“When did you finish?”
“I was thirteen when they stopped us from going to school, but I was finishing tenth grade.”
My eyes widened.
“You are book-smart.”
“I skipped some grades,” he said, shrugging, as if it was nothing, then asked, “How about you? When did you finish?”
“Fourth grade,” I muttered, flushing. “Mama tried to homeschool me after that. She did her best, but she’d had a limited education, so she really wasn’t able to teach me.” I still called Truda and Mateusz by their real names, but Roman had no idea they weren’t my real parents, so whenever he was around, I forced myself to remember to call them Mama and Papa instead.
“How did you learn to draw like you do?”
“I was bored back at our old house. There wasn’t much to do, but Mama and her sister gave me paper to draw,” I said, then I asked him hesitantly, “Would you like to see some more of my drawings?”
I’d collected dozens of them over the year since Sara gave me those notebooks, mostly sketches in charcoal. I fetched the pile and held my breath as Roman flicked through them.
“Most of these are of the ghetto,” he commented.
“I know. That’s why I couldn’t show anyone else.”
He studied a rough sketch I’d made of the youth center building, tracing his finger over the lines of the doors.
“This building was still there when I left, but most of the rest of the ghetto had been burned down.”
“I think they finished the job while you were recovering,” I told him hesitantly. He looked at me in surprise. “It’s all rubble now, all of the blocks of the ghetto. There’s nothing left, not even the wall in most parts. Even the Great Synagogue is gone. The SS blew it up...punishment for the Uprising.”
“I’m still glad we did it,” he said.
“What was it like?” I asked him softly. Roman looked at the paper again.
“I thought it would feel cleansing to avenge my family. To avenge the suffering. But it wasn’t enough.” He touched the sketch again, then asked, “Why did you draw so much of the ghetto? It was hardly a scenic landscape.”
Roman shuffled through another paper, another scene from the streets he’d been confined to for years. This time, I’d drawn a body on a sidewalk, the woman’s arm stretched out above her head, reaching toward help that would never come.
“You expected that vengeance would be cleansing,” I replied quietly. “I think when I draw, I’m looking for the same thing. You know sometimes when your thoughts are so cloudy you can’t make sense of them? That’s when I draw. I can usually find a way to let things go if I just draw what I’m thinking about. When I’m really overwhelmed, I pray and I draw.”
“How do you know how to capture it?” he asked and pointed to the shading around the woman’s face. “How do you know how thick the line should be? How do you know where to put the shadow?”
“I feel it,” I said, leaning forward to trace a line just beneath his finger. “There’s an endless dance between the shadow and the light...the way the shadows shift as the light shifts, illuminating different parts of a thing, bringing different pieces into focus. Capturing an image like this is feeling that dance in my bones and pouring it onto the paper.”
He looked at me, his gaze thoughtful.
“You are so lucky to have such a talent. But you’re also lucky to have an outlet.”
“What’s your outlet?”
He shrugged. “I guess I have to figure that out, now.”
Now that our bedrooms were separated only by a thin wall, I sometimes heard his nightmares. He would cry out in anguish, and I’d startle awake, heart racing at the thought of his suffering. Usually, I would think about slipping out of bed to go to him, but I never did. Instead, I’d lie in bed and pray for him. Often, if the shouting went on for a while, I’d hear the creak of the stairs as Sara went to check on him.
The more time I spent with Roman, the more fretful Truda and Mateusz became about the propriety of it all.
“Keep the door open. Don’t sit on the bed with him. Don’t touch him,” Truda would always instruct me when I was heading down the hall. Mateusz, too, found plenty to worry about.
“Please don’t tell him the truth about yourself,” he said.
“We can trust him,” I said lightly. “He can’t exactly leave the house just yet anyway—he’s too weak—but even if he could, I know he would never betray me.”
“We were only going to tell Piotr, remember? And now Sara knows, and then you widen the circle to Roman, and where does it end? We may as well paint your real name on the side of the building.”
“But it’s been more than a year,” I said impatiently. “No one is even looking for me!”
“You don’t know that. And maybe no one is looking for you because you have slipped off the radar. Let’s say your friend recovers, and he goes out into the world again. He is a loose cannon, Emilia.” Mateusz sighed. “Do you really believe he will lie low once he is well? He will find trouble because there is so much trouble in his heart. If he gets mixed up in the underground again, if he is captured and tortured, he cannot betray your secret if he doesn’t know it. Promise me, or we will have to keep you two apart.”
He left me no choice. I sighed impatiently but gave him my word. My time with Roman meant too much to me to risk it.
25
Roman
“It’s too risky. You cannot be serious about him living here forever.”
I was in my room reading one of Sara’s novels when the words floated up the stairs from her living area. It was late—long after I’d normally be asleep, but the book engrossed me, and I was feeling a little stronger. I had closed my door most of the way, but the latch hadn’t caught, and it swung open just a little. I’d noticed that as it happened, but I’d been too lazy to get up to shut it again. Now, I closed the book and sat up, frowning as I strained to listen.
“Oh, you are uncomfortable with risk when it suits you?” Sara hissed. “I knew this was going to be a problem when I had to nag you to get his new papers. There is no money to be made from him, so now you are concerned about risk.”
I slipped out of bed and walked slowly to the door so I could hear better. She was speaking to Piotr, and they both sounded frustrated.
“Sara, I am worried about you,” Piotr said. “He is Jewish. This—”
“He is a Catholic boy who had a Jewish family,” she snapped.