I leaned toward her, then carefully brushed my lips against hers. I had never kissed a girl before, and during one of those lazy chats in Sara’s apartment as I recovered, Elz·bieta had told me that she had never kissed a boy. That first kiss we shared was over in an instant, but it set a fire in my chest and in my heart that would sustain me to the end.
“If you really won’t stay, then you have to promise me that you will guard your life as if it were mine,” Emilia said, touching my skin near the injured side of my neck again, this time with utmost gentleness. I rested my hand over hers. “Promise me. Say you’ll guard your life as if it were mine.”
I hesitated only for a moment. Staring into her eyes, being close to her, it seemed that I was powerless to refuse her, even when she was asking for the impossible.
“I promise. I’ll guard my life as if it were yours.”
She nodded, but then her eyes filled with tears.
“Please don’t go, Roman. Please.”
I kissed her again, softly and sweetly, but then I walked away. I left her crying in the basement hospital, and I ignored the protests of her parents and the medical staff as I walked back into the street.
31
Emilia
I cried so much that night that my eyes were painfully swollen by the time I woke up. My throat was raw as if I had been screaming in my sleep. When I made my way to the kitchen, I found Truda and Mateusz already dressed, sitting at the table in silence, nursing cups of tea. They, too, looked emotionally exhausted.
We hadn’t talked about Uncle Piotr’s death—each of us trapped in our own prison of grief. Speaking aloud might have made the pain worse, and I was scared of the conversation we would have to have after that one—the conversation about what we would do next.
But the sun had risen on our first day without Uncle Piotr, and we could only put off that conversation for so long. Mateusz rose and silently made me a cup of tea. I joined them at the table.
“Can we still leave the city?” I asked, my voice husky. I had felt a range of emotions over the course of the war—few of them good—but I had never really felt hopelessness like this before. We’d lost Uncle Piotr, Roman seemed to be on a suicide mission, and the city was closing in around us.
“I’m afraid it’s complicated,” Truda said. “Piotr organized safe passage, but we have no idea how or what the details were.”
I looked to Mateusz.
“He was going to tell you...”
“He was distracted...so animated,” Mateusz said, his voice thick with tears. “He was determined to convince Roman to join us. He felt he had let you down. He wanted to make it up to you...to put something right for Roman, too.”
“I can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Neither can we.” Truda sighed, rubbing her forehead wearily. “But that also brings us to our other problem, Emilia. Piotr told Mateusz that the guides and vehicles he organized were going to cost almost all the money he had on hand, and we have no idea where that money is. I searched his room last night and even the basement. We have only a few hundred zloty, and we are guessing that we need tens of thousands.”
“So we are trapped?”
“I have heard the Germans stopped the slaughter in Wola,” Mateusz said carefully. “They are taking prisoners now, not—” He broke off, then cleared his throat. “I’m trying to say that we won’t be... I mean, it’s likely that...”
“When this district falls, and it inevitably will fall, we will surrender and hope for the best,” Truda interrupted him. I nodded slowly, digesting this.
“And in the meantime?”
“As long as we have food and water, we simply have to stay put.”
* * *
Our district was entirely out of food within weeks, and tens of thousands would have starved to death but for the AK taking control of a brewery on Ceglana Street. They distributed bags of barley to civilians in the blocks around our street every day, and people would use their coffee grinders to turn the barley into a powder they could boil. It would form a thin paste that came to be known as pluj-zupa: spit soup.
We were lucky. When Truda searched Uncle Piotr’s room for money, she found a cache of beans and powdered milk under his bed. We shared our bounty only with Sara, who visited every few days for food and rest. When she came the first time, we wept together for Piotr and for Roman, too.
“Have you seen him?” I asked her, and she nodded.
“He came in to have the wound cleaned.”
“Is it infected?”
“It’s not too bad. It’s going to leave an awful scar.”
“If he survives.”
She sighed heavily and nodded. “If he survives.”
Each day had me swinging between the terror of the situation and sheer, monotonous boredom. I couldn’t focus enough to read, besides which, I had already read every book I could get my hands on.
Desperation led me to start a new project. I collected my pencils and charcoal and then stripped the artwork from my bedroom wall. I moved furniture so that I had one gloriously blank wall, and then I considered it a canvas. I sat by the window to stare out at the streetscape, watching to catch the details that defined those days in Old Town. The elderly lady who hung her washing on a string along her windowsill. The window garden that a young mother grew herbs and flowers in last summer. The window in that abandoned apartment that had been cracked ever since I arrived in Warsaw. And the beautiful, ornate buildings—neat rows of homes that had mostly been built in the twelfth century and that had survived hundreds of years of ups and downs of life.
Down on the street, parents were just doing the best they could for their children. Elderly residents would sit on the doorsteps and tell anyone who passed that the city was brave and strong and that for all Poland had endured in its history, it could survive this, too. The AK fighters passed in their tattered uniforms, increasingly worn, but still there and still fighting.
I drew it all. I spent hours a day on the mural, until my fingers or back cramped. Every single morning, I picked up my pencils, and I continued to work. I had to—I was compelled to capture every detail of Warsaw that I could, while I could.
I could see from the rooftop that other parts of the city were on fire, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching the last days of a city’s life. Who knew how many of us would survive the war? Who knew how many of us would survive the Uprising?
But we mattered, and our city mattered, and I wanted to record it all—even if the building was destined to be destroyed.
Those agonizing weeks during the Uprising confirmed that art is not always for the viewer. Sometimes the very act of creating can mean salvation for the artist.