Cilka's Journey(66)

“All right, I will.”

“Don’t forget, Cilka, I am here. Any time you want to talk.”

Cilka sways a little on her feet. Sometimes she does run the words in her head. But can she let them out?

“I need to get back to work.”

“What about at the end of the day?” Yelena persists. “I’ll make sure you get something to eat if you miss your dinner.”

Cilka is afraid to let it come up, come out. But talking about it is something she hasn’t tried. She feels a glimmer of something, that survival mechanism; a sense of hope. Maybe she should. She nods, just a little. “Not here. I don’t want anyone we work with to see me talking to you.”

“I’ll find an empty room for us.”

While they have been talking, a new patient has arrived. Blood is seeping through the bandages on his bare chest. He is groaning quietly, the deep, painful sound Cilka has come to recognize as coming from someone barely conscious and unable to scream out in pain. She is glad of the distraction.

“Do you need a hand?” she calls out to the men roughly transferring him from the stretcher to the bed.

“He’s not going to make it,” one of them calls back.

Cilka walks over to the bed, picking up the man’s file that has been dropped on his legs. She reads the brief notes. Multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, extreme loss of blood. No active treatment.

A hand grabs at her apron. Strong and with purpose, the man pulls her toward the head of the bed, his eyes pleading, small gasps escaping from his bloodied mouth.

“Help.” Barely whispered.

Cilka takes his hand and looks down at the wounded man. Only then does she recognize him—it’s the thug who threatened her in the dispensary, shadowed her, taunted her.

“You,” he says.

“Yes, me.”

“The drugs…”

Cilka can see his face is full of regret.

“I know it’s this place that did that to you,” Cilka says.

The man manages to nod, squeezes her hand.

Cilka holds the man’s hand between her own two until she feels the strength leave it. She places it on the bed, and she closes his eyes. She doesn’t know what he did in his life, or in here, but he will not be harming anybody else, now, and she thinks she can spare him a thought. A prayer.

Picking up his file, she records the time of death.

She takes the file back to the nurse’s desk and asks Raisa if she knows what happened to the man whose death she has just recorded.

“He was the loser in a fight. The trusties of the criminal class are always wanting to be the top dog around here, this is the way it ends up.”



* * *



At the end of the day, Cilka takes a cursory look around but doesn’t see Yelena. Gathering her coat, she walks from the ward, trying not to admit to herself that she is grateful she has escaped talking to her. When she steps into the waiting room, Yelena is there. She beckons Cilka to follow her to a small room off to the side of the ward.

A desk and two chairs are the only furniture in the room. Yelena places the chairs face to face.

She waits for Cilka to begin. Cilka takes her time folding her coat and placing it just so on the floor beside her.

Raising her head, she looks directly at Yelena. “I was only sixteen when I went into that other place. But I grew up fast.”

Yelena says nothing.

“They said they wanted people to go to work for them.”

Yelena nods.

“The Germans, the Nazis. I stood in a cattle train for days, peed where I stood, held up by people surrounding me, squashing me.”

“And it took you to the camp called Auschwitz.”

“Yes,” Cilka says quietly. “My sister too.”

“How long were you there?”

“Three years.”

“But that’s—”

“A long time to be there, yes. For three years I lived in hell—the abyss. Although I have been here just as long now.”

“Tell me about the number on your arm.”

“That was our introduction to Auschwitz. They took my small bag of belongings. They took my clothes. They took my youth, my identity, and then they took my name and gave me a number.”

“How … how did you…?”

“Survive?” Cilka begins shaking. “In a place that was created for one reason only, to exterminate us? I’m not sure I can tell you.” She holds her arms around herself.

“Cilka, it’s all right. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“Thank you, Yelena Georgiyevna,” Cilka says, and then forces herself to ask something. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“No. I don’t. I don’t know why anyone is here, and I have no need to ask. I’m sorry if that makes me sound like a coward.”

Cilka clears her throat.

“I am here because I slept with the enemy, or that is what I was charged with. Sleeping with the enemy. Working with the enemy. For me, there was no sleeping. He—they—came into my bed and sometimes slept, after they…”

“Raped you?”

“Is it rape if you don’t fight back, don’t say no?”

“Did you want them to have sex with you?”