Page 88 of The Storyteller of Krakow

I had papers, technically. Ink and signatures. But I didn’t trust them. I’d lived too long as a person who could be erased by a question asked the wrong way. When officers spoke about ‘the future’, I felt my mind reach for a weapon, any weapon, even a lie.

Without battle to organise the hours, time went soft. Men drank in daylight. They started fights over nothing, then apologised as if they couldn’t recognise themselves. A few wrote letters with shaking hands and stared at the page like it was a minefield.

When the clerks asked me where I wanted to go, I couldn’t answer. I had been pushed across the world like a coin passed from hand to hand – first the gulag, then Uzbekistan, then Iraq, then Egypt, then Italy. Would I go home – did I want to?

My mother and father were dead. My brother was dead. If I went back, who would I be going back to? A house without voices. A village that would look at me like a stranger.

Somewhere in the waiting and the deciding, a thought began to take shape. Not a huge plan, not yet, just a spark of something that was grounded in reality rather than one of my stories of Matthias. My father had been a doctor. He fixed what he could, and when he couldn’t, people still thanked him for trying. Anka had helped all those people dying on those slopes. Even thinking of Zosia and how she had helped Matthias, so sure and steady, I thought: maybe I could do that. Maybe I could make something useful out of all of this. Maybe that was my future.

Wojtek, of course, didn’t understand any of it. He didn’t understand choices and futures. He understood food, hands, voices, routine. He understood when the men were happy and when they were afraid. He did not understand endings.

He noticed the change before I did. The men stopped calling for him. The laughter around him thinned. Someone who used to wrestle him every evening walked past without looking up. Wojtek followed for a few steps, puzzled, then returned to the kitchens where at least rules still existed.

Vehicles came and went with new purposes. Crates were marked not with shells but with names. Men queued to hand in rifles like they were returning borrowed tools. Someone painted over unit markings as if wiping away a past that might stain the future. There were trains, they said. Ships. Camps. Homes that weren’t homes yet.

I heard it from a driver first, the way you hear all bad news: carelessly, as if it belongs to someone else. ‘They’re sending the bear on,’ he said, laughing. ‘He can’t come with us any more.’

Something inside me went tight, the same way it had when I saw Anka wrapped in canvas. My mind did the quick, stupid arithmetic of loss: one friend, then another, then another, until you are left holding nothing but yourself.

I found him behind the kitchens, where he liked to loiter. He sat on his haunches like an oversized dog, tongue out, watching a pot with hopeful concentration. When he saw me he made a low sound in his chest and lumbered over.

‘Hello, you,’ I murmured, as if he were a person who could answer properly. I had half a heel of bread in my pocket, and he knew it. He took it gently.

I scratched behind his ear the way he liked and felt the warmth of him under my hand. For a second it steadied me. Then I said the words anyway, because if I didn’t say them they might not be true. ‘They say you’re going.’

He only blinked at me, slow. How could he know what ‘going’ meant? Humans used the same word for a walk, a train, a funeral.

‘They say you’re going to a zoo tomorrow. A zoo. People will come and pay just to look at the bear who went to war.’

I pressed my forehead against his. ‘We’ve crossed half the world, you and I,’ I said. ‘And you saved me, you know. You saved me not just from Janek, but myself. You kept me going – kept me hoping, laughing even when there was little to laugh about. I love you, Wojtek.’

I let the tears fall into his fur. I let him lick my face. I let us sit there, him and I.

My friend.

My love.

25

FEBRUARY 2014, KRAKÓW

‘Did you ever see him again?’ Kasia asked.

‘Wojtek? Oh yes.’

‘I meant the man – this Matthias that you had feelings for.’

I pretended not to hear her, wanting to leave it where it was for now, but she continued.

‘So you never saw him again, never wrote him?’ she asked. I could hear the hope in her voice, and it reminded me so much of Anka. I smiled. She needed an ending – well, so many stories do, don’t they?

‘I saw him again,’ I said. ‘I’ll save that for another day, though.’

I could see the disappointment on her face, but I could not stay in the apartment any longer. My pills were calling me and I needed to take them sooner rather than later.

‘Tomorrow afternoon then, perhaps?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I’ll be back at work then, but can always sneak off and talk for a little while.’

‘Tomorrow it is,’ I agreed.