On a bright April morning, Elzunia was strolling along the quiet paths of the Praski Park on her way to the hospital. As usual, thoughts of the past threatened to overwhelm her, and to dispel them she kept her eyes fixed on the beds of irises and hyacinths, and her thoughts on Gittel and Zbyszek. Whenever her eyes strayed across the river to the Old Town, she averted her gaze. Too many memories. Like a tightrope walker feeling her way across the wire, she knew how easy it would be to slip, lose her balance, and plunge into the blackness.
Elzunia glanced at her watch. She still had half an hour before her shift. Sitting down on a wooden bench she closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the spring sun on her eyelids. She touched the amber brooch she always wore pinned to her blouse and felt that her mother was close by, watching over her.
The park, peaceful and shady, was conducive to contemplation, and its serenity calmed her mind. In the six months since she had arrived at her aunt’s place, most things had fallen into place. The children had settled in at school, and Aunt Amalia took care of them while Elzunia worked at the hospital.
Even Stefan seemed to be getting his life in order, judging from the letter he sent from Kraków. He enthused about the city and a girl he had met there. He was working as a clerk but assured Elzunia that as soon as he’d saved enough money he would study law at the Jagellonian University.
Elzunia looked across at the ruins on the other side of the river, and reflected on Stefan’s letter. He was wise to move to a city that hadn’t been bombed. She thought about Granny’s building, damaged beyond repair, and sighed. As Toughie had predicted, the old woman had been forced to move, and Elzunia’s efforts to find her had so far been fruitless, but, as she sat in the park and recalled Granny’s kindness, she strengthened her resolve to keep searching for her.
Her reverie was interrupted by a pair of young lovers walking past. They stopped by the huge beech tree on the other side of the path and, leaning against its trunk, began kissing passionately. Elzunia looked away so that the envy in her eyes wouldn’t stab them. Her tranquillity shattered, she rose and walked slowly to the hospital.
Some of the other nurses had already arrived for the afternoon shift and the common room was filled with light-hearted chatter about boyfriends, scandals, clothes and movies. Elzunia rarely joined in their conversations. She was changing into her uniform and pulling on her black stockings when she overheard two nurses chatting.
‘My sister is in charge of the surgical ward over at St John’s Hospital and she says their new medical superintendent is really strange,’ one of them said. ‘He wears a funny cap and tells everyone to call him by his first name …’
Elzunia shot up so suddenly that her chair fell backwards and clattered to the floor. Without waiting to change her clothes, she bolted outside. She longed to rush straight to St John’s, but fear and apprehension held her back. She needed time to collect her thoughts and find the strength to cope with possible disappointment.
Surely there couldn’t be any doubt. It had to be him. But what if it wasn’t? And suppose it was, and he’d found someone else?
Calm down, she kept telling herself. Calm down. But the more she tried to compose herself, the more jittery her mind became as it jumped from one disturbing thought to another. Without realising it, she had returned to the park and was walking along a path where the interlaced branches of the chestnut trees formed a canopy overhead. A breeze sprang up and the fallen leaves scattered around until they came to rest in soft drifts along the edge of the path. A young mother was wheeling a high-sided pram. The baby gurgled and its mother cooed back. Despite her tension, Elzunia smiled. Wars had been lost and won, maps of the world had been redrawn, old nations had vanished and new ones had emerged, and, in the process, millions had been senselessly slaughtered, but the chain of life was infinite, like the stars.
Babies were a symbol of hope for the future but what kind of world would that baby grow up in? Would it find out how easily evil men can convince their followers to commit atrocities? Would it learn anything from all the courage and all the cruelty that the war had exposed? And would that baby ever comprehend the excruciating complexity of being human? Or would the war soon recede into the shadows of a distant and irrelevant past so that its lessons would one day have to be learnt all over again?
Turning into a dappled alley of beech trees, Elzunia sat down on a bench and breathed in the musty smell of the leaves. The light that slanted through the trees shone with a brilliance that made her catch her breath. It was the kind of intense golden light that artists painted to depict a sacred moment or to suggest an impending miracle. She looked around, almost expecting a revelation that would imbue the scene with some monumental significance. But there was only the rustling of the leaves, and, when she turned her face up to the sky, she saw that each bough of the massive beech was swaying to its own rhythm.
A young man walked past, whistling a tune she recognised. It was a lovesong from a Lehar operetta that her father used to whistle while shaving. An exquisite pain gripped her chest. The beauty of the melody became enmeshed with recollections of her parents and the world that now lived only in her memory. She closed her eyes and her mind became a kaleidoscope of faces, trees, birds and music. She could hear Andrzej saying, ‘Life is a brief gift.’ Time stopped and she felt her soul floating past the treetops towards the sky.
Being alive was extraordinary. Life was an impenetrable mystery, a network of beauty and ugliness, wonders and horrors that were intertwined and interconnected, where happiness trembled on the brink of disaster, and the good could not be untangled from the bad.
As though awakening from a trance, Elzunia looked around in wonder. Something mystical had brushed her soul and she sat very still so as not to smudge its delicate fingerprints. The moment passed. The conflict and hesitation were gone, and, in their place, she felt a calm sense of purpose.
As she rose, she looked back to capture the moment and imprint it on her memory but the light had lost its incandescence and that corner of the park no longer glowed with an ethereal light.
Elzunia started walking towards St John’s Hospital until she could no longer contain herself and broke into a run. For the first time, she felt that the war was over.