Page 87 of The Storyteller of Krakow

When I woke properly, it was dark. The fuzziness in my brain remained but I could finally see where I was, finally understand what had happened.

Zosia sat beside my bed, shoulders folded in on themselves.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered before I could speak. Her eyes were wet. ‘I didn’t want… Lena, I didn’t want this.’

‘You told him,’ I said.

‘He knew something was wrong,’ she said. ‘He watches. He counts. If I breathe differently, he notices.’ She looked down at her wrist and rubbed it once, hard. ‘He asked where I’d been. He didn’t ask like a normal person asks. He said he’d do things to me.’ Her voice shook. ‘I tried to hold it. I did. I tried not to say a thing. And then I didn’t.’

I looked at her and saw that her right eye was swollen, and there was a small cut just above her ear.

‘Is he, Matthias—?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. She reached into her apron and pulled out a small folded paper, creased again and again like it had been carried in a fist. ‘He’s alive. He was transferred to a prisoner camp. He made me take this,’ she said. ‘For you. Before they moved him.’

My hands shook as I opened it. The writing was unsteady but careful.

Lena, thank you for not letting me die alone. I don’t know what will happen now but I am alive because of you.

If the war ends and you are still alive, write to: Matthias Keller, Bülowstraße 17, Munich, Germany. Maybe one day we will see each other again, somewhere that isn’t underground.

I read it twice, then folded it so small it hurt my fingers. Zosia watched me like she expected me to strike her.

‘I’m sorry, Lena,’ she said again. ‘And I’m sorry about Anka.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ I said.

She sat with me a few minutes more, perhaps waiting to see if I would tell my story. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t angry with her. I wasn’t even angry with Janek. I felt nothing – like I had been scraped clean, the same feeling I had had when I was seasick. Only this time, it had taken my feelings too.

After she left, I pressed the note under my pillow like a talisman. I tried to picture Munich, tried to imagine what it would be like to see Matthias again. I went inside my head and told myself stories – all sorts of stories, some with Matthias, others without. I told myself that I was not here – that none of this had happened, and in that way, I managed to survive until the final gun stopped, until we were told, once more, we were free to go.

Free.

And yet, I had never felt so imprisoned.

24

1945, MONTE CASSINO, ITALY

The war ended in scraps of information. Rumours first, then orders, then the strange sight of men smiling without immediately checking the sky. There were cheers, of course. There were toasts. There were prayers. And there were people like me, standing at the edge of it, trying to work out what you do when the thing that kept you moving finally stops. We were free – free to go home, free to do what we liked. But I had spent the past years of my life being told what to do and I was not sure what I was meant to do now.

Despite how many flags appeared, no matter how many men kissed the ground, Anka was still gone. A year had passed and I had been given no punishment for my actions – instead, they had decided I had gone mad through war and was given a desk job: checking inventory, ticking things off on lists. I spoke to no one but Wojtek during that time, filling in his side of the conversation myself.

I told him stories, and did it the way you darn a sock, threading over the holes until you can pretend the fabric was never torn.

I took fragments of memories, the cellar, for example, and this time lit it with candles. I took Matthias’s pale face and made his cheeks rosy. I took my own fear and rewrote it as courage. I took the brief moments of time with Matthias and wove them together to make a tapestry so broad, so colourful and large, it was tantalisingly true.

In the stories I told Wojtek, Matthias always had time for me. He wanted to listen to me, and just talk. Sometimes I gave him a cigarette, because Anka smoked, and stories like symmetry. It embarrassed me in a way, how easily I stole from the dead to decorate the living.

If I admitted it was only a handful of visits and a note written with a fevered hand, then what had I been doing? Risking my life for nothing but stubbornness? I couldn’t bear that. So I named it. I made it tender. I called it love when no one could correct me.

In my story, Matthias wasn’t feverish and filthy and half-delirious. In my story, he was clean, and his voice didn’t shake, and when he said my name, it sounded full – ripe. He was in Munich, waiting for me. He had bought a house. He would help me figure out what to do when the war ended. Maybe we would have children. He would buy me a piano, just like Piotr’s, and put it in a parlour. He would never tell me what to do, or be cruel, or demanding. He was simply perfect in this story. As much as it was a lie, the truth was just too ugly: a cellar, a bandage, a handful of conversations, Anka bleeding to death, Zosia being punished by Janek. So I kept turning it, polishing it, because the address in my pocket felt like the last thread tying me to a future – Munich, with a house and a door I imagined knocking on one day, saying, ‘It’s me. I’m home.’

In May of 1945, we were told we would be moved – the Italian campaign was over, and soon, they said the war would be over everywhere. Papers would be checked. Lists would be made. Men who had been soldiers for years suddenly had to become ‘persons’ again. I watched them practise it like a new language.

The camp changed. Men now queued not for ammunition but for stamps and signatures. A clerk with tired eyes became more frightening than a mortar, because he could decide whether you went home, or somewhere else, or nowhere at all.

Some men talked about England as if it was a promised land made of tea and wages. Others talked about Poland and spoke quietly of not wanting to return as if the country itself might hear and be offended.