Cilka's Journey(92)
Cilka blushes. “I have work to do,” she stammers as she rushes away.
“She’ll be back,” Yelena tells Alexandr with a wink.
Cilka spots Kirill at the nurses’ desk.
“Kirill, hello, it’s nice to see you back,” she says as she approaches.
“What’s going on there?” he snarls at her.
Perplexed, Cilka looks where Kirill is indicating, back at Alexandr. “What do you mean?”
Does Kirill know something about who attacked Alexandr? Cilka wonders. If so, is there a risk he’ll tell the person who beat him up that he’s alive? Her heart races. No, Kirill is Cilka’s friend. He wouldn’t.
“You and him, what’s going on?”
Ah, Cilka thinks. This is something else entirely.
“I think you should leave now, Kirill, I have work to do.”
* * *
At the end of her shift, Cilka takes the chair that has become a witness to her and Alexandr’s growing friendship and sits beside him.
He has spoken quietly about his past, and his arrest. He had been translating for the Soviet administrators but feeding back information to the resistance fighters. When he was caught he was brutally tortured, made to sit on a stool for days until he was completely numb, starving, soiled. He gave up no names.
He wrote poetry in his head. And, after spending time in another camp and doing hard labor, when he got the role in the administration building he could not help writing some of the poems down. Sometimes he would disguise the true words of the poem inside paragraphs of propaganda. And then he realized he could do this with information too. With every piece of written material leaving the camp being checked over, he suspects a savvy counter-intelligence officer caught on.
“And here I am. But my poems have never been about happy things,” he says to Cilka. “Now I have met you, they will be. And I look forward to sharing them with you.”
Cilka looks him in the eye. Trusts she may be able to share with him too.
“There is something else I have to tell you,” Alexandr says seriously.
Cilka stares at him. Waiting for more.
“I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Cilka stands, knocking the chair over. Those few words are so large, so overwhelming.
“Cilka, please, stay and talk to me.”
“I’m sorry, Alexandr. I need to think. I need to go.”
“Cilka, stay, don’t go,” Alexandr calls out.
“I’m sorry, I have to.” She forces herself to look at him again. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Will you think about what I said?”
Cilka pauses, looking deep into his dark brown eyes.
“I’ll think about nothing else.”
* * *
Cilka knocks on Raisa’s bedroom door in the nurses’ quarters. The nurses share rooms, and the prisoner nurses are in a larger dormitory within the barracks.
“Come in,” a sleepy Raisa calls out.
Cilka opens the door and stands in the doorway, doubled over.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not feeling well. I don’t think I should go on the ward.”
“Do you want me to take a look at you?” Raisa asks, throwing her legs over the side of the bed to sit on the edge.
“No, I’ll be okay. I just want to go back to bed.”
“Go back to bed. I’ll get up and start your shift. I’m sure the others will overlap and cover you.”
“Can you tell Yelena Georgiyevna I think I’d better be off for two or three days? I don’t want to spread whatever it is I have to the patients.”
“No, you’re probably right. Go back to sleep and I’ll have someone bring you something to eat in a few hours and check on you.”
Cilka closes the door and returns to her bed.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944
The footsteps in the block and then the knock on her door startle Cilka. She remains lying on her bed. The knock comes again.
“Come in,” she says, barely above a whisper.
The door slowly opens. A face pokes into the room.
“Lale! What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,” Cilka cries out.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course, come in. Shut the door, quick.”
Lale does as he’s been told. Leaning against the door, he looks at Cilka, who is now sitting on her bed looking back.
“I had to see you. I had to say thank you in person, not through Gita.”
“It’s dangerous, Lale. You shouldn’t be here. You don’t know when one of them will come here.”
“I’ll take the risk. You took a bigger one asking for me to get my job back. I need to do this.”
Cilka sighs. “I’m glad it worked out. It was breaking my heart seeing Gita so upset, not knowing if you were alive, then hearing where you were working.”
“Don’t say any more; I can’t bear hearing how it would have been for her. My stupidity got me into trouble. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever learn.” He shakes his head.
“She loves you, you know.”
Lale raises his head again. “She’s never said that to me. I can’t tell you what it means to me hearing it.”