A Feather on the Water(84)

Martha nodded.

“What about?”

Martha didn’t want to let on that the nightmare had been about Stefan. “Russian soldiers,” she whispered back. “They were trying to smash their way into the camp. One of the gates went up in the air and nearly landed on me.”

Delphine grunted. “Well, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to work that one out: it’s all that iron curtain stuff in the news preying on your mind.”

“I suppose it is. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“You didn’t.” Delphine gave her a wry look. “I’ve been awake half the night, worrying about the auxiliaries. They haven’t stopped talking about that food, you know. Two of the girls are ready to sign up.”

“But they’ve got no home to go back to.”

“I know. I’m trying to talk them out of it, but they think they’ve had enough experience at the hospital to get jobs in Warsaw. And the idea of getting two months’ worth of rations in one go—when you think what it was like before the snow melted, well, you can understand it, can’t you?”

“What about Wolf?” Martha held her breath. She couldn’t bear to think of what it would do to Delphine if the apple of her eye up and left the camp.

“I asked him what he thought about it. He’s . . .” She hesitated. Her eyes were glassy. “Mon petit chou. My little cabbage. It doesn’t sound so good in English, does it?” She sniffed. “He said: ‘I only go where you go.’ I just wanted to weep when he came out with that. I mean, what kind of future does he have if he stays here?”

“Remember what you said to me?” Martha took her hand. “This place won’t be here forever.”

“But when it closes down, I’ll have to go back to France, and as things stand, he wouldn’t be allowed to come with me.”

“There’s a way he could. If you wanted him to.” Martha hardly dared to say what had come into her mind.

“How?”

“You could adopt him. Legally, I mean. Both of his parents are known to be dead, so there’s nothing to stand in the way of that.”

Delphine was staring at the patch of gray light filtering through the window. “Do you really think I could?”



Later that morning, when she had finished doing the ward rounds with Dr. Jankaukas, Delphine went to find Wolf. He was in the side room, putting away sheets and pillowcases that had come back from the laundry. In the ten months she had known him, he had grown taller than her. He no longer needed to stand on a chair to reach the top shelf. As he worked, he chatted with one of the girls, who sat in a corner of the room, winding clean bandages.

“Wolf, can I have a word with you?”

He looked around at the sound of his name.

Delphine cocked her head toward the entrance to the hospital. She needed to talk to him outside, where no one would overhear.

There was a worried expression on his face when he sat down beside her on the wall in front of the hospital. “I do something wrong?”

“No.” She patted his arm. “I just wanted to tell you something.” She saw his face relax. “You know that one day this place will close down. And I will have to go back to France.”

He nodded, staring at the ground. “You come to tell me I cannot go with you. That I will be alone again.”

“No, Wolf, I didn’t come to say that.” Tears prickled her eyes. “At the moment, you wouldn’t be allowed into France. But there’s a way you could come with me. There’s a word you won’t know—adoption. It’s when someone signs papers to say they will look after a child who is not their son or daughter. That’s what I would like to do: adopt you.”

His dark eyes widened as he looked up. “You will be my mama?”

She nodded. “If you want me to.” She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

“You can do this? Tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow. I must write letters first. But soon, I hope.”

He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight, as if he never wanted to let go. She could feel his tears in her hair. She was crying, too.





CHAPTER 26


Operation Carrot had an immediate impact on morale in the camp. Within a couple of days, Martha was only a handful of people short of the target the major had given her. The names on the list were mainly young single men. There was almost no one over the age of forty. On the last transport there had been many older people—all of them desperate to be reunited with relatives in Poland, but the older DPs who remained at Seidenmühle knew there was no one waiting for them. Whatever nostalgia they had for the place they once called home, they didn’t have the heart to return to a place inhabited by ghosts—and no amount of extra food was going to change that. But staying behind was only a temporary solution. The DP camps would have to close eventually, and no one, including Martha, had any idea how or when that would be accomplished.

She was relieved to see that Aleksandra and Marek had not volunteered for the transport. She hadn’t sought them out, because she felt it was wrong to try to influence them. But the thought of them taking little Rodek to Poland was chilling. She knew that one day, she would have to wave goodbye to her little godson. But she wanted him to grow up in a place of hope, not fear.