Page 75 of The Storyteller of Krakow

What if someone had helped Piotr?

What if…?

I listened to Anka breathing again.

I had promised her and I had thought I had meant it.

But I knew I was going to break this promise to her.

* * *

The following night, I went back, jacket over my overalls, helmet pulled as low as it would go.

The guns muttered somewhere beyond the ridgeline, distant, steady, like a man coughing in his sleep. I slipped out of camp and took the long way, avoiding the paths where men smoked and talked, where a voice might stop me and look too closely at my face.

I knew one scar on the mountain where there had never been a track. Shells had chewed a shallow gully into the slope, just deep enough to climb if you didn’t mind tearing your hands and knees. It was the sort of place officers never looked, because it wasn’t a route on any map and it was perfect for me not to be seen and to keep away from any harm – or at least harm from the end of a gun.

The slope was broken stone and splintered roots. Mud sucked at my boots; the air tasted of damp limestone and old smoke.

I climbed until my lungs burned, pausing only when the ground trembled under another far-off impact. Each time, I waited for shouting, for a flare, for the sharp bark of German voices. Each time, there was only wind and echoes of bombs.

I managed to find my way to the farmhouse fairly easily – it seemed that all my time studying maps had paid off, and it felt now almost like a sixth sense. I could get to wherever I need to be.

I climbed down, switched on the torch, and found him where I had left him, bundled under the canvas sack, his German uniform dark beneath it, the collar damp with sweat. His face was pale in the lantern light, but his eyes were open.

He was alive – that was one thing at least, one ‘what if’ I could now answer.

He watched me set down my pack, watched my hands as if he expected them to turn into a weapon.

‘You came back, Lena,’ he said in English.

‘I said I would,’ I answered.

‘Why?’ he asked.

I shrugged and took out some gauze and motioned for him to move his arm away from his abdomen. As I pressed down, I felt him flinch underneath my hands.

‘So many are dying,’ he said. ‘You come back because you don’t want more to die?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘Men. They wouldn’t come back,’ he said.

‘Would you? If you had found me, or a soldier, would you have come back?’ I lessened the pressure and looked at him. I needed to know.

‘I hope I would. Yes,’ he said.

‘Hope?’ I gave a little laugh. I was wrong to have come here. Wrong to help him. Hope.

‘Hope, yes,’ he said again. ‘It is war and decisions are made quickly. But yes. I think I would come back. I would come back for you, Lena,’ he said.

I didn’t believe him. Not one bit. He knew to say anything else would mean his lifeline would disappear. Did he think I was stupid because I was a woman?

I worked on him and told myself that I would give him the food and water I had brought then leave him to deal with whatever fate had in store for him. This had been foolish.

‘Lena,’ he said, ‘I need to talk as you do this.’

I looked at him and saw that now I was cleaning his leg and trying to straighten it he had paled further, and sweat dripped down his face.