WITHIN A WEEK, stomachs cramped and skin sweated and fevers flared up and died down, passing from car to car, creeping in through the windows or in the food passed through the bars at stations. Soon the faces of the car became as familiar as a neighbourhood they had all lived in for years. While the Bernardyńska set, and even the street in Lwów became faded and hazy around the edges, so that Anna had to work hard to recall the names of people she had dined with, whose daughter married whom, or even the exact pitch of Margo’s voice, the world shrank to these fifteen: the curves of their faces, the shape of their hands, the exact shape of this one’s nose, that one’s crooked teeth. She vomited through the pipe and onto the tracks while Riane held her hair. Anna tipped water onto Frank’s lips, when he was so dehydrated he became disorientated and weak. Janina crouched in a corner, her head on her knees, like a dying animal, and Leo dabbed her face with the bottom of her dress, smoothed her hair. They fell into a comradeship of near silent nursing and wiping and gentle sounds of comforting each other.
As the first wave of sickness died down, Alicia lay with her head in Anna’s lap. Anna stroked her daughter’s hair, her nails scratching the scalp a little too hard, Alicia’s neck bent too far around. The ache in her back was so sharp, the skin so hot, she only vaguely registered the pain in her neck. Her bladder throbbed in sickening pulses and where she had begun distracting herself by counting them, now she could only breathe and swallow, trying not to vomit. Her view of the truck was distorted into patterns of light and shade, shocks of harsh colours when the pain peaked. At first she had sat on the pipe, cold air on her thighs, and wept as the burning came. (‘Oh, I know!’ Frank called. ‘Like pissing knives, I know! Don’t tell me, stop whimpering, girl, it’s the same for all of us!’) Within hours, she was shaking in Janina’s lap, her whole abdomen aflame, until her mother had reclaimed her, pulled her to her side of the car and their awkward embrace.
She fell into a fever dream of her painting. That dress, clean and thick, the velvet against her skin; she could still remember the way, if she ducked her head to rub her chin on her shoulder, it would feel soft and rich against her skin. In her mind’s eye she returned again and again to the way the painting glowed red and gold, how Uncle Stefan had told her it would hang in a gallery some day, her name on a bronze plaque. She remembered how she’d wanted her Papa’s attacker to see it and be afraid. Somehow, he’d become the first chink in the smooth wall of their old life, pried it open with his dirty, angry hands, let the others – the soldiers, the guards, the men in uniforms, it was always men in uniforms – pour through, erasing Papa and Karolina as they swept through their lives, wrecking and trampling everything. But the painting was still intact somewhere; her younger, richer, happier, smoother, cleaner, well-fed, spoiled face was hanging on a wall, or propped against a bookcase, or laid flat, wrapped in tissue paper, ready to be unwrapped again by careful hands; somewhere, those men in uniforms were looking at Alicia-in-paint, thinking, These are important people, these are famous people, save those ones, and save the painter too, he’s an artist … and someone would go to Jozef’s cell, and apologise, release him, and Stefan too, once Jozef intervened. This was the reverse-dominoes she imagined hour after hour, a reversal of the collapse, all because of the painting, finally fulfilling its role, as Uncle Stefan had promised.
‘She needs water,’ Anna said.
And so the small rations of water were passed, uncomplaining, towards them. Even the little boys in the miracle family. Anna passed those back. The water was warm and metallic, dripping down the back of Alicia’s throat. It joined the pulsing in her stomach, rising and falling until she vomited it up again, coloured spots dancing across her vision.
Anna called to the next car. ‘A doctor, we need a doctor for my daughter, pass along.’
‘We all need doctors, woman,’ came a gruff reply.
‘She has an infection and she’s really sick, please.’
Anna could have imagined the call being taken up, passing down the cars; it could have been only the rush of air and her own panic.
As they pulled into a new station, Leo and Janina took turns to stand up at the rivet, calling for help. Leo bellowed in Russian, ‘There’s a sick child, a sick girl in our car,’ but it got lost in the other voices, other calls of sickness and wounds and give us more water and how long will it be now? She stepped down, and Janina got up to beat at the bars with a canister, but it was a tiny tinkling chime in a whole orchestra. She looked down at Alicia, small and curled up in her mother’s lap, her face blank, her eyes open but seeing elsewhere, lost in a world of a fever that wouldn’t break. Anna caught her eye, and there was none of the rage of the days since Karolina had gone. There was appeal, and terror, and something of the days they had reached for each other in the street in Kraków, trying to speak of real things among shoes and gossip, and of the day they fled, holding each other in the sea of people. Janina turned again and screamed into the night, straight from her belly, her lungs full: ‘Help! Help! Help!’ She abandoned everything but her raised voice, shooting straight through the bars, cutting through the other voices, the rhythms of queries and complaints. A soldier came towards them. He tapped his rifle on the bars.
‘Hey. Quiet now, old woman,’ a voice came in Russian, and Janina heard only the sense of his words, a dismissal. She reached out of the bars, grasped and found cloth. A shocked cry came out as she tugged and screamed again, ‘Help us! Help! Help!’ A crack as he dropped the rifle and his head connected with the bars. Her hand was wrested away, a painful grip on her wrist.
‘Stupid old bitch!’ More men came. Janina’s courage drained. She stepped down, backed away. The men’s eyes were wide through the bars, looking down at the people below. One of the little boys started crying, the other watching him in wide-eyed toddler disdain as he chewed on his mother’s hand.
Janina began gibbering, ‘I was trying to help. I was trying to help.’
Voices called down. ‘Hey. Hey! Who was that just attacked me? Where is she?’ A collective gasp came up from the car as a shock of flashlight beamed in, whipped around them.
‘Please,’ Anna whispered. Then tried again, found her voice, though she spoke to the floor. ‘My daughter is sick.’
‘Quiet, quiet!’ Frank said. ‘They’ll kill us all, didn’t you know?’ Leo shushed him, reached for Janina’s hand. Anna did too, gently lying Alicia’s hot one in her lap, so they held Janina between them. She felt the bucking pulse of Janina’s wrist, and her own heart quickened still more. The flashlight disappeared, and in the gloom Anna took Janina’s hand, kissed it. Janina kissed Anna’s cheek. ‘It’s all right,’ they whispered to each other.
The screech of metal and wood was a shockwave through the car: they cried out, and huddled together, as the doors were wrenched open. There was the world: a station platform, a rush of cool air, floodlights beyond the station showing the tips of woodland. Leo took a long gulping look at the sky, but the lights were too bright to trace the stars. A boy in soldier’s uniform stood with his arms crossed in petulant fury, while three others shone torches into the car. A small crowd of soldiers and civilians milled up and down the platform, large Alsatian dogs on chains barking into the night. The air was full of smoke and petrol.
‘Is that child dead? That one, dead?’ one of the men called, shining his beam on Alicia’s limp form.
‘Oh my God, is she?’ shrieked one of Riane’s girls, and there was a scramble away from the car, a collective recoil, but the soldiers held up their hands, and everyone stopped.
‘What … what did he say?’ Anna said.
‘No, she’s sick,’ Leo called, in answering Russian. ‘We’ve been asking for a doctor.’
‘Where’s that old woman that attacked me?’ the boy called. He pointed theatrically to his head, a small stream of blood. He drew a finger across his temple, held it up in indictment, the red inky stain. ‘Come on out, you old bitch!’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Anna whispered. Her breath, on Janina’s face, was somehow still sweet. ‘I – Janina, I’m so, so sorry, oh my God, I’m sorry—’
‘Thank you for trying to help me, for bringing me with you,’ Janina whispered, as she unknotted Anna’s fingers from her own, one by one, as she had used to do when Aleks gripped the railings outside school, frightened of bullies.
‘I’m so sorry about Karolina,’ she added. She once more held the smooth cool skin before laying Anna’s hand back on Alicia’s form. As she stood, Anna called, ‘Wait,’ and others stood, blocking her way, trying to explain, but the torchlight was on her face, and the boy she had hurt stood grim-faced, triumphant. ‘It was an accident, it was an accident,’ Anna cried, with all the authority of her old self. ‘She was trying to get help for my daughter!’ The men broke their stare, spoke to each other, and it seemed for a moment that the nightmare months had fallen away, that Anna could save her by sheer will, by the force of her outrage, as though they were simply young, offensive boys in Kraków; their mothers would be furious, That’s a dear friend of the Oderfeldts you were rude to, do you want your father to lose his business deal? But then the boy beckoned Janina again, and all the fantasy protection fell away. Anna faded from her as she picked her way through the figures in the car.
So, it’s to be a Russian prison, Janina thought, as the boy led her away from the platform, Anna’s cries still carrying across the air. I can write to Aleks from there, she thought, the boy’s rifle in the small of her back, small shouts from the other cars, as they noticed her, calls of what are you doing? As they stepped further away from the floodlights of the station, the expanse of air and sky above her, she thought, It might be better, I’ll be alone, but I won’t be in that damned car full of vomit and stench … As she was pushed to her knees, she thought, Perhaps they’ll send me back to Kraków after all. As they told her to look ahead, cold steel against the back of her neck, Janina’s last thought was of her own apartment, the little chair by the window, Aleks’s photographs, her china set with hot bubbling coffee, Laurie working at his desk, turning to smile at Aleks playing with his toy soldiers on the floor, and she almost sobbed with relief and contentment, as though waking from the worst of dreams.