‘I think I’m getting addicted to this,’ Elzunia said as she snuggled against Andrzej in his bed. She delighted in the secret glances they exchanged across the operating table by day, and couldn’t wait to sneak into his room at night. In his arms, the harshness of the world receded. There was no Uprising, no suffering and no terror. At last she had something solid to hold on to.
‘I’ll probably be arrested for corrupting minors,’ he said, and chuckled. ‘Come to think of it, you’re the one who corrupted me.’
After they made love, he kept his arms around her and nuzzled the nape of her neck. It was his tenderness she craved as much as the sexual intimacy, but this time his gaze slid away, as though to conceal his thoughts.
He sat up. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
She felt the air squeeze from her lungs. He was going to tell her he was married, or that he didn’t want her any more.
‘The AK fighters are pulling out of the Old Town.’
He told Elzunia that one of the military commanders of the Old Town district had come to see him at the hospital that morning. German attacks had intensified, and the AK fighters had lost about seven thousand men and couldn’t continue defending the area. The remaining units were to be evacuated to the central district along with some civilians, and that included patients from the hospital.
Elzunia found it difficult to listen as Andrzej described the situation. ‘That’s insane,’ she burst out, recalling her recent expedition to the warehouse. ‘They’ll never make it. They’ll be shot on the way.’
‘They’re not going above ground,’ Andrzej said. ‘They’re going through the sewers.’ He was squeezing her hand so hard that she winced. ‘Elzunia, we have to evacuate the hospital.’
She stared at him. ‘Evacuate the hospital? How?’
He told her what the major had said.
‘Listen, Zawadzki, I’m not going to mince words,’ he had barked. ‘There’s going to be one hell of a bloodbath here once the fighters pull out. Pick out all the patients who can walk, get your staff together, and be ready to leave the day after tomorrow. No stretchers or stragglers. It’s a tough journey even for able-bodied people but if anyone collapses in there they’ll endanger everyone else.’
The next day, an unusual quiet hung over the hospital as word of the evacuation spread among the patients. They all knew why Dr Zawadzki was pacing up and down the cellar corridors, scrutinising each of them in turn. They knew from the doctor’s haggard face and the dull look in his eyes that he was assessing them and weighing up who could make it through the sewers, but although their lives hung on his decision, no one made his task harder by pleading their case.
‘Don’t take it so hard, Dr Zawadzki,’ one of the patients said. ‘We know you’ll make the right decision. God bless you for all you’ve done.’ Andrzej nodded briefly and turned away to hide his tears.
At the end of the ward round, he flung himself onto a chair and buried his head in his hands. ‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,’ he told Elzunia. ‘They’re like people on death row hoping for a last-minute reprieve. My job is to heal people, not condemn them to death. I don’t want to play God.’
Elzunia tried to console him but she was struggling with her own anguish. Stefan’s harrowing account of his escape through the sewers was still vivid in her mind and the prospect of having to make that journey herself made it difficult to concentrate on anything else.
That evening, when she crept into Andrzej’s room, he wasn’t stretched out on the narrow bed as usual. He was standing up, fully clothed, a flashlight in his hand.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We’re not staying here tonight.’
Intrigued, she followed him up the broken stairs and into the street. By night, the streets were eerily quiet with the sinister silence of a volcano about to erupt. Without speaking, they held hands as they ran into a jagged shell that had once been a building. Mounds of pulverised bricks and broken slabs of stone filled the courtyard, which had once connected the neighbouring apartment blocks.
Andrzej stopped and looked around to get his bearings. A moment later they crept through a small cave-like opening in a collapsed wall and climbed one step at a time to the top of a flight of stairs that swayed under their feet.
They were standing in an apartment with no window panes. The blast had hurled pictures from the walls and books from their shelves, and the floor was covered with chunks of plaster and smashed glass. Elzunia bent down and picked up a copy of War and Peace with its cover torn off.
‘If Tolstoy were writing today, he’d have to call it War and War,’ she said.
In the eerie silence of the devastated apartment and the debris of family possessions acquired over generations, she saw shattered hopes and broken lives. Suddenly a clock struck with a deep, sonorous tone that made her jump. At the far end of the apartment, behind a wall that had crumbled like a stale biscuit, stood a handsome grandfather clock in a walnut case, its brass pendulum swaying from side to side.
Andrzej’s face lit up. ‘That clock has been part of the family,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘I remember it striking the hour and half-hour since I was a small child. Sometimes I hid inside the case. I can’t believe it’s still ticking. But for how much longer?’
He sounded so sombre that she looked anxiously into his face but he said no more.
‘Is this why you wanted me to come, to meet your family?’ she asked, moved that he wanted to make love to her in his family home, surrounded by the spirits of his ancestors. It was as though he had brought her here to obtain their blessing. As he folded her in his arms in front of the grandfather clock, she imagined that she could hear the heart of this abandoned household beating.
‘I wanted us to spend our last night here,’ he whispered.
He pushed away the fragments of portraits and porcelain from the Persian rug, shook it out and they lay in each other’s arms. After the explosions and artillery fire during the day, the quiet of the evening lay like a balm on their anxious souls.
‘Listen,’ she whispered. ‘Can you hear it?’
He held her more tightly and nodded.
Across the courtyard, someone was playing a Chopin nocturne. She closed her eyes. Grandeur and intimacy, nobility and grace, poetry and passion were all mingled in each exquisite phrase and, as she listened, she stroked Andrzej’s hand. ‘The last time I heard that,’ she murmured, ‘Szpilman was playing it in a café in the Ghetto.’
The music stopped but its magic hung in the air. Without speaking, Andrzej bent down and kissed her. Gently at first, then more passionately. Instead of the comforting and affectionate sensations she usually felt, this time his kiss sparked an unexpected rollercoaster ride that started slowly but became wilder and more intense. She heard herself moaning in a voice she’d never heard before, as her body arched and rocked with a primal rhythm of its own until it ended in a shuddering rush of joy. For the first time, she hadn’t imagined that it was the airman making love to her.
‘I thought my head was going to blow off,’ she said.
‘You should always keep your head.’
‘I suppose I should, now that I’ve lost my heart.’
She recalled later that he didn’t smile at her quip.
‘I wonder where we’ll be this time tomorrow,’ she mused.
‘You’ll be safely out of the sewers, in the Centre,’ he said.
‘So will you.’
He shook his head. ‘Elzunia, I’m not going.’
She thought she must have misheard but a drum was already pounding a warning beat inside her chest. ‘What do you mean, not going? Are you leaving later?’
‘I’m not leaving.’
Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘You can’t mean that! It’s crazy! You can’t stay here after the fighters pull out!’ She was shouting and he took hold of her hands.
‘I can’t leave knowing that the patients I’ve left behind will be at the mercy of the SS.’
She tried to control her rising panic. ‘Andrzej, that doesn’t make sense. You can’t save them by staying. You’ll just get killed as well. What’s the point? You can’t stay here! It’s not heroic, it’s suicidal!’ She didn’t realise she was shaking him.
He stroked her hair. ‘I’m not trying to be a hero. No one knows what will happen here, but I can’t abandon my patients.’
‘What about me?’ She was shouting and sobbing at the same time. ‘You’re abandoning me! How come your noble conscience lets you do that?’
‘Elzunia, believe me, I want to live. I want to be with you. But sometimes our worth as a human being is distilled into a single choice. I couldn’t live with myself if I abandoned the patients. Please try to understand.’
‘Then I’m staying too! I won’t go without you!’
He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘Elzunia, listen to me. That’s out of the question. You must go.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m tired of trying to survive.’
‘You must,’ he insisted. ‘Being alive is a unique gift; that’s the real blessing — not the rituals and myths concocted by priests. You can’t throw it away. The patients you’ll be accompanying tomorrow are counting on you.’
She turned away from him. There was nothing more to say and she had no emotions left. Everything inside her had been scooped out and only a hollow shell remained. She should have known that there was nothing to hold on to, that there was no one she loved who wouldn’t die or leave her. She couldn’t even cry.