Somewhere else in the apartment, the adults talked, and all I could do was wait for the ax to fall. I knew that upon hearing what Sara had to say, Truda and Mateusz would want to raise their voices—except that they couldn’t, in case they roused one of the neighbors. Even though shouting was off the table, I was soon to face a maelstrom of disappointment and anger, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“You simply must wake up,” I murmured to Roman as I dripped the water into his mouth, then cupped his chin in my hand to tilt his head back. I did this time and time again, although I felt I was achieving little. Water always dribbled out the corners of his mouth, then ran down his beard to soak into the towel. Still, I had nothing else to do other than sit and listen to the muffled voices. At one stage, I heard the volume of Truda’s voice rise sharply, and my efforts to coax the unconscious boy in the bathtub to drink redoubled. “Please wake up and drink for me.”
When the glass was empty, I sank onto the cold tiles and covered my face with my hands. I sat like that for a long time, until my bottom had become numb. When I stretched my legs out in front of me, trying to dispel the pins and needles, Roman suddenly stirred. His eyelids fluttered, and so I rolled onto my knees and took his uninjured hand in mine.
“Elz·bieta?” he whispered, prying his eyes open with visible difficulty.
“I’m here,” I said. The glass was empty, so I hastily refilled it with water from the tap. “You’re badly dehydrated. Can you take some sips of this?”
Roman winced as he sat up. He drank the entire glass greedily, then sank back onto the towels. The pallor of his skin, already pale, turned a sickly shade of gray, and he gave me a panicked look.
“I think I’m going to—”
I reached for the bucket just in time, as what water he had managed to swallow was violently ejected from his body. The sound of his retching drew Sara from the kitchen.
“You’re awake,” she said, delighted, then dismayed when she saw the bucket. “The surgeon is coming shortly, and he will rehydrate you through injection. Until then, we just need you to take small sips of the mixture. Elz·bieta, go and ask Truda to make some more.”
I almost protested. I was nervous to face my adoptive parents. But Sara seemed unconcerned, taking Roman’s pulse and wiping his brow with a cool cloth, and so I sighed and scrambled to my feet. When I stepped into the kitchen, Truda and Mateusz were embracing. I cleared my throat.
“Sara needs more supplies for the hydration mixture.”
Mateusz released Truda, and now both of their gazes were upon me. I couldn’t read their expressions, but I dropped my gaze, feeling their disappointment.
“Do you remember the day that my father died?” I asked them, my voice small.
“Of course,” Mateusz said.
“Can you imagine a world where Alina brought me to your house and you walked past us and closed the door, refusing to help me?”
“Never,” Truda said fiercely.
I forced myself to meet their gazes again. My stomach was alive with butterflies.
“I thought I could be a heroine. I could do something remarkable to honor my family legacy. I was thinking about myself, mostly, but I was also so desperate to do something. If I hadn’t found some way to help at least a little, I wouldn’t have honored the example you set for me when you took me in or the examples my father and Tomasz set, or even Alina.” My voice broke, and tears filled my eyes. “You raised me in a family of courage. And I know I should not have lied to you, and I know I have done the wrong thing. But I had to balance my own conscience as a child of God with my responsibilities and respect for you as my parents. Please forgive me.”
Mateusz crossed the room and embraced me in a bear hug so tight that his arms shook around me. He kissed the top of my head and then held on to my upper arms as he looked straight into my eyes.
“We will need to speak about this more later, once your friend has been moved on,” he said, his eyes shiny, but I could already tell that he would forgive me for the deception, sooner or later. Truda was going to be a much harder sell. On the other side of the room, she stared at me through narrowed eyes, her arms crossed over her chest.
“I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life about you going into that place, Emilia,” she said, her tone curt. My real name sounded strange on her lips. “Later, when all of this is over, I’m going to throttle you for lying to us, and I’m going to shout at you for taking such foolish risks. In the meantime...” she puffed out a long breath, then turned and picked up the sugar bowl “...come over here and get what Sara has asked for.”
23
Roman
I had no concept of whether it was day or night, but this was a very different blur from the one I had lived through in the ghetto. I drifted along on a sea of pain and sickness, never quite sure if I was awake or hallucinating. A strange man came and went several times, leaving me only with the impression that I had met him before, maybe several times, but I could never quite grasp his name or why he was there. I was vaguely aware of injections in my good arm and then a period of blinding, white-hot pain in my right arm and of suffocating—desperately gasping for air, but someone’s hand was over my mouth.
Then maybe I woke for a while, but soon came a fever, and I drifted on a sea of delirium for still more time. Chaim came to visit me, sitting on the end of the bed, cracking jokes and smiling that broad smile I had become so fond of. Later, Andrzej came by, and after him, my whole family. My friends had been vibrant, full of color and life, but as my mother sat on the end of the bed, I saw her in blurred black-and-white, like a photograph. Dawidek held her hand, and although I could hear them murmuring to one another in Yiddish, they didn’t speak to me, despite my desperate efforts to get their attention. Samuel waited out of reach by the door until he came and touched my cheek.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, but then he, too, was gone.
There were ferocious dreams, too—German soldiers chasing me through a sewer, rotting corpses all around me and a hunger that turned my body inside out. And then sleep—a confused sleep, because I was so exhausted that even as I began to recover, I could barely keep my eyes open for more than minutes at a time. Elz·bieta or Sara or the strangers in the apartment would rouse me and spoon-feed me broth or water, and then I would sleep again.
When the storm passed, I woke properly, to golden sunlight filtering through a gauze curtain in an open window, in a room I was vaguely familiar with, only this was the first time I viewed it through clear eyes. I was lying in a bed of clean linen and a soft mattress, wearing clothes finer than any I’d worn since we moved to the ghetto. I sat up gingerly and felt my right arm with the fingers of my left. Heavy bandages and a splint protected the wound, but even so, the light pressure was enough to make me gasp. The fingers on my right hand were swollen and red, but I had a vague memory that at one point, my entire right arm had been in a much worse state.