The Upright Heart (2 page)

“Is it winter now?” Wiktor asks, squatting beside the German.

The young soldier turns to him slowly, his eyes glassy and pale as if his vision is obfuscated by the world. He looks at Wiktor’s tiny frame and shrugs his shoulders as if he could care less what time of year it is. He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve and looks off toward a distant field.

“Who knows?” the man mumbles. “It is always winter now. We’ve been waiting for days and days and nothing. No one has come to get us. No one has told us who is winning. Who cares if it’s winter? We might as well be dead.”

Wiktor swallows.

“He’s right!” chimes in another soldier, gaunt and tired as he leans his baby face against his pack, the heels of his boots digging into the fresh, snowy mud. He laughs hysterically and caresses his groin as if looking for comfort.

A gentle moan is emitted from the group as a soldier of about eighteen stands above the rest and begins to shout, his legs trembling, spit forming at the corners of his mouth.

“I keep asking, why don’t we do something!” he cries. “I cannot continue to sit by this river without knowing what is happening! I need to know! Captain, please! I keep thinking about my mother sitting at the kitchen table waiting for a letter. She isn’t moving. She isn’t eating or sleeping. She is in a warm house but she is worse off than we are. Please! She is just waiting! Please help us to find out
what is happening! Help us to get home.” His eyes are pleading as he looks to the smoking man, who blows perfectly formed smoke rings that mingle with the foggy air. He barely flinches an eye.

“Upon your order, captain,” he mumbles, shrinking back into a seated position.

“I can tell you,” Wiktor whispers.

He clears his throat and begins again. He wonders why his voice is quivering when he feels so calm. “I can help you find a way to get home.”

It is dinnertime in all the houses on Strzelecka Street except one. Here, nobody has the will to cook. They eat bread and butter. They don’t wash the dishes. They do what they can to get through the day. Elżbieta is living in a dream in which the world is distant and alive. She can taste, see, and smell the dust molecules in the air. She asks herself,
Is this what death brings?
The atmosphere is humming.

On the wall to the left that separates this room from the next is a layer of paint so fresh that the paintings meant to hang there are placed carefully on the floor. It wasn’t long ago that this wall was no more than a gaping hole. It wasn’t long ago that soldiers took Elżbieta and her family from their house at gunpoint.

“Just shoot!” Elżbieta’s sister Henia shouted. Elżbieta shook at the invitation.

When the family was finally allowed to return to their home, Wiktor spent every Sunday evening carefully repairing the wall and reconstructing their world. He had just finished applying the second coat of paint.

Elżbieta takes Mateusz from her mother’s arms and rocks him to sleep.
“Aaa, kotki dwa,”
she sings.
There are two cats
. Lullabies emerge from the recesses of her memory when holding her baby
in her arms. It is as if they went to sleep somewhere in the back of her mind, and waited for that moment when they would offer shelter to another human being. Motherhood is new to Elżbieta. So is orphanhood.

There is nothing but this baby to hold me down
, she thinks.
If it weren’t for this little baby and his unquenchable thirst, I would surely fly away. I would rise up into the sky and I would meet you there. How many years will it be before I see you again, Papa?

She rests her feet on a little stool as she switches the baby from her right breast to her left. She stares at the westward wall of the room and through the windows that look out over the garden and surrounding fields. She rocks herself gently. The sun is misty and pink, as if peering down on their little town through a lens of clouded glass. In this region of Poland daylight can seem like a pale and hallucinatory dream, so white that it is as if God were trying to erase the world.

Through the open window Elżbieta can hear the sound of eager raindrops even though there is no rain. They hit the tender grass, patches of brown and green moss so soft that they seem to belong to a fairytale much more than they do the streets of a coalmining town. The trees are swiftly shedding frost accumulated overnight. To the right is a stream that has set the stage for so many events in her life, and beyond are the train tracks where her father was killed. As far as the eye can see looking west, there are only fields and forests beyond. Other than the sound of the drops as they fall, everything is so quiet. There is only the bubble of rain and the sound of her heart beating, racing inside her head, but there is nowhere for her to run.

At this moment, those worries that have always tugged at the back of her mind begin to surface. Elżbieta thinks of her little brother, Karol, now in kindergarten, now without a father. Will he live to fight in another war? Or, like their father, will he live to see another war through, only to die needlessly once it is over? Will he get picked on in school for being so small? What time is it? Will he
make it safely home? She hopes the front door is locked, so that they are all safe, so that her baby is safe. Is it locked? She cannot remember. And then she repeats the questions to herself, for they sound like a comforting song.

Elżbieta’s mother comes into the room and sits beside her.

“Oh Mama,” Elżbieta cries, and buries her face in her mother’s chest. The baby awakes and begins to wail. Elżbieta rocks him to sleep. There is only silence. Even the little rain has come to an end.

Wiktor has decided to take the soldiers over the bridge and into town. The smoking man is quiet, but the younger members of the group are enthusiastic about leaving the banks of the river behind. The group moves slowly, six tall men following one smaller Wiktor. The soldiers take care not to slip as their boots meet the warm ground and the snow melts away. Only the beetles can hear their sound.

The smoke from the coal mines mingles with the foggy night air, and it is so dark that Wiktor becomes unmoored at moments, as if he cannot remember which way to go. He is careful not to reveal this uncertainty.

On their way into town the group takes Strzelecka Street, and soon passes Wiktor’s house. The front gate is locked, but the lights are on upstairs, and Wiktor can see Waleria and Elżbieta sitting and talking. He wants to wave to them, but then remembers that he has no hands.

In my empty heart, in the space where it once was, I am waving to you. I am sending you my love
.

The night has settled in, and as they walk down the hill, past the church, there is no one around.

“It is so quiet,” the youngest, baby-faced soldier whispers to no one in particular, fumbling with the small, star-shaped gold pin dangling from the lapel of his jacket.

“I say we go for a drink,” the smoking captain, who is the commanding officer, snarls as they pass a small bar at the edge of town. Inside, men are sitting at small wooden tables somberly drinking vodka. The only woman present is a short, middle-aged barmaid.

“No. No drinks,” Wiktor says quietly. Despite his hushed voice, he is still heard.

“There is someone that I would like to stop and see, if you don’t mind,” says the gaunt, slow-moving soldier, gesturing toward Wiktor, standing close behind him but never looking him in the eye. “A girl.”

“It won’t work,” Wiktor says, turning to the young man. “I’m sorry, but it just won’t. Besides, we don’t have time. We have somewhere to go.”

“I don’t know why you say it won’t work. It works just fine.…”

There is the sound of a dog barking, and as is always true in Rybnik, when one dog barks, all the other dogs must chime in, and so a chorus of singing dogs resounds through the streets.

“Funny,” the first young soldier remarks. “Everything sounds so far away.”

“Left here,” Wiktor commands, as he takes the group around the side of the town’s old church.

The barking dog wanders around the corner and saunters directly toward them, exhaling clouds of wet fog into the soft brown light of a nearby street lamp. From behind the German shepherd emerges a young couple, arms locked as they walk. They gaze at one another, just as people do in spring after war. Her hair is golden, and her coat is made of felt wool, burning bright red in the dark night. She is a beacon of light. She walks toward the young soldier, the gaunt one, as he stops moving and whispers her name, “Zosia.” She walks briskly past him, as if he wasn’t there at all.

Zosia pulls her coat tightly closed and leans in to her lover. “It is chilly tonight, isn’t it?” she asks, a shiver crawling up her spine. Her lover simply looks down at her and smiles as they walk off into the dark night.

The gaunt soldier shakes as he follows the group out of the light.

Wiktor leads the men to a door at the back of the church. This is the crypt, he wants to tell them, but he doesn’t have the heart to say the word. The men have hopeful faces. The steps leading down are dark and damp, but the men can only perceive the cold. They shudder because they know they should.

Being alive was like riding a boat and letting the waves knock you around until you could barely orient yourself to the world
, the youngest soldier thinks quietly, not wanting anyone else to hear. It is all over now. It is all over. It is. Darkness enshrouds the group. Not even a footstep or the echo of footsteps can be heard.

They call it a nebula. What lights up the night sky in an explosion of blue, red, orange, green. Colors you don’t know about yet. Colors you’ve never seen.

I know that there is a buzz in the heart that lingers long after you are gone. I know that it lifts you up, out of your body and higher until you are in the beyond. I am suspended here, above the nebula, in this ring of planets, and I cannot even remember where I come from or what came before. I can only remember a sound and maybe a feeling. I can recall needing someone once, I think.

We are one system, this ring of tiny planets, this white feather and me. If I look back and try to remember, if I drop, the feather rises. If the feather falls, I float up.

What is the measure of a heart? The weight of a feather, you might say.

I am waiting to begin again.

Wiktor and his group of soldiers make their way into the crypt of the Rybnik town church. The church spire extends toward the sky and can be seen from everywhere in town, a reminder that God is watching. There is a row of tombs on each side of the passageway, and the smell of mold hangs heavy in the air, but the group remains oblivious to it.

“What exactly are we doing here?” the captain asks Wiktor, leaning against the cold stone wall. He might as well be standing in a bar holding a beer and talking to a girl.

“There are tunnels that lead somewhere behind one of these doors.”

“But where will they take us?” the young, gaunt soldier asks, his pale face haunting in the dim, basement light. He looks longingly into Wiktor’s smiling dark eyes. “She didn’t even see me,” he whispers. “She didn’t even say hello.”

“No, she didn’t,” Wiktor replies, looking away. He turns back to their leader.

“I know that these tunnels were used during the resistance. They go to Kraków, to Warsaw, maybe even to Berlin.”

“They will lead us nowhere,” one soldier says. “Is the war over?”

“It is. I am not certain where these tunnels lead, but you must try,” Wiktor replies. “There is a chance they will take you home.”

The captain nods and the group moves carefully past the tombs of priests and of local saints. There is a wooden door at the end of the corridor that opens to a dusty tunnel. Wiktor takes the soldiers through. He stands at attention.

“I must leave you all here,” he says. “Let you continue on your own.”

“Thank you,” the captain replies, and Wiktor turns to leave. “Thank you for helping us get home. Maybe we will see each other again.”

“You will be just fine if you follow the tunnels. Your mothers and your wives are waiting for you.”

“But wait,” the young soldier says, turning toward Wiktor. “Please tell us, who won?”

Wiktor turns his back and says nothing as he retraces his steps and walks past them, out of the crypt. They are transfixed.

The captain bends down to examine something colorful on the ground.

“What is it?” the gaunt soldier asks, taking a step back.

“A flower,” the captain replies. “Growing here, in the dark.”

Is it any good that we all share a name? Yes, it is. This way we can remind each other who we are whenever we forget. I am Sarah and so is she. We all wear the same uniforms and play the same games. Only now the games we play are different than before.

The Łódź girl’s school was our haven in life and it is for us now as well. All of our classmates were Jewish except for four Polish girls. We all had things in common. All of us had refined clothing, a warm home to return to, and parents who could afford to give us a good education. Not only could they give it, but they also wanted their daughters to have it. Where are those four Polish girls now? Eating dinner somewhere in the countryside, perhaps? Still recovering from the war? They are Magdalena, Małgosia, Malwina, and Anna.

We are left behind. We sit at our desks, dressed in uniform, making lace figurines out of water and light. We catch the slightest specks of matter and then we weave them into something beautiful.

This is the chorus of Sarah’s favorite song. She learned it from an American musical that once played for three weeks in a row at the town cinema before the war. She snuck out to see it seven times and spent every night for months trying to learn to dance the way the lead girl did in the movie. Her name was Gingerogers, I think. Whenever we get sad or lonely Sarah tells us to stand in a circle and sing this song until we can’t sing it any more. She knows how to get us going, and sometimes she can even make us laugh. That is her gift. She would have made a wonderful actress or comedian. Besides, she is very beautiful.