A Feather on the Water(62)

Martha stood on the empty platform, looking down the track, watching the plume of smoke rise to meet clouds tinged pink and gold with the rising sun.

“You should smile,” the major said. “This is what you came here for: to get them home.”



It was a lonely drive back to the camp. The roads were deserted. Even the fields looked bleak, stripped of their grain crops and vegetables. Martha wondered where the train would be now. The first stop was Nuremberg, where more cars would be added. Then on to two more German stations before crossing into Czechoslovakia. It would be almost halfway through October by the time the train reached Poland. According to the army, it was already snowing there. An image flashed in front of her: Stefan searching for his wife and child in an icy wasteland of bombed-out buildings. What would he do if he couldn’t find them? What if the Russians arrested him and took him away before he’d even had the chance to start looking? What if . . . She braked sharply at the gates of Seidenmühle. She had to stop thinking about it—about him. But the way her insides surged at the memory of him kissing her goodbye in the darkness of the trees made that next to impossible. The image of his face as the train had pulled away was etched inside her head. She knew that look would come back to haunt her whenever she closed her eyes.

She couldn’t face going back to the office. Not yet. Instead, she pulled up a few yards beyond the gates and wandered down to the river. The early morning mist had melted away. Dew sparkled on the grass along the bank. She sank down, feeling the cold wetness on the palms of her hands, not caring if the moisture seeped into her clothes. The water flowed past her, smooth and silent. In the distance she could hear the people left behind going about their daily business. It was impossible to think of Stefan not being among them.

She thought of the day, nearly four months ago, when she had sat beside a different river, halfway across the world. That morning in New York, she had been scared and excited in equal measure: scared of Arnie finding her and dragging her back, scared of the flight across the ocean—but excited at the prospect of the new, unknown life that lay ahead. What would she have done if she could have seen into the future? If she could have felt the heartbreak of standing on that platform as the train pulled away?

As she gazed across the water, she saw a feather, white and perfect, drifting past her. Her eyes followed it as it moved gently with the current. It looked so delicate, so fragile—and yet it glided down the river with all the strength and balance of a boat. It was not struggling to escape. It was simply allowing itself to go where time and the water would take it.

She watched it disappear around the bend that would carry it to the faster stretch by the mill wheel. No way to know if it would stay afloat in that choppy water. Perhaps it would go under for a while. Perhaps it would emerge a few yards downstream, bedraggled but intact.

Martha stood up, wiping her wet hands against the sides of her jacket. As she walked back to the car, she felt a curious sense of calm. This was the path she had chosen. She couldn’t fight against the direction it had taken. Accepting this was a kind of surrender. But it was the only way to find peace.

As she drove into the main part of the camp, she caught sight of a figure coming toward her, waving. It was Aleksandra. She was carrying Rodek on her hip, and she gave a shy smile when Martha got out of the car.

“I make special breakfast for you.” Aleksandra had mastered English quicker than Martha had picked up Polish. “You like take him? I bring it to cabin.”

Martha took her godson in her arms. He didn’t make a sound. As she walked down the path, she bent her head, breathing in the scent of his hair. She whispered his name, stroking the soft skin of his cheek. He gazed up at her, his eyes impossibly wise, as if he could see beyond this moment, this place, to a future she couldn’t even contemplate.





CHAPTER 19


Kitty could hear people singing in the boxcars on either side of her. She wasn’t surprised that they sounded so happy. She thought that the countryside they had passed through on the journey was the most beautiful she had ever seen. Although winter was not far away, the trees in the valleys were still cloaked in red and gold. Jewel-colored pheasants darted across the fields as horse-drawn plows made slow, dark lines through the pale stubble left behind by the harvest. Once, when the train had stopped early in the morning, she’d seen a hare, just yards away, its nose twitching as it sniffed the air. She’d pulled out her sketchbook in a bid to capture it before it darted off across the fields. Charlie had seen it, too. He’d brought half a loaf for their breakfast, and they’d eaten it together, sitting on the cinder path between the tracks.

The town of Ostrava was the last one on the Czech side, before the train crossed the border into Poland. There was a last flurry of trading at the station. Cigarettes were swapped for finger-licking pastries and bottles of plum brandy.

Then the train began the final few miles of its journey east. The first village inside Poland was called Zebrzydowice. As they approached, the DPs began singing the Polish national anthem, which Kitty recognized because her mother used to hum it sometimes in the workshop—usually when she was tackling a particularly tricky piece of sewing.

Soldiers boarded the train when it stopped. They weren’t checking papers—that would come when they reached the bigger town of Dziedzice. But they climbed into each car and took a good look at the people inside. Kitty noticed the hammer-and-sickle badge on the cap of the man who came into her car. It was the first time she had encountered a Russian soldier.