“How many times am I going to have to come sit vigil at your bedside, Roman Gorka?” she demanded.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, as I drank in the sight of her. Emilia had lost the gauntness that had plagued us all over the course of the war. Her cheeks had filled out, and a rosy glow had returned to her complexion. Her hair was out, all around her shoulders and stretched down to her waist, so much longer than the last time I’d seen her.
“I couldn’t stay away,” she said. She didn’t seem nearly as pleased by this as I was.
“We lost the referendum,” I surmised, glancing down at the headline of the paper under her arm. “We will regroup,” I said, almost to myself. The interrogation had been so much more brutal than I’d anticipated. I hadn’t given up any AK insurgents, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have been as brave if I had known their real names. For situations just like this, we adopted the Gray Ranks convention of only using code names.
“Do you know how Mateusz got you out of that prison?” Emilia asked me flatly.
“Mateusz?” I said, frowning. I was still groggy enough that I hadn’t wondered how I’d been rescued, but suddenly I panicked at the memory of UB officers beating him as they dragged me from our office. “Is he okay?”
“He’s missing some teeth. His bruises have healed, but he’s fine,” she said impatiently. “Although God only knows how long that’s going to be the case, because Truda is on the warpath, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she killed him. He took the money he borrowed for the factory, and he used it to rescue you.”
I was suddenly distracted from the pain in my legs by a burst of guilt so immense, it almost swamped me. I knew how much Mateusz was relying on that loan—his entire plan for supporting his family had been based around it. The shame was so intense that, for a minute, I couldn’t speak. I wished he’d left me in the prison to die.
“I’ll pay him back,” I whispered.
“Do you remember the first drawing I ever gave you?” Emilia asked me suddenly.
“The fist,” I said. “Of course.”
“And the words beneath it?”
“Striving for justice is always worth the battle,” I said, staring into her eyes. She shook her head.
“You forgot the most important part, Roman. The first part of that sentence said There are many ways to fight. We wanted the war to end, and it did for the rest of the world, but...for us? We here in Poland have only entered a new phase, and this phase will last years. Bullets and bombs have failed us. Maybe they have always failed us. You need a new strategy.”
She had changed since the assault, but not in ways I would have expected. The idea of her suffering made me want to tear the world apart, but Emilia didn’t seem angry. In fact, in the months since I had seen her at the convent, she had only grown stronger and more certain.
She was healing, I realized. Emilia Slaska continued to astound me.
“All of the violence and bloodshed and death and suffering, and what has been achieved? Nothing,” she said in frustration. “No justice. No freedom. I understand the inclination to continue fighting, and believe me, I understand what it is like to want to hurt those who have hurt you. But it is a losing battle, Roman. You defeat one bad man, and another is there, ready to take his place. You need to fight the ideas that lead to bad men in the first place.”
The war had been so destructive in Emilia’s life, but it had never dampened the goodness of her spirit. From the first moment I met her, she had been finding ways to do good. And in the early months of our relationship, even in the lead-up to the Uprising, she had been vocal about her desire for revenge. But over time, she evolved beyond those instincts, and that was something I had failed to do.
“You will never know justice for what happened to you,” I said unevenly. She blinked away tears as she nodded. “You are looking toward the future anyway. How?”
“When you killed Germans during the Uprisings, did that bring you healing?” she asked me gently.
“You know it didn’t,” I whispered.
Emilia reached forward and rested her hand over mine. I turned mine over, sliding our fingers together, and she squeezed gently.
“Maybe it’s time to find another way.”
Don’t waste it, Chaim had said as he pushed me down into that manhole back in the ghetto. I’d let those words drive me through more years of conflict, but staring down at my fingers linked through Emilia’s, it struck me that I might have misunderstood his dying wish. Had he really saved me so I could live to die another day for our cause? Or had he saved my life so I could live it?
“I don’t know how else to live my life,” I whispered to Emilia. She ran her thumb over the back of my hand and flashed me a breathtaking smile.
“You don’t have to have all the answers today, Roman. We have all the time in the world to figure this out together.”
46
Emilia
Roman was in traction for months, stuck in a hospital bed, reliant on others to care for him, with little to do but think. When he was finally released, Sara took him in. Her new apartment was a few blocks from City Hall, two Spartan rooms on the third floor of a hastily repaired apartment block. Roman was using a wheelchair while his legs further healed, and the stairs that led to Sara’s apartment were impossible for him to navigate. She worked irregular shifts at the hospital, and he was often at home alone all day, with only a radio and whatever books we could source to keep him company.
“Remember when we had libraries?” he said wistfully. “Entire buildings filled with books—all gone now. It seems crazy that I never stopped to appreciate that before.”
“The libraries will be rebuilt,” I promised. “We will rebuild them ourselves if we have to.”
At home, money was tighter than ever—Mateusz was struggling to pay off the loan he’d taken and to support us at the same time. He was resilient: he’d found work again on a construction crew and remained philosophical about our situation.
“I saved Roman’s life, and I have a hunch that might be one of the best things I ever did,” Mateusz said, shrugging. Truda was less forgiving.
“He better not let us down,” she warned, shaking her head. “It’s going to be a long time before I trust that boy again.”
Anatol was gradually weaning, down to only a morning and a night feed as he learned to eat solid food, and my days were at last my own. I found a job as a receptionist for a newly reestablished newspaper. The pay was terrible, but I knew that every zloty helped my family, and for the first time in a long time, I felt useful and independent. Every evening, on my way home from work, I called in on Roman to bring him a copy of the newspaper.