A Feather on the Water(24)

One of the girls said something back in Polish. She finished the braid, tied it with colored string, then jumped to her feet and disappeared inside.

Moments later Wolf appeared, grinning. Delphine couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or proud to have been summoned by the camp nurse. She thought his friends must know that he spent his days in the hospital. It had occurred to her that some of them might be interested in joining him. With no parents to prejudice them against the women in the maternity ward, they might be willing to work as auxiliary nurses. She could offer certificates for when they eventually left the camp, give them a better chance of employment. It was something she needed to talk over with Martha.

As they walked across to the hospital, Wolf pulled something out of his pocket. It was a faded black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman, very smartly dressed, the woman cradling a baby in her arms. Wolf pointed to the baby, then at himself.

Delphine nodded. “Mama and Papa?”

Wolf nodded back. His face betrayed no emotion.

“Dobrze.” It sounded pathetically inadequate, to say “good” in response to him showing her something so intensely personal. But she felt that to say nothing at all would have been worse. She longed to be able to ask him about his parents: to find out how old he had been when they had died and how he had survived the war without them. But she didn’t have the words. Fishing in her bag she pulled out the piece of paper Kitty had given her and scanned the phrases. There was just one that would serve. “Przykro mi,” she said. I am sorry.

Wolf said nothing in response. He peered at the list, a curious expression on his face. Following Kitty’s handwriting with his finger, he said: “I . . . am . . . a . . . nurse!” The way he pronounced the last word was quite comical—it sounded like “nursie”—but Delphine was impressed that he could read the English.

“Dobrze!” She patted him on the shoulder.

Wolf clapped his hands, triumphant. Then he tried another one: “Have . . . you . . . opened . . . your . . .” He turned to her, clearly perplexed by the word that followed.

“Bowels. Bow-els.” Delphine felt the corners of her mouth turning up. She mimed lowering herself onto a toilet seat and jabbed her thumb at her behind.

“Bowels,” he repeated. At which point they both burst out laughing.

By the time they reached the hospital, Delphine was wiping tears from her eyes. It seemed like years since she had laughed like this. How was it that this child, with whom she couldn’t even hold a conversation, had the ability to take her out of herself? She wanted to give him a hug, but she held back, remembering how reticent and self-conscious Philippe had been as an adolescent. Instead, she rummaged in her bag for a chunk of Bavarian smoked cheese, wrapped in waxed paper. It had been part of last night’s meal, but it had been too much for her, so she’d saved it to eat for lunch. She held it out to him.

“Thank you for making me laugh again.” She knew he couldn’t understand, but it felt good to hear herself say it.



Martha couldn’t quite believe that it had come back to her so easily. She was driving along the road that followed the river, the windows down, breathing in the scent of the pine trees.

“You are doing very well.” Stefan smiled as she glanced sideways. “But watch out for holes.”

She nodded. “The roads are bad; we hit quite a few potholes on the way from France.”

“How did you get from America? By ship?”

“Plane,” she replied. “I’d never flown before; I was quite scared, but it was fine.”

“I have never done that,” he replied. “I went on many ships: to England, Holland, other countries. Where do you live in America?”

“New York. But I grew up in the South—Louisiana.”

“You like New York?”

She hesitated. “I like some things. But it’s not an easy place to live.” She realized as the words came out how flippant that must sound to someone who had spent the past three years as a slave laborer in a German factory. “What I mean is, it’s a good place to be if you have money, but if you don’t . . .”

“It is the same in all the world, I think. In Warsaw, where I live, just the same. But when the Germans came, it made no difference how much money you had.”

Martha tried to picture him as he would have been before the war: a man running an international export business—probably wealthy. What would have happened to that business when the Germans took over? Would there be anything to go back to, if and when DPs were able to return to their homelands? And what about his family? Had there been a wife? Children?

Before she could frame any question that might prompt him to open up about his past, she saw something that made her slam on the brakes. A wagon pulled by a pair of oxen was blocking the way ahead. It was piled high with cabbages, a couple of which had tumbled off and lay in the road. A few yards away, on the riverbank, a man was shouting at a couple of other men, both of whom carried the kind of makeshift wooden fishing rods she’d seen earlier.

“Verdammte Ausl?nder!” The man shook his fist at the fishermen. They were backing away, but with the river behind them, there was nowhere to go.

“What’s going on?” She turned to Stefan. “What’s he saying?”

“He called them dirty foreigners.” Stefan’s hand was on the door. In a moment he was out of the car. Martha watched, alarmed, as he strode right into the middle of the confrontation. He put his arm up, holding the German at bay while he spoke to the fishermen. She saw him jerk his head downriver, in the direction of Seidenmühle. Then he turned to the German. There was a brief exchange before the man climbed back onto the cabbage wagon and urged his oxen forward.