka practically skipped down the gangway, her coat flapping, grinning like a girl on holiday.

‘We made it!’ she said. ‘Italy! Can you believe it? I hear Italian men are very nice to look at!’

The train that would take us further south to Apulia waited near the edge of the port. Its engines belched tufts of smoke as soldiers began to board, stacking gear, and guiding vehicles and supplies aboard.

Anka nudged me. ‘Come on, Lena. You look so… down. I thought once you were on dry land, you might cheer up. First stop, Apulia. Training. Food. Beds.’

‘And tents,’ I muttered.

‘They won’t be so bad,’ she said.

‘They’re always bad,’ I said.

And I was right. We arrived in Apulia under a darkening sky that was turning from deep indigo to its nightly inky black. The air smelled different here, the ground dusty but not sandy, which meant that I could breathe in sharply and not have remnants of sand in my nostrils. The temperature was better too. Not too hot. Not too cold. God, I sounded like Złotowłosa i trzy niedźwiedzie: Goldilocks and her bears.

The camp itself was a collection of tents, as I had predicted, pitched haphazardly on a scrubby hillside. I knew what would be inside them – fold-out beds, thin mattresses and blankets that scratched your skin. Beyond the wire fences, the land rolled in soft brown undulations, dotted with olive trees and small farmhouses whose roofs had seen better days.

It was beautiful. I actually thought it, for once. If I squinted, the tents became a blur, and all I could see was the countryside of olive trees, and orange tiled roofs. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad after all, I thought.

* * *

Training began in earnest the following morning. I was to be an ambulance driver, and to have company for once in the form of a nurse or a first aider. For the first two days, I was given Anka, as she learned to dress wounded limbs, administer medication, while I drove like a woman possessed, my new instructor telling me to forget everything I had learned in Iraq.

‘You’ll be under fire,’ he said. ‘It’s constant. Italy might have changed sides now, but you know the Germans have taken Mussolini in, and set up a puppet state in the north, and the bastards aren’t conceding yet. But we Allies are going to drive them right back where they came from. Next stop, Rome. Anyway, listen, you will have to move quickly and without fear. You get to the wounded, you tend to them there if you need to, then you get the fuck out of there and back to base with them in the back. There’s no time to worry. You put your foot down and drive.’

I listened to him. He had three deep scars on his face, all from shellfire. He had lost an arm. Now his job was to help me, help others like him, not lose limbs, nor die.

He was serious and smoked constantly. Told me to wrench the wheel left, right and pretend I was being fired at. He’d make me race out of the truck, hands over my head, and find cover underneath the chassis.

He made me change tyres constantly, so that I got quicker and more adept at it.

‘It’s not just driving,’ he said, smoking as I changed the last tyre that day. ‘You’re carrying the wounded. You’re saving a life. The truck is your armour, but it will only get you so far. Always think that something is chasing you, because it probably is.’

‘I didn’t think they could fire on ambulances,’ I said, wiping the sweat from my brow.

‘Not supposed to. But it happens. You just get caught up in it.’

The third day, Anka was taken to the infirmary to be shown how to dress real wounds and not just the strange dummies she had been given to practise on.

So, I got a new nurse to pretend to drive about during our drills. And wouldn’t you know it, it was Zosia.

‘Lena,’ she said.

She had changed. Somehow she was taller. Prettier than I remembered her to be. Her face seemed different too – sort of not like her at all – no cheer, no spark in her eye. What was the word? Dull. Yes, she looked dull to me.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

She hesitated, glancing over her shoulder before responding.

‘It’s a lot, isn’t it?’ She looked beyond me at the truck behind me. ‘I won’t be going much in the truck; they need me to stay and wait for people. So I don’t really know why this is necessary for me to be run about here and there all day.’ She sighed.

‘I suppose it’s just so you know. Just in case.’