Page 7 of The Storyteller of Krakow

I eventually caught up with Piotr and asked him why he was angry with me.

He didn’t answer at first, just kept walking.

Then he stopped and turned to look at me.

‘I was only trying to help,’ I said.

‘But you didn’t, Lena. You didn’t. You do as you always do. You react without thinking. You think you’re a boy. But I’m a boy. You made me look stupid.’

‘But I…’ I started, then saw the red tinge of anger spread across his cheeks.

‘From now on, I’m the boy. I’m your older brother, I’ – he stabbed at his chest – ‘will be the one to be brave. To stand up. You must be more like a girl, as our parents said. You’re a girl. Behave like one.’ He then used that same finger to stab into my own chest.

I didn’t argue with him. Normally, I would have. But I saw that this whole thing had embarrassed him.

I didn’t heed his words. I acted as myself and nothing more nor less. Yet he changed. He stopped playing chess. Stopped reading. Stopped playing the piano. Found friends and began ignoring me.

He grew taller and stronger, and eventually had his fight with Boris, which made him the victor.

It wasn’t enough, though. He found strength, but it was misplaced. He was strong against Boris, against boys at school, but he was still Piotr. He was still afraid. So he went to war, not to save others but, I think, to prove something to himself and to me.

As much as people might say that the incident had no bearing on his decision, I knew that day had left its mark. Not in a simple, neat way; nothing in life is that tidy. But in the way a small crack lets water in, and then winter comes and everything splits. He wanted to be something in my eyes, and in his own. He wanted to prove he wasn’t the boy with his trousers round his ankles while the world laughed. Would he have gone to war anyway? Perhaps. Most likely. The world was leaning that way regardless. But I cannot help myself: I take that moment and set it at the start of a line, and then I follow it forward, event after event, as if it might explain the end. That is what guilt does. It doesn’t claim I fired the bullet. It only whispers that I helped aim him at the life that found it.

* * *

It was in 1939 when Piotr enlisted in the Polish army, when he went to play a game of chess that he would never win. He was no longer playing against himself, but an actual enemy. I often wondered if he had ever taken that into consideration. Perhaps he did. But more than that, he wanted to prove himself, to get away from that young boy that day in the orchards with his trousers pulled down, with the boys laughing, with me, his sister, taking too long to save him. Perhaps he wanted to prove that this time he was the one who could be the saviour. Leaving me with my parents, awaiting the next chapter of our story, and the next, before I met the bear called Wojtek.

My brother died in the same year he enlisted in a nameless field in Zambrów. A single bullet hole to the head.

The news came to us via a comrade of his, who had been sent to a hospital in Warsaw after losing an arm.

The comrade stood in the doorway, not accepting my mother’s pleas to enter, stood there and kept touching the stub he had left just below his shoulder with his good hand.

As he told my parents about my brother, my mind drifted away from the cries, the news in itself, and all I could think about was that poor man’s arm. I wanted to ask him if it still hurt or if he still felt it was there, and that’s why he couldn’t leave it alone.

It was only after he left that I took in the news and knew he had been lying. Neat bullet hole to the head. Didn’t feel a thing. I doubted it and started to imagine the truth of my brother’s death, the gun, the pain, and him crying out.

Those days were, well, bleak. My parents busied themselves with work, with trying to help their patients, with trying to forget that the unthinkable had happened, leaving me at home to do nothing but think about it.

I slept a lot. I ate little. I did not venture to Nowak’s orchard. I simply waited with the rest of them – our neighbours, our friends, for death to find us. And it did not take long.

4

1940, VORKUTLAG, SIBERIA

The next memory that comes to me is the train, and, heading east to Siberia with my parents, none of us sure we would survive.

There had been months between my brother’s death to this point, but I don’t remember them now. I am sure that I was sad, that we cried, and that mundane things happened. But the next memory that comes to me is a knock on our door, though not the gentle kind. The kind that says open up as if the door is already theirs.

Russian soldiers in heavy coats filled the threshold, red-cheeked from the cold, guns slung over shoulders. One of them read from a paper in a bored voice, as if he were announcing the weather. We were being ‘resettled’, whatever that meant. We were to take what we could carry. Fifteen minutes. Maybe it was an hour. Time did strange things then.

My mother’s hands shook as she tried to choose between a blanket and bread, between photographs and soap. My father went very still, the doctor in him already assessing: the neighbours’ frightened faces, the old man who couldn’t get his boots on, the child being hauled out half-asleep. No one argued.

You don’t argue with men with guns.

Why us? They had reasons, of course. They always do. In the months after the Russians came in from the east, they made lists. Teachers. Policemen. Priests. People who owned too much. People who had studied too long. People who might remember that Poland had once been a country and not a prize to be shared out. My parents were medical people, which should have made us useful, but it only made us suspicious – too educated, too independent, too likely to be asked for help by neighbours who still trusted us. So they packed us into the back of a truck with others from the village and drove us to the station, where cattle wagons waited with their doors yawning open. Somewhere in the west of Poland, the Germans were doing their own version of the same work: the west carved up, Kraków turned into an administrative nest, Warsaw tightening like a fist, professors and priests disappearing, Jews herded behind walls and into ghettos as if the country could be tidied by locking people out of sight.

Poland was being squeezed from both sides, and ordinary families like ours were the pulp.