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

end of Floriańska Street to Wawel Castle seated high atop a hill overlooking the Wisła River. Walking, it seemed, was the one thing that neither time nor war could take from me.

I did not stop at the cafés, though. Once I might have sat with my friends, laughing and talking as the sun set and the lights went on for evening, sending pools of yellow cascading against the pavement. But there were no nighttime lights now—everything was dimmed per German decree to disguise the city against a possible air raid. And no one I knew made plans to meet anymore either. People were going out less, I reminded myself often as the invitations that had once been plentiful dwindled to nothing. Few could purchase enough food with ration cards to entertain at home either. Everyone was too caught up in their own survival, and company was a luxury we could ill afford.

Still, I felt a pang of loneliness. My life was so quiet with Krys away and I would have liked to sit and talk with friends my own age. Brushing the feeling aside, I circled the square once more studying the shop windows, which displayed fashions and other wares almost no one could afford anymore. Anything to delay going back to the house where I lived with my stepmother.

But it was foolish to stay on the street much longer. The Germans were known to stop people for questioning and inspection with increasing frequency as night fell and the curfew drew closer. I left the square and started down the grand thoroughfare of Grodzka Street toward the house just steps from the city center where I had lived my entire life. Then I turned onto Kanonicza Street, an ancient and winding way paved with cobblestones that had been smoothed by time. Despite the fact that I dreaded encountering my stepmother, Ana Lucia, the wide town house we shared was still a welcome sight. With its bright yellow facade and well-tended flower boxes in the windows, it was nicer than anything the Germans thought a Pole deserved. Under other circumstances it surely would have been confiscated for a Nazi officer.

As I stood in front of the house, memories of my family danced before my eyes. The visions of my mother, who had died of influenza when I was a toddler, were the least clear. I was the youngest of four children and had been jealous of my siblings, who had so many years with our mother, whom I had scarcely known at all. My sisters were both married, one to an attorney in Warsaw and the other to a boat captain in Gdan´sk.

It was my brother, Maciej, closest to me in age, whom I missed the most. Though he was eight years older, he had always taken time to play and talk with me. He was different than the others. He had no interest in marriage, nor the career choices my father had wanted for him. So at seventeen, he fled to Paris, where he lived with a man named Phillipe. Of course, Maciej had not escaped the long arm of the Nazis. They controlled Paris now, too, darkening what he had once called the City of Light. But his letters remained upbeat and I hoped that things were at least a bit better there.

For years after my siblings left, it was just me and my father, whom I had always called Tata. Then he began making trips to Vienna for his printing business more often than he had. One day, he returned with Ana Lucia, whom he had married without telling me. I knew the first time I met Ana Lucia that I would hate her. She was wearing a thick fur coat with the head of the animal still attached around the collar. The poor thing’s eyes stared at me piteously, filled with recrimination. A whiff of her too-heavy jasmine scent filled my nose as she air-kissed my cheek, her breath an almost hiss. I could tell from the cold way she appraised me upon our first meeting that I was not wanted, like furniture that someone else had picked out, which she was stuck with because it came with the house.

When the war broke out, Tata decided to renew his army commission. At his age, he certainly did not have to go. But he served out of a sense of duty, not just to country but to the young soldiers, barely more than boys, some of whom had not been born the last time Poland went to war.

The telegram had come swiftly: missing, presumed dead on the Eastern Front. My eyes stung now as I thought of Tata, the pain as fresh as the day we had learned the news. Sometimes I dreamed that he had been captured and would return to us after the war. Other times, I was angry: how could he have gone and left me alone with Ana Lucia? She was like the evil stepmother in some childhood story, only worse because she was real.

I reached the arched oak doorway of our house, started to turn the brass knob. Then hearing boisterous voices inside, I stopped. Ana Lucia was entertaining again.

My stepmother’s parties were always loud. “Soirees,” she called them, making them sound grander than they were. They seemed to consist of whatever decent food could be found these days, paired with several bottles of wine from my father’s dwindling cellar and some vodka from the freezer, watered down liberally to make it stretch. Before the war, I might have joined her parties, which were filled with artists and musicians and intellectuals. I loved to listen to their spirited debates, arguing ideas long into the night. But those people were all gone now, having fled to Switzerland or England if they were able, the less lucky ones arrested and sent away. They had been replaced by guests of the worst sort—Germans, the higher ranking, the better. Ana Lucia was nothing if not a pragmatist.