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

it was not another aktion like the time I had seen the woman jump from the bridge with her children. But the police did not seem as urgent as they had that day, their movements perfunctory and efficient. A checkpoint, I realized as they began checking the papers one by one of the people attempting to cross the bridge. The notion was only slightly less worrying than the aktion. Since the start of the war, the police had set up checkpoints across the city at random, inspecting the papers of ordinary Poles, questioning any irregularities. But it happened with greater frequency now, and the reasons people might be detained for questioning seemed more arbitrary and frequent.

The man in line in front of me shuffled forward and I followed, pulling out my identification card as I neared the checkpoint. “Kennkarte?” the policeman asked me. As I handed the card to him, my heartbeat quickened. My papers were in order and the stamps Ana Lucia had procured from the Germans enabled me to walk freely throughout the city. But that would not stop the police from questioning the purpose of my going to Dębniki.

The policeman looked up from the card, appraising me. I braced for the interrogation that would surely come. Then he handed it back just as quickly. “Move on!” he barked, gesturing for the person behind me to step up and be checked. I hurried on, fighting the urge to run.

A few minutes later, I reached the far riverbank. I looked back uneasily at the checkpoint, afraid that the police might be able to see the sewer grate. But the vantage point was thankfully obscured from view. There were a few children playing by the water’s edge, though, feeding the ducks, and I had to wait several feet away until they moved on. At last I started toward the entrance to the sewer. It was almost eleven thirty now, our scheduled meeting time had passed, and as I neared the grate, I expected to see Sadie, looking up, her brown eyes hopeful and expectant. She wasn’t there. My uneasiness grew. One missed visit was an aberration; there might be any number of reasons that she could not get away. Twice in a row meant something was wrong.

I knew how important our visits were to her. She wouldn’t just stop coming. More to the point, she needed me for food, I thought guiltily, regretful that there had been nothing I could sneak from home that morning without being noticed.

Sadie had not come. Something was wrong. A dozen awful scenarios swept through my brain. She could have been arrested or drowned like her father. Of course, it might not be that bad, I realized. She might be caring for her mother or someone else underground. There was no way to know.

Unless I went into the sewer. I knelt by the grate, my stomach churning as I tried to see beneath. But the space was shrouded in darkness. I did not know how Sadie did it, day after day. It wasn’t that bad, she had said more than once. The sewer was a refuge to her, salvation. She had gotten used to the awful conditions. As I stared into the hole, though, I could not imagine going down there for a single second. It was not the filth, nor the raging sewer waters she had described sweeping her father to his death, that scared me the most.

Rather, I was afraid of tight spaces. “Claustrophobia,” my brother, Maciej, had called it.

My mind reeled back to a childhood nightmare of being trapped. It was more than a nightmare, I realized suddenly, the memory snapping clear into place. When my father was on business trips, Ana Lucia could be unfathomably cruel. She didn’t hit me, but she had other ways, like forgetting to feed me for a day and a half. Olga, our cook at the time, slipped me scraps when my stepmother wasn’t looking so I didn’t grow faint with hunger. Once when I had gotten dirty playing outside, Ana Lucia locked me in an armoire, packed full with a dozen fur coats. Stuck among the pelts of those dead animals, I could not breathe. I cried out, but the coats muffled the sound of my voice. I imagined the air disappearing and me slowly suffocating while nobody knew. I tried the door but it was locked. It was four hours before Olga realized where I was and freed me and I came out sweaty and hysterical. Ana Lucia had gone to town and there was no telling how long she would have left me there if my Olga had not come.

After that day, I could not bear to be in a close space again. And I could not go into the sewer now. I stepped back, ashamed of my cowardice.

In the distance, a clock chimed half past eleven. It was too late for Sadie to come now. I started away from the riverbank, then hesitated. The bridge was still choked thick with pedestrians at the checkpoint, so there was no point in starting back home now. I looked up the road toward the square in Dębniki and the spires of the Kostka Church which loomed above it. The other grate, I remembered suddenly. I had not returned to the sewer opening behind the church since Sadie and I had decided to meet by the riverbank. The grate in Dębniki was closer to where Sadie lived underground; perhaps if I went there, I might be able to find her. It was unlikely, but there was no other place I might look for her. I started up the riverbank and toward the industrial neighborhood, which had become more familiar to me since I had started coming. I reached the alleyway and, after making sure that no one was watching, walked to the grate. But the place beneath was dark. Sadie was not there.

Of course not. We had decided not to meet here anymore. Dejected, I left