Pastel Orphans (17 page)

C
HAPTER
24

It is freezing this night, like the many nights before it, and Henrik makes another shelter. We huddle together in the one sleeping bag. Our bodies are warm together but by morning Henrik’s body is stiff and cold like mine.

The walking is difficult, our steps heavier as our feet sink in deepening snow. Our clothes are damp. Walking keeps us warm. There is only a small portion of food left. Henrik makes a small fire and we roast two potatoes.

We eat them slowly. When I have finished, my stomach is still empty and I wonder whether we should eat the rest of the bread.

We wait till morning and finish the bread.

Over the coming days, we pass several villages and are careful to remain unseen. I am relieved to see that life continues, with people performing their ordinary household duties in their ordinary surrounds, seemingly untouched by invasion, seemingly trustworthy. Though trust is no longer something I take for granted. It must be earned. Trust is something rare and precious.

We hide behind the trees to spy on a house. A man chops wood. Henrik says that when the man goes inside, I am to stay while he tries to get some more food. We wait until the man enters his house.

I watch Henrik step into a curtain of snow; the weather is slowly worsening. I can just make out his dark figure as he disappears around the side of the house. It seems like a long time before he comes back again. He is carrying something gray in his arms. He is running.

“Run!” he yells.

There is a man behind him and together Henrik and I run blindly through the forest, uncaring about the direction. I am lagging behind Henrik because I am carrying both our packs, even though they are lighter now with less food. When we eventually stop, the man is no longer in sight. Henrik holds out several apples and a woolen blanket.

“Here,” he says, and puts the woolen blanket around my shoulders. His nose is red and we breathe heavily from the chase.

Not long after, Henrik searches in his pocket for something, then curses in German.

“What is it?”

“I have dropped the compass.” He heads back a short distance to search, following our footprints and using his feet to brush aside the powdery white surface. But he returns without it.

“We must keep moving forward. We will ask for directions at the next village, as I think we should already be turning northward.”

My legs feel like two large weights hanging off the end of my body. My head aches and my menstrual period has come. Every so often I sneak off to replace my rags and wipe the soiled ones in the snow.

Henrik thinks that perhaps we should walk at night now. He uses the lighter to light the way. I walk in his shadow. We have already eaten the apples. Then suddenly the light disappears and Henrik says there is no more fuel.

We continue walking, at my peril, unfortunately. I do not see the dip, which is hidden beneath the snow, and my foot slips awkwardly against the ground. I feel something give in my ankle.

Henrik helps me to stand but I cannot put any pressure on my left foot. I have twisted my ankle. I wince when I try to walk.

“We will have to stop then and try and walk tomorrow,” Henrik says. “Maybe a night of rest for it to repair.”

I do not tell him that one night is unlikely to fix such an injury. This has happened before, and I used to own a pair of crutches for such occurrences. My bones and muscles are weak, and I was too ill to exercise as a child.

Henrik does not make a shelter this time; he does not have anything to make it with. Much of the bracken is hidden beneath the layers of snow. He spreads the sleeping bag on the snow and we lie in it with the woolen blanket over the top of us. At some point I sleep and dream of my bed back in Cracow. I dream that Mama has made a berry pie, which is hot from the oven, and the fresh cream is melting over the top.

When I waken, my mouth is dry and my lips are cracked. I reach out and put some snow in my mouth.

Henrik checks my ankle, which has swollen. His face is grim and wan. His eyes are puffed and bloodshot. He has more to worry about now and I am the cause. I want to be the one to hug him and tell him that it will be all right, and I cover my face to stop the tears.

“Hey, what’s this?” He pulls my hands away to reveal my sorrow.

“I am useless. I am so sorry. I should not have come.”

Henrik takes my hand and chooses a tree to sit by and lean his back against. He pulls me down between his legs, placing his arms around me, and I rest my head on his chest.

“I am so glad you came with me. Don’t cry. It will be all right. We will get through this. It isn’t far now. Soon, we will be returning to Zamosc with Greta, and Mama and Femke will take care of you too. Eri will kill plenty of Nazis and drive them out of the villages. We will all be free.”

He strokes my head until my tears stop falling. I am exhausted and, with my head against his chest, I can hear his beating heart. I think I am falling in love with him, and this is the last thought I have as I fall asleep.

It is afternoon when we both wake. Henrik tears off part of his shirt and binds my ankle. There is no more dry tinder to start a fire and no lighter to light it with anyway.

“I am going to the next village to see if I can get some help.”

“Who will want to help a Jew?”

Henrik bites his bottom lip, and this makes him look like a small boy. But he is not a small boy. He is almost a man and very brave. I have never met anyone like him. He is funny but he is also very serious at times, which makes me feel safe.

“I don’t want you to go. What if you hurt yourself?”

He does a little dancing shuffle in the thick snow. “Look! Unlike my companion, I have two good legs! There is no fear of that happening.”

I laugh at the way he lightens the load of worry with his comical drawings and his buoyancy. He is like a raft in the sea of despair. But my smile quickly goes when I wonder if he will come back. He buttons up his coat and leaves the packs, but not his rifle.

“I will be as quick as I can. We need food and we need a place where we can be out of the cold, just for a little while. We have been in the wilderness for long enough.”

And then he is gone.

The sky dims quickly until there is no light at all. I listen to the sounds of the forest. It is mostly the quiet noises of wildlife that I hear, though occasionally, very faintly, I think I hear guns. Then there is the groaning of planes in the distance. There is a war going on outside the forest. Sometimes amidst the trees this is easy to forget. I start to see shapes in the dark. Sometimes I imagine they are German soldiers. There is the sound of a truck in the distance. It is the sound of civilization. I do not know how long it is before I hear footsteps. I stay very still. The footsteps get closer and then Henrik whispers my name.

“I am here,” I say.

Henrik follows my voice to reach me in the dark.

“I have found someone who can help us. There is a family in a village.”

Henrik tells me how he spied through the windows until he found people who appeared kind: parents with small children. He thought they might be understanding and helpful.

“Are they Jews?”

“No,” he says. “But they say they hate the Germans.”

“Do they know that I am a Jew? That you are part Jew?”

“Yes, I thought that it was necessary to spell out such things.”

Henrik tells me that we are only a couple of days’ journey from Cracow, and we should travel close to the roads now. The family has offered some supplies.

He hands me a large stick, which I lean on with one hand, and then he supports my other side. We come to a narrow part of a stream; its banks are frozen and pieces of ice float past us. He carefully balances himself in the flowing water and then lifts and carries me over one shoulder. Then we are near a road. There are several lights ahead and we arrive at the village, which is nestled into the forest. It is pretty and peaceful. The planes have stopped temporarily.

He knocks softly on a cabin door. The houses, though basic in many ways, are raised from the ground and have electricity. A man answers. He does not smile but opens the door wider to let us in. There is a woman there, and two children sit in nightgowns beside the fire. The woman smiles nervously. She is small and matronly and moves forward to help me sit down. The man’s smile appears forced.

The woman ladles some soup into bowls. It is watery but warm, with much flavor, and there are small bites of meat. After this we have some black tea. I am very grateful.

“Thank you so much,” says Henrik. “We will be gone in the morning.”

“Where are you from?”

Henrik talks about the trek through the forest. He does not talk about his sister or Eri, and I am relieved because, like me, he knows to keep most of his cards close to his chest. He gives the name of a town to the north, one that I am not sure exists, and says that we were heading there but somehow got lost.

The man and woman are equally guarded. They say nothing of themselves. Henrik queries whether there are soldiers in the town.

The man pauses slightly. “No,” he says. “There were, but they have done their damage and gone now.”

The woman takes the two children to bed. I smile at the children and they wave as they leave the room. The woman returns with a fresh bandage for my ankle, which she wraps up tightly.

“You should be resting this,” she says warmly. “Otherwise it won’t heal.”

We talk for a while about the war and they advise us of the progress that Germany has made into Russia. I want to cover my ears. I do not want to hear any of this. Shrill voices come from a radio they have left on. I understand some of the words: “victory,” “loyalty,” “honor,” and others that German spokesmen are fond of using.

Then it is late and I feel sleepy from the warmth of the fire. The couple says that we can lie here near the warmth. Henrik tells them again that we will be gone before sunlight.

I do not know how long I have been sleeping when I awake to the sounds of a truck coming down the road. Henrik is sleeping heavily. The trips back and forth to collect me have exhausted him. The house is some distance from the rest of the town. I wonder why the truck is coming this far, to where the forest ends. There is something about this that disturbs me.

“Henrik,” I whisper. “Wake up! There are people coming.”

The sounds of noisy slumber stop and I know that he is now listening too. We do not need to pack our bags; they are ready for us to leave. We made sure of it.

“We will go out the back way,” he whispers, “straight into the forest.”

We creep towards the door, but there is slight movement ahead and the room suddenly appears under a cheerless, sallow light.

I am in front of Henrik. I stop dead in my tracks.

“You have to stay,” says the man calmly. He stands at the back door to block our way. “The Germans are here to collect you.”

“Why did you tell?”

“You should have been gone a long time ago.”

“Let us go,” says Henrik. “We are hurting no one. And you will always be in our prayers.”

The man grins. “I do not need your Jewish prayers.”

We can hear the voices of Germans now and the shutting of doors. I can hear their footsteps crunching in the snow. I feel Henrik shifting behind me, and something slides across my back.

“Please,” I say.

“Please,” echoes Henrik.

The man shakes his head. “It is for the best that you are taken to be with your own kind.”

“They will kill us,” I say, pleading.

“They will take you to a safe camp.”

“It is not true. They have been lying to honest Polish people. Those are places where they slaughter Jews.”

The man hesitates. He sees the pain in my face and it distracts him.

“You must wait here for the Germans. They will decide what’s best.”

“Then I am sorry,” says Henrik.

“What for?” The man is humoring him.

The sound of Henrik’s gun deafens me, and the man drops his own gun and clutches at his thigh before sinking to the floor. Henrik tries to drag him out of the way to get through the doorway, but the man makes himself into a dead weight so that he is difficult to move. He then grabs at our limbs as we scramble over him, but we slip through his weak grasp. Henrik drags me by the arm to hobble faster across the small yard, the pain in my ankle still raw. I hear the Germans circling the house; they have not yet seen us. We enter the forest in the direction from which we have come, in the direction that Henrik knows.

“Halt,” yells an officer, and then there is gunfire that lights up the trees around us like candles during Hanukkah.

We run and run, and I bear the pain, until we reach the river to hide near the frozen banks under frozen branches. Our previously warmed bodies become chilled to the bone again as we watch the Germans shine their flashlights onto the stream. The lights pass over us but we are disguised by the branches. They do not try and cross. They do not want to get their shiny new boots wet, or their feet frozen. They return to their truck while we stay hidden for several more minutes, until it is safe to come out.

We must keep moving. Our wet clothes will turn to ice if we stay still.

In the morning, Henrik steals some dry wood from another village farther upstream. He starts a fire using some sheets of paper from his book. It has, astonishingly, stayed dry from being inside his shirt, wrapped in heavy cloth.

We warm ourselves by the fire until our clothes are dry. My ankle is neither worse nor better. Henrik checks the place in his art book where he has been marking the date.

“Happy Christmas!” he says.

“Happy Hanukkah!” I say, though it is a couple of weeks late.

“What would you have been doing during Hanukkah?”

“Lighting candles, praying, telling stories, and eating lots of sticky, sweet, doughy cakes.”

“Stop,” he says. “You are making me hungry.” And both of us are silent while we imagine the food.

Henrik says nothing. Much of his former motivation is missing. He sits a short distance away, his eyes glazed. There is a change in him. Sometimes he looks up through the trees, in the direction from which we have come; before, he was always looking in the direction we are headed. I try to think of something to say that might shake him from this mood but can’t find any words. Today, everything seems a little grimmer. Some of the fight has left him.