The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

myself on an errand to this remote part of the city on a Saturday morning. An hour earlier, I had been in my room, composing a letter to my brother, Maciej. He had lived in Paris for nearly a decade, and although I had not had the chance to visit him, the city came alive through the dancing script and detailed description and wicked humor of his letters. I wrote him back in the most general of ways, mindful always that our letters might be read. The Falconess has been hunting, I said at one point. The name was our code for Ana Lucia and her love of wearing animal carcasses as clothing, “hunting” a reference to the times when she was being particularly wretched. Come to Paris, he had urged in his last letter and I smiled as I heard his acquired French affect jump off the page in his words. Phillipe and I would be overjoyed to have you. As if it were that simple. It was impossible to travel now, but perhaps when the war was over, he would send for me. My stepmother would not care if I left, as long as the trip didn’t cost her anything.

I had just finished sealing the letter with a bit of wax when I heard the commotion down in the kitchen. Ana Lucia was yelling at our maid, Hanna. Poor Hanna was often the target of my stepmother’s wrath. We’d once had four full-time house staff. But the war had meant sacrifices for everyone, and in my stepmother’s world that meant making do with one servant. Hanna had been our maid, a tiny waif of a girl from the country with no family of her own—she was the only one willing to take on the work of the entire household staff and so she was the one who stayed, gamely managing housekeeper and butler and gardener and cook duties all at once because she had nowhere else to go.

I wondered what the subject of my stepmother’s wrath was today. Cherries, I learned when I went downstairs. “I have promised Hauptsturmführer Kraus the best sour cherry pie in Kraków for dessert tonight. Only we have no cherries!” Ana Lucia’s cheeks were flushed hot pink with anger, as if she had just stepped from the bath.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Hanna said. Her pockmarked face bore a flustered expression. “They’re out of season.”

“So?” The practicalities of the situation were lost on Ana Lucia, who wanted what she wanted.

“Perhaps dried cherries,” I offered, trying to be helpful. “Or canned.”

Ana Lucia turned toward me and I waited for her to reject my suggestion out of hand, as she always did. “Yes, that,” she said slowly, as though surprised I had a good idea.

Hanna shook her head. “I tried. There are none to be had at market.”

“Then you go to other markets!” Ana Lucia exploded. I feared my suggestion, though well-intentioned, had just made the poor girl’s situation worse.

“But with the roast to cook...” Hanna’s voice sounded helpless, aghast.

“I’ll go,” I interjected. They both looked at me with surprise. It was not that I wanted to help my stepmother appease the appetite of some Nazi pig. To the contrary, I would sooner shove the cherries down his throat, pits and all. But I was bored. And I wanted to go out to the post office to deliver my letter to Maciej, so I could do both in one trip.

I expected my stepmother to protest, but she did not. Instead, she passed me a handful of coins, vile reichsmarks that had replaced the Polish zloty.

“I heard there might be some cherries to be had in Dębniki,” Hanna offered, her voice full with gratitude.

“Across the river?” I asked. Hanna nodded, pleading with her eyes for me not to change my mind. Dębniki, a district on the far side of the Wisła, was at least thirty minutes by tram, longer on foot. I had not planned on going so far. But I had said I would go and I could not abandon Hanna to my stepmother’s wrath a second time.

“The pie has to be in the oven by three,” Ana Lucia said haughtily, instead of thanking me.

I put on my coat and picked up the small basket I often used for shopping before starting from the house. I might have taken the tram, but I welcomed the crisp, coal-tinged air and the chance to stretch my legs. I followed Grodzka Street south until I reached the Planty, crossing the now-withered swath of parkland that ringed the city center.

My route beyond the Planty going south toward the river took me along the edge of Kazimierz, the neighborhood southeast of the city center that had once been the Jewish Quarter. I’d seldom had reason to visit Kazimierz, but it had always seemed exotic and foreign with its men clad in tall, dark hats and Hebrew writing in the shop windows. I passed what had once been a bakery and I could almost smell the challah they used to bake. It was all gone now since the Germans had forced the Jews to the ghetto in Podgórze. The shops were abandoned, their glass windows broken or shuttered. Their synagogues, which for centuries would have been filled with worshippers on a Saturday morning, were now empty and still.

I had hurried past the ghost town uneasily and now stood at the base of the bridge that spanned the wide stretch of the Wisła. The river separated the city center and Kazimierz from the neighborhoods of Dębniki and Podgórze to the south. I gazed over my shoulder at the hulking Wawel Castle. Once the seat of the Polish monarchy, it had presided over the city for nearly a thousand years. Like everything else, it was part of the General Government now, taken by the Germans as the seat of their administration.

As I looked at the castle now, a memory loomed of a night not long after the invasion when I had taken a walk. As