41

Ala wakes from a dream in which her mother came to see her. In the dream Ala was wearing soft silver slippers and a long dress that trailed over the ground. Her mother was like a shape-shifting silhouette of herself. She knew her mother was dead. But felt a chill of fear that she too might be dead. She stood under a tree and asked her mother what it was like to be dead. But her mother refused to look at her. A cry of distress from one of the men sleeping in the room ended the dream. She now has the familiar gnaw of hunger in her stomach. She thought she might be more resistant to the challenges of hunger because of her dietary discipline as a ballerina but her feet have swollen up. She has difficulty getting her shoes on.

Also sleeping in this room is a man who was a stagehand at the Grand Theatre. Neither of them remembered or recognised the other but he shares a few of her own memories. He remembers the problems caused by the artificial snow during The Nutcracker in which she danced in the corps and a drunken violinist in the orchestra another night who began playing a raucous Polish folk tune during one of the quiet sections of Swan Lake. Sharing this memory was the first time Ala has laughed since she was separated from her mother. They hummed together the Waltz of the Flowers. He showed Ala a creased photograph of his two daughters who were taken from him. There are no longer any illusions about what happens to the Jews in the trains. A man escaped from Treblinka and told of the shower rooms from which no one emerges alive. News of his report spread through what remains of the ghetto within hours.

Ala now spends every day sitting at a sewing machine, fingering squares of grey-green cloth. Growing ever more delirious with hunger and exhaustion. Feeling herself pared down to this one function, like an automaton. Sometimes she thinks of the German soldier who one day will feel against his bare skin the piece of cloth she guides under the clattering needle. She puts a witch curse on every square of fabric she touches.

She, like her fellow inmates, works from first thing in the morning until late in the evening. The only reward a bowl of watery liquid with a few scraps of rotting vegetable at the end of the day. A barbed wire fence encloses the area where she works and is billeted. No one is allowed to leave. She has no way of knowing if Henryk or Max are still alive. She doesn’t allow herself to think of her mother and father. But she misses her mother more than she would ever have thought possible. It’s as if, without her mother, she has become a little girl again and has been left all alone in the world. One day when she saw her face in a black windowpane she didn’t recognise herself. The ethereal being she was trained to be now a grubby frightened emaciated swamp creature with greasy skin.

Sometimes she thinks of Adam, the man responsible for the capture of her mother. Then she wants to see Henryk, Zanek or even Mira. To warn them about Adam. The Jewish Fighting Organisation, a ghostly, perhaps mythical, presence in the ghetto, is rumoured to assassinate informers.

Later she is woken up again by a volley of shots and the shattering of the glass in the window. Shards pelt the room, some landing on the blanket under which she sleeps on the floor. There is laughter outside. Raucous drunken German voices. And then more shots and more glass shattering nearby.