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

“I was walking and something sharp was jutting out from the tunnel wall that cut me,” he explained.

“The same thing happened to me when we first arrived.” Only my wound had not been nearly as bad. “Wait here,” I instructed. I raced back to the chamber and grabbed Mama’s bag of salves, leaving again before she could see me. When I returned to where Saul sat, I uncapped one of the tubes and squeezed out a bit of salve. I knelt and reached for his leg, but he reared back. “You don’t want it to get infected,” I said.

“I can do it myself,” he insisted, but the spot was on the back of his calf and difficult to see. I understood his hesitation. A religious Jew, he was not permitted to touch women outside of his family.

“You can’t see the spot or reach it properly,” I pointed out.

“I can manage,” he insisted.

“At least let me guide you so you dress the right spot.” He reached behind his calf awkwardly with the salve. “A little to the right,” I said. “Rub it in a bit more.” He tried to place the bandage over the wound, but one of the ends slipped. Before he could protest, I moved to press it into place, then pulled my hand back hurriedly.

He stepped away. “Thank you,” he said, clearly flustered. He studied the dressing before rolling his pants leg down. “You did a good job.”

“I want to study medicine,” I blurted, instantly embarrassed. The idea sounded too big, foolish.

But Saul smiled. “You’ll do well at it.” The certainty in his voice reminded me of Papa, who had never expected me to be any less than my dreams. My insides warmed.

“You shouldn’t wear that,” Saul said, gesturing to Papa’s chai necklace around my neck, which dangled as I stood up.

“Hah! You’re one to talk.” How could someone who wore a yarmulke and tzistzis, whose family put a mezuzah on the door to the chamber, tell me it was unsafe to wear a simple necklace that identified me as a Jew? The truth was that if we were caught, we would have worse problems than what we wore.

He shook his head. “Mine is a requirement of the faith. Yours is jewelry.”

“How can you say that?” I replied, stung. “It belonged to my father.” Papa’s necklace was so much more than that, a connection to him and my last bit of hope. I turned away.

“Sadie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that I worry about you.” He looked away, a note of embarrassment in his voice.

“I can take care of myself. I’m not a child.”

“I know.” Our eyes locked and held for several seconds and a jolt of electricity went straight through me. I liked him, I realized suddenly. I had not given much thought to boys before the war and it caught me off guard now, the idea foreign and strange, especially given our circumstances. Of course, it was just a crush. Saul had Shifra waiting for him, and anything else was completely imagined on my part. I turned abruptly away.

I picked up the trash bag and water jug and started down the tunnel on my original errand. Water and garbage were tasks that always fell to me or Saul, especially garbage because it involved climbing through one of the forties, a forty-inch-diameter pipe too narrow and awkward for the older folks. We had to place the garbage at a spot where the bag would sink unseen, Pawel explained early on, and not be carried to the sewer entrance and give our presence away. I took the filthy bag and clutched the water jug between my teeth and began crawling through the pipe, pushing the bag of garbage and water jug in front of me.

When I emerged from the forty, I continued along the tunnel, feeling for the wall in the semidarkness and ducking so as not to bump my head. I reached the juncture with the larger pipe and put the trash bag into the water, trying not to think of the river below that could take me as easily as it had my father. I saw that moment over and over again. If only I had reached for him. What had become of his body? He should have had a proper burial.

Turning away from the river, I started in the other direction and crawled back through the forty. I passed the entrance to the chamber and started toward the place on the other side where we gathered clean water from a leaking pipe. A few meters from the chamber, I stopped once more beneath a slatted sewer grate. Our hiding place was not far from the main market square in Dębniki, a working-class neighborhood on the south bank of the river, just a few kilometers west of Podgórze, where the ghetto was located. Today was Saturday, a market day, and I could hear the sounds of the vendors hawking their wares. I stood listening to the customers placing their orders, smelling the roasted meats and salted fish, and remembering a time when I was a part of it all.

I continued on a bit farther and stopped beneath the leaking pipe, which ran just above my head along the sewer wall. I fashioned a cloth as my mother had shown me so the water would trickle into the jar. As the jug filled, I listened for the sounds of the market. I had come to know the rhythms of the city from its sounds in a way I could not have imagined living above ground: the predawn scraping of the carts, the walking of pedestrians as morning broke to noon. At night the streets fell silent as everyone returned to their homes before curfew. Our chamber was just below the St. Stanisław Kostka Church and on Sundays we could hear the parishioners singing, the sound of the church choir filtering through the grate.

Capping the jug, I