Our apartment was still there, but there were no windows, and there had been a fire on the ground floor. The one small blessing was that there were no corpses visible in the rubble around our apartment. I spent much of the trip stopping to gag, composing myself, then repeating the process all over again just steps down the road. Winter preserved the corpses, but spring had arrived, and they were finally beginning to rot.
We had seen dozens of other people on the road as we crossed Warsaw, at least half of them walking back out of the city, having decided they would prefer to go back to wherever they’d come from. But I didn’t have the energy to fight with Truda and Mateusz. I barely had the energy to stand.
“So what do we do now?” I asked them. Truda wiped at her eye, dislodging an errant tear, but we were so dirty and dusty by then that the tear had turned to mud, and she managed to leave only a gray streak of it across her temple. The daylight was starting to fade.
“I’m going to go see how structurally sound the building is,” Mateusz announced.
“You’re no engineer.” I sighed.
He shrugged. “I’ll check that the doorframes are still somewhat square. Check that the stairs still have integrity. Check that I can even get to the top floors. Then I’ll come back and get you girls, okay?”
“And if it’s not safe?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. Instead, Mateusz walked through the smashed door and into the lobby. I saw him check the door to the courtyard, but he quickly abandoned that and walked up the stairs.
“Maybe there is still food in the pantry,” I said hopefully.
“Unlikely,” Truda said abruptly, then she waved her arms around us. “Do you really think there will be anything of value left anywhere when the city looks like this?”
“I wanted to go back to Lodz,” I reminded her. She pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.
After about ten minutes, we saw Mateusz coming back down the stairs. He stuck his head out the front door, then waved to us to enter. As we approached, he smiled.
“The hallway is very damaged, but outside of that, the building hasn’t fared too badly. The windows are all smashed, and some of the furniture has been broken, but our old beds are still there, and once we clean them off, they’ll be fine to sleep on. It looks like the rest of the building was looted, but the looters didn’t go to the top few floors. Best of all, Mr. Wójcik is still on the second floor and he’s been collecting rainwater. He will give us enough for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll walk to the river for more. Sound okay?”
“And food?” Truda asked.
“There’s still cans under Piotr’s bed,” he said, then he beamed. “See? We’re lucky.”
“Lucky,” I said and snorted, pushing past him to make my way upstairs. The gaping hallway and the void where Sara’s apartment had been gave me shivers, so I quickly slipped into our apartment. As soon as I did, my gaze landed on the stairwell that led to my bedroom. I climbed the stairs two at a time, then rushed across the room to the wall opposite the window. I dusted it with my palm, wiping down the whole wall to free the mural from beneath the film.
The city was gone, but my mural was still there—capturing a moment that felt like it had been frozen a lifetime ago. I sank onto the floor by the couple I’d drawn at the last minute and then reached out to trace the boy with the tip of my finger. My characters were strangers now, but they were strangers I was immensely jealous of.
* * *
For dinner that night, we warmed up canned beans over a fire Mateusz built out of wood he had salvaged from the rubble on the road. Up high in our apartment, the stench of the city was not so bad, and I managed to keep my food down. Truda had done her best to shake the dust and chunks of debris out of our bedding, and they set my bed up in their old room, right beside their mattress. I wanted to protest and remind them that I was not a child, but I felt far from safe anywhere, and I was shaken by the chaos in Warsaw. We had seen no shortage of Soviet soldiers as we crossed the city, and I didn’t want to be alone.
As soon as we finished eating, I excused myself and climbed into bed, and as I lay staring up at the ceiling in the fading spring light, it occurred to me that when I had lived in this household, I had prayed every night. I hadn’t said a single prayer since the attack, but now, for the first time, I closed my eyes and offered one up.
Thank you for sparing our apartment. Please look after Roman and Sara. Please let them be happy and healthy and safe.
“She seems worse, not better,” I heard Mateusz say. I opened my eyes, suddenly racked by guilt at the concern in his voice.
“We need to find Sara.”
“You really think Sara can help her in some way that we can’t?”
“I know she can.”
“Why?”
“She knows things about...” Truda cleared her throat “...about women.” There was a longer pause, then Truda’s voice dropped further as she admitted, “I don’t even know how to talk to her about this.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll start scouring the city. If she’s here, I’ll find her. But have you thought about what we’ll do if she’s not here? I hate to say this, but there’s a very real possibility Sara didn’t even make it out of Warsaw alive.”
I rolled over then and covered my head with a spare pillow.
* * *
For the next few days, Truda and I worked from morning to night, trying to restore order to our apartment. We only left to walk the short distance to the banks of the Vistula River, filling buckets with water for cleaning. Mateusz made the same journey with us each morning, filling an additional bucket for drinking water. Then he would leave and be gone all day. He registered us for the grant the city was offering those who returned, and then he started looking for Sara and for a job.
As the days passed, I found a comfort in the city that I hadn’t expected. Such a thing seemed impossible when we had first returned, but as I settled into life among the ruins, I began to see signs of recovery. They were only baby steps: a family returning here, a determined old woman raising hens on a patch of crushed cobblestones there, a man collecting bricks from the street and stacking them up on the sidewalk, doing what he could to clear rubble so that vehicles could move freely again. But each of these things seemed important, and I gradually stopped focusing on what was gone and started focusing on new signs of life. It made me feel strangely hopeful.
I was sitting in an empty window staring out at the street watching all of this, when a sudden thought struck me.
“Truda?” I called, climbing down from the sill and dusting myself off.
“Yes? What is it? Is something wrong? Are you okay?”