Emilia
With false identity papers courtesy of Uncle Piotr’s mystical network, Roman was a freer man than he’d been in years. These days, it was only his health that kept him prisoner.
Just as he’d seem to improve and begin moving slowly around Sara’s apartment, he’d suffer a setback. Several times, the infection in his arm appeared to clear and the wound healed over, then swelled again overnight. With his new set of papers, he might have been able to visit a hospital, but Sara decided it was better to avoid any questions about how he got the wound. So every time his infection flared up, she would call one of her doctor friends to perform another agonizing debridement to clean out the wound. And while Sara tried to build his gut up slowly to handle consistent food, several times he was stricken with bouts of violent vomiting or diarrhea, and then he was all the way back to sipping spoonfuls of broth.
“Why is this taking so long?” I asked Sara one day, when I visited to find Roman was once again in bed, resting after a night of intense illness.
“He came to us very near death, Elz·bieta,” she said gently. “A person does not recover from that kind of physical trauma overnight.” Her face grew sad, and she added carefully, “Nor the mental trauma. Just remember that.”
I could sense how frustrating it was for him to have freedom within his grasp, only to be held at bay by his own body. Roman was never one to complain, and at times it was hard to even get him to acknowledge his pain.
“How are you feeling today?” I’d ask him, even when he was positively green or Sara told me that he’d been awake all night in pain.
“Just fine,” he’d always say and shrug.
But for all of the challenges, those months became a magical interlude for me. The war raged on outside Sara’s apartment, but inside her spare room—the room that was now Roman’s room, right on the other side of my wall—all was quiet, except for the beating of my heart and the quiet rhythm of our chatter.
“You’re so smart,” I said, shaking my head as he told me about how he’d been unable to sleep the night before, so he’d read through one of Sara’s nursing handbooks. Now, he was full of all sorts of information about how the typhus inoculations worked and why soap was so useful for preventing the spread of disease. He seemed to possess an uncanny ability to absorb information, even if he’d only read it once.
“You’re smart, too,” he said.
“Not book-smart like that.”
“Well, I was good at school.”
“When did you finish?”
“I was thirteen when they stopped us from going to school, but I was finishing tenth grade.”
My eyes widened.
“You are book-smart.”
“I skipped some grades,” he said, shrugging, as if it was nothing, then asked, “How about you? When did you finish?”
“Fourth grade,” I muttered, flushing. “Mama tried to homeschool me after that. She did her best, but she’d had a limited education, so she really wasn’t able to teach me.” I still called Truda and Mateusz by their real names, but Roman had no idea they weren’t my real parents, so whenever he was around, I forced myself to remember to call them Mama and Papa instead.
“How did you learn to draw like you do?”
“I was bored back at our old house. There wasn’t much to do, but Mama and her sister gave me paper to draw,” I said, then I asked him hesitantly, “Would you like to see some more of my drawings?”
I’d collected dozens of them over the year since Sara gave me those notebooks, mostly sketches in charcoal. I fetched the pile and held my breath as Roman flicked through them.
“Most of these are of the ghetto,” he commented.
“I know. That’s why I couldn’t show anyone else.”
He studied a rough sketch I’d made of the youth center building, tracing his finger over the lines of the doors.
“This building was still there when I left, but most of the rest of the ghetto had been burned down.”
“I think they finished the job while you were recovering,” I told him hesitantly. He looked at me in surprise. “It’s all rubble now, all of the blocks of the ghetto. There’s nothing left, not even the wall in most parts. Even the Great Synagogue is gone. The SS blew it up...punishment for the Uprising.”
“I’m still glad we did it,” he said.
“What was it like?” I asked him softly. Roman looked at the paper again.
“I thought it would feel cleansing to avenge my family. To avenge the suffering. But it wasn’t enough.” He touched the sketch again, then asked, “Why did you draw so much of the ghetto? It was hardly a scenic landscape.”
Roman shuffled through another paper, another scene from the streets he’d been confined to for years. This time, I’d drawn a body on a sidewalk, the woman’s arm stretched out above her head, reaching toward help that would never come.
“You expected that vengeance would be cleansing,” I replied quietly. “I think when I draw, I’m looking for the same thing. You know sometimes when your thoughts are so cloudy you can’t make sense of them? That’s when I draw. I can usually find a way to let things go if I just draw what I’m thinking about. When I’m really overwhelmed, I pray and I draw.”
“How do you know how to capture it?” he asked and pointed to the shading around the woman’s face. “How do you know how thick the line should be? How do you know where to put the shadow?”
“I feel it,” I said, leaning forward to trace a line just beneath his finger. “There’s an endless dance between the shadow and the light...the way the shadows shift as the light shifts, illuminating different parts of a thing, bringing different pieces into focus. Capturing an image like this is feeling that dance in my bones and pouring it onto the paper.”
He looked at me, his gaze thoughtful.
“You are so lucky to have such a talent. But you’re also lucky to have an outlet.”
“What’s your outlet?”
He shrugged. “I guess I have to figure that out, now.”
Now that our bedrooms were separated only by a thin wall, I sometimes heard his nightmares. He would cry out in anguish, and I’d startle awake, heart racing at the thought of his suffering. Usually, I would think about slipping out of bed to go to him, but I never did. Instead, I’d lie in bed and pray for him. Often, if the shouting went on for a while, I’d hear the creak of the stairs as Sara went to check on him.
The more time I spent with Roman, the more fretful Truda and Mateusz became about the propriety of it all.
“Keep the door open. Don’t sit on the bed with him. Don’t touch him,” Truda would always instruct me when I was heading down the hall. Mateusz, too, found plenty to worry about.
“Please don’t tell him the truth about yourself,” he said.
“We can trust him,” I said lightly. “He can’t exactly leave the house just yet anyway—he’s too weak—but even if he could, I know he would never betray me.”
“We were only going to tell Piotr, remember? And now Sara knows, and then you widen the circle to Roman, and where does it end? We may as well paint your real name on the side of the building.”
“But it’s been more than a year,” I said impatiently. “No one is even looking for me!”
“You don’t know that. And maybe no one is looking for you because you have slipped off the radar. Let’s say your friend recovers, and he goes out into the world again. He is a loose cannon, Emilia.” Mateusz sighed. “Do you really believe he will lie low once he is well? He will find trouble because there is so much trouble in his heart. If he gets mixed up in the underground again, if he is captured and tortured, he cannot betray your secret if he doesn’t know it. Promise me, or we will have to keep you two apart.”
He left me no choice. I sighed impatiently but gave him my word. My time with Roman meant too much to me to risk it.