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

Without saying good-night, Ana Lucia turned and stumbled down the two flights of stairs, nearly falling. I heard the door to her bedroom close. Still, I did not dare open the armoire door. Through the pipes came the awful sounds of Ana Lucia and the colonel in bed. Mortified, I prayed Sadie could not hear them in the closed armoire.

After a while, the bedroom below went silent. I waited until I was sure that they were asleep. Then I opened the armoire door and helped Sadie out. She looked angry and afraid. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but I clamped my hand over it so she would not wake Ana Lucia or her wretched guest. “Shh,” I said. “Not now.” I led her quickly from my room and down the back steps. The floorboards creaked, threatening to betray us with every step.

At last we reached the ground floor. “Is it time to go back?” Sadie asked as we stepped from the alley behind my house onto Kanonicza Street.

I shook my head. “We have another two hours at least.” It was the middle of the night and I didn’t know of another place where we could wait or hide.

“Can we walk a bit?” she asked. “I’d like to see the city one more time.”

I started to say no. We should head straight toward the river and find a place to hide close to the sewer grate. Being out and about was not safe; we were out breaking curfew and would be arrested if caught. But she already knew that. “Please, Ella. I’m free just for a bit more. Who knows when I will have a chance like this again?”

I saw it then from her point of view. These were cherished moments of freedom to her, maybe the last she would have. I started toward the shadowy streets below the Rynek, assuming that she wanted to see the Old Town, planning to lead her as I always had. But Sadie caught my arm, tugging in a different direction, taking the lead and guiding me south toward Kazimierz, the neighborhood that had once been Kraków’s Jewish Quarter—and her home.

Though I had passed by the outskirts of Kazimierz several times on my way to the bridge, I had not walked through the neighborhood since the start of the war. It was a cluster of narrow streets, packed with more than a dozen synagogues. Once it had bustled with Jewish shops and merchants, more Yiddish spoken on the streets than Polish. The Jews were all gone now, the buildings burned and windows broken. But the remnants were still here, Jewish writing etched on a shard of broken glass, the faint outline of a mezuzah where it had once hung on a door.

We walked the deserted streets without speaking, the silence broken only by the shards of glass that crunched beneath our feet. I watched Sadie out of the corner of my eye. Her expression grew sadder with every passing block. This was the first time she had seen what had become of her neighborhood and I wondered if she regretted coming. “We can turn back,” I offered. “Go another way.” Seeing what was no longer would surely only bring her more pain. But grim and determined, she pressed on.

Sadie turned down a smaller street and stopped before a row of town houses. They did not seem to have been as badly destroyed as some we had passed. It looked as if people might live there. Sadie did not speak as she gazed up at the building, lost in memories.

“Yours?” I asked.

She nodded. “Our apartment was on the third floor.” They had lived in only part of the building, I realized, not the whole house as we did. Sadie’s home had been a simple one, but I could tell from the way her eyes danced with memories that it had been filled with warmth and love.

“You’ll come back here,” I said. I slipped my hand into hers and laced our fingers together. “After the war.” Though I meant it kindly, we both knew it was a lie. The war had shattered her life into too many pieces to be put together the same way again. Whatever life held for her after the war, it wouldn’t be here.

Sadie stood motionless for so long that I feared she would not leave at all. I prepared to coax her away, but she took a last look at the house and turned to me. “I’m ready,” she said at last. Together we walked slowly back toward the river to Podgórze.

As we neared the bridge, I scanned the far bank for Krys. He wasn’t there, of course. It was too early, more than an hour before we were supposed to meet. Still, I worried about all of the bad things that might have happened—that he had not been able to get food, that he had been arrested.

“Krys isn’t here yet,” I said.

“You still like him,” Sadie said. “I can hear it in how you say his name.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps. But we can never be together, so what does it matter?”

“Never say never,” she said, flinging my own words from earlier back at me. We laughed for a moment, our voices carrying too far with the wind. “Love always matters,” she added, her voice earnest now.

We rounded the corner near the bridge. Just then, there came the sound of a car engine ahead. It was a police car like the one we had seen earlier, now patrolling the riverbank. We leapt back around the corner, pressing ourselves flat against one of the buildings to stay out of sight. Beside me, Sadie trembled. I braced for our discovery, tried to think of an excuse to explain our being out at this hour. The police car snaked slowly by on the road that ran along the river.

“We can’t wait here,” I said when the police car had passed.

“What should we do?” Sadie asked, still shaking with fear. I considered