Eight
At the end of September, a telegram finally arrived with the news that my aunt was in labor, and my mother buzzed around the house like an annoying fly. She reminded me I wasn’t to climb ladders when I was alone on the farm. I must take care not to fall down the well, must dress as a boy if the Russians came. She’d already darned and mended my brother’s outgrown clothes. She’d made me try on a pair of his boots, which were in better condition than my own, because he’d grown out of them so quickly that they had hardly been worn. They were too big, and I watched her boiling wool into felt and sewing them into slippers to make a thick lining for them. She’d even climbed up into the attic, and eventually came down with a strange-looking pink corset, a stiff band of fabric with shoulder straps and lacing down the side. She said it had been my great-aunt’s in the 1920s when it was fashionable to bind your breasts flat. Everything was ready for my transformation into a boy.
“You’re only going for a couple of days,” I pointed out. “The Russians aren’t likely to advance that fast.”
She ignored me, refolding a blouse. “And you’re not to see that boy Bill.”
“I won’t be able to help it if the Oily Captain brings them here to work,” I retorted.
“Don’t call him that. He’s Captain Meier. You’re not to go out to meet Bill at night, like some…bad girl.…D’you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I snapped with the degree of petulance I knew she’d expect. Inside, I could hardly contain the glee that fizzed through me like bubbles in lemonade. It was coming: My wedding day was finally coming!
My mother continued to pelt me with instructions and warnings as she carried her suitcase downstairs. I followed with my brother’s. Marek was already waiting by the door, eager to be off, to see his cousins, to be the important child who was taken to the birth of a new baby.
Our neighbor was waiting outside with his cart to drive them to the station. It was only then, with one foot out of the door, that my mother stopped and really looked at me, as one woman to another. “Will you be all right?”
I laughed. “Of course I will. I’m twenty. I’m a grown woman. You were married and had Jan on the way by the time you were my age.”
She nodded, but still hesitated. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said eventually, and reached out to give me a fierce, quick hug, which took me by surprise. Her arms were strong as ropes around me, and I held the feel of them in my memory, because I didn’t know how long it might be till I saw her again.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and my voice cracked slightly, though I intended it to be reassuring. I cleared my throat. “Everything’ll be fine.”
She stared at me with her quick, penetrating eyes, trying to see through me to where the truth was hiding, and then walked quickly toward the cart.
“Give my love to Auntie,” I called. “I hope it all goes well.”
I watched until the cart lurched around the bend. Then I returned to the kitchen, where I began to dance and sing, “It’s today, today. It’s going to be today!”
I ran out to the barn and pulled the oilskin kit bags from their hiding place in the rafters. They were dusty already, and the dust made me cough. I peeked out of the barn to make sure the coast was clear before I carried them back across the courtyard and up to my bedroom. I rushed to Jan’s room to gather up the clothes I’d chosen to turn me into the boy of mother’s dreams, the boy who would have been allowed to join the partisans. And from my father’s drawer I took the clothing to transform Bill from a British soldier into an itinerant farmworker.
At first, Bill had objected to my plan that we run away together, with me dressed as a boy. He’d said it would be too dangerous, that as soon as he went missing, the Nazis would be looking for him and would find us both. His face had closed down with worry at the thought of a dog patrol snapping at our heels. We might both get shot, he’d argued.
But I worked on him, first of all reminding him what would surely happen to me if I stayed on the farm and the Russians came, repeating to him the hair-raising stories of Russian atrocities circulating among the village women, until he knew he had to help me get away. I also assured him that my father would find us. Of course, I wouldn’t tell Mr. Novak about our plans to run away, but once we had both gone, I was sure he’d find a way to let my father know so he could come and take us to join the resistance. I painted a picture of us with my father and Jan, hiding out in the mountains with the partisans. Bill told me about Robin Hood and Maid Marian and I said yes, that was how we’d be, living in the forest and fighting the bad guys side by side until the end of the war. Together. And doing all the private things that a married couple could do, whenever they liked.
And slowly, he’d come around to my idea—perhaps seeing no alternative in the face of the Soviet advance, or perhaps seduced by my certainty of our rescue by the partisans and the picture I painted of us fighting together for the resistance. And maybe, like me, thinking a lot about sex.
So, as I made our preparations, I couldn’t help singing, and every now and then darting to the window to be sure the cart wasn’t bringing my mother back home. I lifted up my great-aunt’s bust-flattening corset, giggling at the stupid, ugly thing. I pulled open a drawer and took out my sanitary belt and rags. At the bottom of our kit bags, I’d sewn a false bottom, which formed a secret compartment, and I folded the belt and rags into it, with a small vest of Marek’s.
The rattle of hooves on the road made me clutch the bag to my chest, but when I looked out of the window, it was just our neighbor, returning alone. My mother had really gone. It was my wedding day! I was dizzy with joy and excitement.
I packed hastily, mentally ticking off the items I’d identified for each of us. I’d found an old brown coat of Jan’s for myself, and Bill would wear the short oilskin cape and hood over his greatcoat to make it look less military.
When all my preparations were done and our kit bags were packed tight as sausages, I put on my newest underwear and my blue dress. It was a little faded, but I admired myself in the mirror in mother’s bedroom and thought, This is me. I am a bride. My curls were shining, and my eyes were full of excitement. I took my grandmother’s wedding ring from its hiding place, slipping it into my bra for safekeeping. I pulled my coat over the dress and buttoned it to the neck. In the larder, I opened my mother’s last bottle of plum brandy and poured out a mugful, topping it back up with water and replacing the stopper. Wrapping the bottle in cotton, I laid it in my bicycle basket. Then I wheeled my bike out onto the lane, eagerness leaping through my veins.
First, I cycled to the train station, taking the route my mother would have followed if something had gone wrong and she was walking back. I leaned my bike against the station wall and looked cautiously onto the platform. Empty. They’d definitely left.
Next, I pedaled to the church, glad that it wasn’t on the main road like Mankendorf, where anyone might see me, but up the hill, behind the trees, only its red roof and onion domes visible from the road. I had to dismount and push the bike up the last steep section, afraid of the smell of sweat on my wedding dress. I laid my hand for a second on the reassuring white walls of the church and hid my bike behind it before pushing open the big door. My stomach was tight as a knot.